March Mix

That was one fast week, as fast weeks go.  And go it did.  I'm hoping this is just my 'magination (humming) 'running away with me'... but have the weeks been flying by quicker than usual lately?  I think maybe it's because I want things to be completed here, and they take many times more time than I have time for.  If you know what I mean.   We are finding ourselves spending time on the boat even when we're not working on it.  It's making that transition from the boat to our boat.  Or maybe we're the ones making the transition.

This morning was a real corker of a sunrise.  Not that this is something unusual, as we get a pretty good string of sunrises here.  Speaking as experienced sunrise observers.  But some just seem to have an extra drop of vivid in them.  Like whomever was putting them together had an exceptionally generous morning with the cosmic paintbrush.  Do cosmic paints have solvents in them?

This one was changing quickly even while I was snapping away. We had near clouds heading east, and high clouds heading south. And the sun was flicking the water up and down the scale.  I didn't know which photo was going to be the good one.  So I turned on the timed interval function on the little Pentax and just left it clicking away at one minute intervals.  This is not the way we usually do it.  But it sort of worked.  Here's a one hour sample of this morning's sunrise:

We still find ourselves oohing and aahing sunrises like we did when we moved to this island ten years ago.  And we all still grab our cameras for the nicer ones.  Well, two of us grab cameras.  One of us is still miffed about the  whole opposable thumbs allotment thing.  He feels slighted after he saw some chimpanzee documentaries on the nature channel.  He immediately saw the applications possible with thumbs, and I don't think that he realized that some animals could operate a can opener.  Oh my.  I don't even want to imagine a world of Jack Russell Terriers with working thumbs.  It could be worse than a huge tribe of psychotic raccoon.

This week followed one of the two familiar patterns we've fallen into lately.  We have one pattern for windy days, and one for calm days.  We are just now coming to the end of a week of very calm weather.   Also known as bug time.

When the trade winds give us a break for a few days, the seas calm down and all the sand suspended in the roiled waters settles out and becomes sea bottom again.   We see the clarity of the ocean just driving down the road to town.  The water is about two meters deep  just  off the shore.  When it's stirred up it's a milky turquoise color.  But on days like this we can see every detail of the bottom from fifty meters away.

 When the seas are calm and the winds take a break from buffeting and shoving La Gringa and I like to take the paddleboards out for a quick run.   This week we were at it again.  The paddleboarding, I mean.  The skies were doing their best to try to intimidate us.  But the water was calm and we decided that after two lightning strikes within ten meters of us in a year the chances of a third were pretty slim.  Statistics, right?

I am not even going to attempt to tell you what Dooley the Disgusted thought of this entire idea.   I thought we were going to have to tape his feet to the board.  I kept telling him "Dooley, look over in this direction.  See?  It's nice and sunny to the east!"  Unfortunately, the weather was coming from the west.  Which is the direction of that photo above.   And the dog knew it.

So we didn't make a morning of it but settled for an intense little workout while we paddled madly out to the little cay where we always turn around and head back.   I thought about bypassing this one and heading upwind to the next little cay but it would double the trip and I figure even suggesting it would have cost me at least of third of the crew.   Maybe next time.  That's our next goal, there in the middle distance.  We've taken the Hobie out there a few times, but haven't quite made it on the paddleboards.  Yet.

We've saturated you guys with SUP photos over the past two months so I'll try not to dwell on that again.   Unless something interesting happens.   It's pretty much the same thing over and over that we wrote about before.   Like my old West Caicos diatribes. I have noticed that the trip is taking less time these days. We're becoming more comfortable standing on the boards. La Gringa took to it immediately, but I'm pretty clumsy and have had to work at it.  It's amazing how much faster that I can get to my destination when I don't fall off every fifty meters , bashing something organic and painful against the board, snorting sea water while bruising body and ego.    Ah, those were the days.  We've made it to the first stage of eventual enlightenment, or something.  Practice, I guess.

This is approaching the little cay still standing on the board, for a change.  I'm usually walking in the knee deep water and pushing the SUP by now.

And this is getting all involved with standing up and holding a camera with forward momentum up to the point where I suddenly realized that this thing really doesn't have much in the way of brakes.

I don't remember actually taking that photo.  I had intended to take one, and then suddenly realized that I was about to merge much more closely with my suddenly changing environment. I do remember what happened about two seconds after I must have pressed the shutter.  Ouch.

Turning around and paddling back to the island of Providenciales looks amazingly like this.  We're aiming for the little stretch of beach to the right of center.  .

You can see that the weather from the west is almost directly overhead by this point.  And we still had a bit of distance to cover.   I didn't mess around with the camera much after this.  For I had promises to keep, and miles to paddle while I weep.  Or something like that.   In the future we'll probably not bother stopping for photos unless we see something really interesting or different.

A few posts back we showed you some photos of  boats tied up in South Side Marina waiting out the bad weather.    And now after a week of good weather the marina is again full as all the cruisers who were trapped somewhere else for the bad weather head south in clumps.   I think they formed friendships while waiting out weather in Mayaguana and Luperon.  Now they're traveling together. It's been so busy we ran up to the top of Jim Hill to get some photos of the marina while it had a boat in every available slip, and two anchored off the beach waiting for slips.

The empty spots in the lower right are reserved for the day charter dive boats that operate here, and those spots will be filled by about 15:00 hours when the divers get back from West Caicos.

Here's another view, same day.  There are two sloops rafted together at the fuel dock.   And the bar has been doing a booming business throughout it all.  Bob told us he had his biggest night ever this week, judging by the amount of liquor that was dispensed.

We're working on our own boat  here on most afternoons, and if we finish up whatever project we're on early enough we'll make the new stair climb up to Bob's Bar while telling ourselves this is exercise and it's good for us.  This has been Spring Break week in many places and there are a lot of people stopping by to check out the marina.  And the sunsets from here are pretty nice, too.  La Gringa is usually happy to take photos of visitors who want a 'selfie' with the sunset behind them.  Knowing how she juggles sunsets and cameras, I'll bet they got a surprisingly good photo of themselves.   And it didn't even cost them a rum punch.

We saw the rare sight of another ancient English catamaran coming into the marina this week.   This is a Prout, about the same age as our Catalac.   These boats are very distinctive catamarans, as they have an area in the hull called a nacelle.  You can just make it out in this photo although it was close to the end of the daylight.  The nacelle is a large bulb in the bottom of the bridgedeck between the hulls.  I'm no expert on them, but have read how they increase interior space and can be used to break up wave slap between the hulls.  We watched them come in with some interest.

We found out later that they were watching us with interest, too.  We spoke with Gary, the captain of the Prout and he knows a lot about Catalacs, too.  His family has been living on that boat for eleven years, spending the past four deep in the Caribbean.   We spoke of storm seasons, and what to do with a boat when hurricanes threaten.  We heard tales of tying up in mangroves and riding out storms that destroyed boats in marinas.  This info is not lost on us.

We are starting to feel very much at home on our old boat these days.  That's a result of spending hundreds of hours on board scrubbing, painting, ripping, cleaning and sometimes just relaxing.   I don't think there is much of the original interior surface left.   So everything we touch these days, or rub up against, has never been touched or rubbed up against by anyone but us.  If you get my drift.   I'll talk more about the boat in a minute, for those of you who follow that part of all of this.  Of course the rest of you have long recognized that I've developed an unhealthy obsession with the thing.  It keeps me out of the pool halls and bars.  Well, except for one bar, of course.  Bob's is not a typical bar.  It's more like a back porch with a fantastic view, cold beer, and rum punches.  And a cookout every Wednesday night for the cruisers.

Meanwhile back at the ranch..... I bought some UAVs, which are mistakenly called drones these days.  I figured that these little flying beasties would come in handy on our trips.  We should be able to get some great photos with the kites and drones.   I've got one with some fairly serious horsepower, GPS, a brain, etc. but I also bought a little cheapo to practice with.  This is so that I could learn to crash with a $50 toy and save the expense of crashing one that cost ten times that.  This is on advice I received from some teenaged wizards that live and breathe multi-rotors.  I rarely take advice, unfortunately, and it's even rarer yet that I would take it from someone a quarter my age.  But this time I did.  Kid made sense.  Go figure.

The little quadcopter I'm using as training wheels does have a video camera in it, but of course for fifty bucks total the quality of the camera is not anything to write home about.    I'd been flying it inside the house and garage for the better part of a week because the normal winds here would eat this little thing for breakfast on most days outside.  But as you've already read, we've had some calm days lately.  I decided to take the quadcopter outside and see how badly I would do.  It wasn't the best of weather for tropical photos, but it did have the makings for a potentially fine sunset.

Dooley the Disturbed doesn't know what to make of this little buzzing flying thing.   He followed me into the garage while I did a couple of warm up flights to make sure it was all working .  These next photos are screen shots from the video camera on the drone.  That's why they are low resolution.    This is Dooley watching me fly it under a table saw.   I like to think that he was amazed at my new skill.   But I don't think so.  He knew I never actually intended to fly it  under the table saw. I was hoping to hover over the Honda.

After I got the feel for it, we waited until we had light winds just before sunset.   Light winds here are still 5 mph.   We took it outside up on to the patio.  I worked to get it upwind, and on the way back I was hedge-hopping back to the house.  Literally.   And if the camera resolution was a bit better, you could see the concern in the worried fellow's beady little eyes.   The dog was  pretty nervous, too.

We grabbed our little drone weather window and took it up above the house.  I did manage to point it at the sunset for a moment or two in the grand scheme of things.  Makes me wish I had a better camera up there.

The experiment was not without incident.   The onboard camera managed to catch the dog's response the moment it crashed next to him on the top of the garage.   Color him surprised when this thing suddenly dropped out of the sky next to him with the noise of  four motors whining while I struggled to get it under control and back into the air.  I gotta say, the old boy still reacts well and the footwork is exceptional under duress.  Dooley, I meant.  

The under control part is important here.  Because La Gringa was also standing just a few feet away shooting sunset photos.  Made a convenient place for the little booger to find some long skirts to hide behind.  What a namby.

 Well, I did manage to get it back into the air.  This is from a hover downwind and above the house.   The crash from here was spectacular.   That little drone made it almost a week.   Now I need another one.

In last Monday's post I mentioned that we'd seen some photos from our long time  friend Trish.  She just won a local fishing tournament with a fairly respectable wahoo.    If you know these fish, you'll know that this one is plenty big enough to take an arm off.

We've written about Trish before.  She's one of the more experienced fishing charter skippers here on the island.  She managed to hook up with this monster from the sportfishing boat "Gwendolyn".  The wahoo was officially 103.5 lbs.  That's a lot of fish and chips.

When was the last time you caught a fish that took two of you to carry home?

Okay we're getting near the end of this week's post and I can't stand it any more.  I have to put in at least a couple photos of the boat.  I mean, this is mostly what we do during the week.   The SUP was one hour of the week.  Boat work is 30 hours plus.  So for those readers who like to bail out of this blog before the boat DIY stuff, this is your cue:

WARNING:  BOAT DIY PHOTOS TO FOLLOW.  GRAPHIC CONTENT!

I bet that got your attention.  And it's true.  I think everything in a blog is graphic content, isn't it?  Funny how the media controls our language.  Or tries to.  I just caught myself using the term 'drone' repeatedly.  Even though I know it's wrong.

I've been doing a bit of fiberglass work lately.  The boat doesn't need much in the way of patching.  Most of what it does need  is cosmetic.  This was  a repair that was poorly done by someone else.  A cracked bulkhead had been globbed with a compound known as 5200, which other boaters will recognize immediately.  This is like the glue Superman would use.  If Superman used glue.  Someone glassed over the 5200, but with polyester resin.  Which I think is fine for auto body repair, but not the best patch on an epoxy resin hull.  I re-fixed it.  This was taken during the re-fix.  I didn't take an after photo. Just imagine it all smooth and strong and done right and checked off a list of endless pages of similar projects stretching into my future.   I hope.  It's good to have a future of some kind.

I've found that I can get a limited quantity of decent fiberglass down here, the West Systems 105 for those of you who also get into this stuff.   The local boat supply store has some limited stock.  For example, they have the resin.  And they have the catalyst.  But they do not have the special pump that mixes it in a 5:1 ratio.  Great.  I had to come up with something simple and workable.   I'm going to mention it here just in case anyone reading this finds themselves in a similar situation.

I  cut the top off of an aluminum can and marked it inside.  This makes a good disposable small-batch mixing container.  It gets hot when the epoxy is kicking over, but it doesn't melt.    For the 5:1 ratio, I made a mark at 50 mm up the side of the can, and a second mark 10 mm above it.    

For the 5:1 resin to hardener ratio I filled the can to the 50 mm mark with resin, and then topped it to the 60mm mark with catalyst.  I used the bottom of the top mark because I wanted the mix a little on the cool side in this climate.  Worked, too.

Here's another example of why this old boat is taking me forever to refurbish. It's all the unanticipated little things that pop out when I start poking around.  This is what typically happens:

I am in the starboard head (right side bathroom)  just doing a general cleanup.  Looking for any little things that might need attention.  I notice that the overhead light is in good shape.  It's a quality fixture and works just fine.    I wanted to take a look at the wiring, anyhow.  I've found a lot of bad wiring and connections over the weeks.  So I thought this would be about a three minute job.  Take the light off, check the wiring, replace the light, move on to next project.  No biggie, right?

Wrong.  It is a biggie, to me anyway.  This is what I found when I removed that light. The heat of the incandescent lamp that some bozo installed in this fixture had melted the vinyl and set the plywood behind it on fire.   I mean  fire as in smoking, blackened generating actual flames kind of fire.   Unintentional fires are really bad news on boats.    There's no place to run from which to fight a fire. Imagine standing in the middle of a bonfire you're trying to extinguish.   It's not good.   We shall strive to eliminate potential sources of unwanted fires from the boat.

What really got me about this one was the previous owner's "fix" for this.  He used plastic tape to hold pieces of aluminum foil over the burnt hole, but he replaced it all the same way.  Think about that one for a minute.  If it was hot enough to melt approved marine vinyl, what would it do to a piece of Scotch Tape?  yeah, exactly.

So, my anticipated three minute job is a pipe dream.  I'll have to make some changes here. It will take time and money I had not planned on.  And this is just one little example.  I have to  wonder what else this marvel of a modern handyman might have repaired that I don't know about yet.  I mean have to as in am now required to.   I could do without surprises like this.  I do suppose it's good that I am finding these things now, at the dock.

We're also still removing things that we don't want on the boat, but  the rate has slowed somewhat.  This is as the decisions have gotten a lot  harder.  Last week I took the single sideband radio off.  Yesterday, it was the life raft.   This was added by the second owner for his two trans-Atlantic trips in this boat.  The third owner liked the idea of having a life raft in Jacksonville's St. John's river, I guess, because he left it onboard, too. For six years. We'd never use a north Atlantic style enclosed life raft here in the tropics, and we didn't want the weight or clutter on board so we removed it.  And now we need to figure out what to do with a never-used, $ 4,000 life raft.   Had a good time getting it off the deck, too.   It turned into one of those late afternoon jobs that kept us on the boat until after dark.  Again.

"Hang on, babe.  Just ten more minutes...." said thirty minutes ago.

I guess there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than working on a sailboat on a tropical island with a patient beautiful woman for advice and support.

On a different note here's a photo that I have no reason to post other than it made me smile.   This is a Lincoln Continental with a custom paint job.  I don't know that I've ever seen a Lincoln with yellow flames on it, before.  I wonder if Ford is going to offer this as an option?

I know the flames are not that easy to see on that photo, so I cropped that part:

To paraphrase a song from my distant past... " Son your Momma must have sure been drinking when she gave you a paint brush and Grandma's Lincoln...."

And on that light note I'll finish with the photo that La Gringa was trying to take while I crashed my first drone behind her scaring the bejesus out of the dog, who promptly dove for the skirts.  The wimp.

And now that Monday morning blog post is out of the way, we're off  to the marina to go work on the boat.  Surprise surprise.

Random Bits

We had a short and unexpected trip to Massachusetts this past weekend. A three day visit.  New England.  Deep winter.  Record blizzard.

Stepping outside the hotel in Boston felt like being dropped naked into ice water.   And I can actually make this claim with some authority.  I know what I am talking about.  I have been dropped naked into ice water before.  Several times.  I found out that  people in Finland  cheerfully do this to visitors from North America, for example.   It might be a national hobby.  I don't know.  I haven't been back.

Now that I think about it, that's pretty close to what actually happened when we stepped off that airplane at Logan airport. Except for the naked part.  If that part had happened in Boston, you probably would have already read about it.  It's not news when it happens in Finland.

I've  been standing at a hotel window looking out at Cambridge Massachusetts. We arrived as the airport reopened after a blizzard, with another one scheduled already.  Although I just posted  fresh photos a few days ago,  I'm thinking that maybe another post might go well with some folks in the northeastern USA right about now.   If ever a place needed a few tropical scenes to break up this gray scale snow monotony.... this place does.  I don't have much in the way of fresh material as it's only been a few days since I uploaded what I had and we've been traveling since then.   But I do have some more photos taken during the past two weeks that I could put up for your viewing pleasure.  Or your derision, if that lifts your spirits. So this is another photo fresh from just last week, on the southern shore of the island of Providenciales, in the Turks and Caicos Islands.   I didn't want anyone to think I took these photos in Cambridge Massachusetts in February. Or anywhere in Finland at any time.

Jacob is one of those solid, compactly constructed guys with a phenomenal sense of balance who took to the SUP  easily.  He's been like that since he was  kid.  Skateboards, skis, inline skates, doesn't matter much.  He'd be a good surfer if he wanted to be.

If I had booted up the camera a few minutes earlier that photo would have included Dooley the Demented standing on the board with Jacob.  But Dooley had decided that whatever I was doing over on the beach looked more interesting than riding around on a surfboard.  So he'd jump ship and was doing his Dooley doggie paddle over to where I was trying to get some artsy looking photos for this blog.   He was just cruising around swimming in big circles, eyes half closed in some private reverie of his own.  I never know what this dog is thinking.  I'd be surprised if it's got anything to do with swimming, although, again, I just never know.  What we do know is that he loves the water.  

I was standing in that water   near the spot where I took that little video that we posted in the previous blog post.   If you click on the "older posts" button way down at the bottom right corner of this blog, it'll take you back to that one.  If you want to see the video.  Or if I weren't so lazy I'd post a link to it like this.

I was hoping to maybe get another video without an unplanned dog swim through  it.  He's got a habit of interrupting peace and quiet wherever he finds it.  Unless it's during one of his quick lap power naps, of course.  

I was at that same rock formation but this was  at a different time of day than before.   The tide was high and the rocks were underwater.  La Gringa and Jacob were now well out on their trip around the little cay, so I just basically relaxed and explored the local ironshore.  Found a cave.  Crawled around with a camera looking for something worth recording.  

If you look at the photos on the previous post  you can easily see the difference between that low and this high tide.   We have about a foot and a half, or roughly 50 cm of tide here, normally.    If you look carefully at this photo you can see the rest of my immediate family on their paddleboards, heading for that little cay offshore.  I think Dooley the Tropical Disturbance was on the paddleboard with La Gringa.

We have two paddleboards and three paddlers, along with a single non-contributing quadruped, so one of us (me) was marooned ashore while the other two were out exploring.   The dog rode with them.  I roamed around the beach looking for interesting stuff.    This is not unusual behavior. Saw the usual collection of sand, shells, rocks, salt water.   You know.    This is probably the same type of stuff you see  in New York or Montreal this time of year, too.  

I really didn't have to look too far to find a nice shady   spot on the beach to wait.  This little Casuarinas tree made a really nice goof-off spot once I cleared out a couple of sticks and branches.   Nice soft layer of  leaves that look like pine needles, although they are not. If I had another one of these trees, and a hammock.... I could have tried for a Corona commercial.

This section looks like it could have been gouged out by a machine of some kind.  Maybe a bulldozer with a comb on the bucket.  I was surprised to see it, though.  Would a contractor here really drive a machine that expensive on the edge of salt water?   It doesn't make much sense, but apparently that's what happened.  I'm not totally sure about it, as I couldn't find any of the heavy metal tread marks a bulldozer would have left.   Makes for an interesting beach though.  Traps stuff  that get washed over the ridges into the ruts.

If you read much of this blog from the past you already know we hang out a lot at South Side Marina. Bob, the owner, has been  making a lot of improvements to the marina recently.  We stopped by a few days ago to check on the boat and saw yet another project underway. Men with jackhammers and shovels were hard at work carving a stairway into the rock.  We took some photos.  

We've noticed concrete and stone steps carved and poured into various slopes all over this island and I was interested in seeing how it's done.  I've finally discovered that quite often the local methods end up being what I end up with after wasting a lot of time and effort arriving at the same conclusions someone else arrived at after going through the same processes.  Duh.

I wonder how Einstein would have characterized that behavior.   It's sounding scarily close to how he defined insanity.

They use a combination of techniques for these stairs.  They carve the shape of the steps into the rock face with a combination of electric jackhammer and chisels, and use those carved, partial stairs to position the wood framing they use to form the concrete portions.  They use mortar to position limestone blocks in the stairs, too.

Notice how the end of that bubble level is resting on a stair carved into the rock face in this next photo.  This is how they get their rise and tread dimensions all correct and uniform.  And that's one of the few things that is uniform around here.

I wasn't sure if this was some kind of ceremonial bug stomping hatchet dance  for the stair gods, or maybe the guy just needed to use the bathroom.  Good shot of the stairs, though. Some of us are undoubtedly impressed by the sartorial splendor of the TCI stair builders, and I admit... it IS impressive.

Looking at that photo might lead one to believe these guys are working in a harsh  dusty environment, but that's just the stuff that these islands are constructed of. Limestone.   They don't have to walk far when they need a refreshing drink. Grab a coconut off the tree with a rake, and chop it open with a machete.  Sort of a tropical version of a vending machine.    

When I start writing about construction techniques I know that I am dangerously close to falling back into DIY mode here.   I'm going to shift the subject back to boats before that happens.   Don't worry, I'll warn you non-DIY types beforehand.

This is essentially our second "season" of spending the majority of our spare time at the marina working on a boat instead of being out exploring.  We're starting to see a pattern.  We meet a lot of cruisers passing through on their way either north or south and now we're starting to recognize friends  on their return north from their cruises.   Last season we met Jorge and Kim as they headed south from Canada to the Caribbean on their long-planned, two year sabbatical Caribbean cruise.  Last week they were here again, passing through this time on their way back home to Canada. Back to a life ashore in the frozen north.  They spent the 2014 hurricane season down in Grenada.   Jorge is from Argentina, and we found a mutual interest in things mechanical.  Last season, Jorge and Kim and s/v CS'ta Time  were at South Side Marina for a couple of weeks while Jorge completely rebuilt the V-drive transmission on his boat.   This guy is the most meticulous mechanic I have ever met. He taps a roller bearing into place the way a Swiss watchmaker handles the tiny gears in a Rolex.   You could safely serve salad inside one of his crankcase housings.  It's that clean.  This year, nothing on their boat was broken so it was a short visit.  Too short.    I briefly considered sabotaging his fuel line or something just so they'd stay a few days longer while Jorge repaired each individual molecule of the damage.  It's a joy to watch, if you're patient.  But of course I wouldn't do that to him.  And they have a schedule to keep, friends to meet up with in Nassau.

I am very interested in the way the radar/solar panel arch is attached to CS'ta Time.  It's attached to the toe rails, instead of being bolted to the fiberglass.  We also have toe rails on s/v Twisted Sheets.

(I thought I'd give you non DIY readers and recovering Super Bowl fanatics a two minute warning.)  

I was taking photos of Jorge's arch setup as he was fueling up for their departure from the marina.  At least, that was my excuse for walking over to their boat again as they were warming up the diesel and getting ready to depart.  They had to catch a weather window to Mayaguana.  They have no plans to come this way again.   We have no plans to ever be in Toronto. These kinds of good byes have some weight to them. Handshakes and hugs last just a second longer than they might have on another day. Emails and "boat cards" are exchanged. But we all know that's more for the scrapbook memories than it is for any real kind of future planning.

And then all too soon our part in their life's journey is behind them.  Once again we've been honored to become part of  someone else's cruising memories.  We know their two years on the boat have been very exciting for them, and that they're also glad to be on the homeward leg now, with only the Bahamas and US to traverse.  

Of course we all know that all good things must come to an end.  This seems to be one of life's immutable lessons, and we are getting accustomed to saying goodbye to friends way before we're ready to say good bye to them..

I guess that could be a simplified analogy for life in general.

You know that mixed emotion, bittersweet kind of feeling you can sometimes get when you're both happy and sad at the same time? 

Watching good friends sail away forever is kinda like that.   

Goodbye, Jorge and Kim. It was a four star, blue ribbon, Olympic class pleasure to meet you guys. We wish you fair winds home on CS'ta Time.  

Warning.BOAT DIY SECTIONNon technical and the otherwise bored can bail out right about here. There are no pretty tropical photos past this point.

Okay, now that the tropical scenery stuff is out of the way I can talk about the boat again.   If the blog is supposed to be about our life here (and it is) then this has to be in it, because for the past couple of years this old bateau has been a big part of what we're focusing on.   

First I want to explain my interest in Jorge's arch attachment points.  We are looking at options for replacing the structure that came with the boat. This includes the hard top, solar panels, dinghy davits, and maybe the dinghy too.  The design that I'm looking at includes a big radar arch like Jorge's, but ours would be connected to the cabin roof with a series of 2" OD schedule 80 aluminum tubing.  In general, an outline of what I have in mind would look something similar to this:

If you look at some of the photos of the boat we've posted you can see that what's on the back of it now is pretty ugly.  This new design should address a few of my objections to the previous owners' solutions.

This would be a big project for us.  I've been looking at the pre-fab "arch in a box" concept that Atlantic Towers sells.  Of course we've also considered having one custom built here, but suspect it would be cost prohibitive.   

That project is on hold until we secure some more funding.  Anyone want to buy a Hobie Tandem Island and a Mojito skiff? How about a nice, almost new three bedroom home on a hill overlooking the Caicos Bank? I'm serious.  Meanwhile, we're actively working on a number of other projects that we can afford at the moment.

For example, notice that in this photo there is a big hole where a window is normally located. We continue to chase down leaks.  We're getting pretty good at it, but sometimes we still have to pull the entire window and scrape out all previous attempts.  

Makes a bit of a mess inside the boat when we do, too.

Jacob has been concentrating on the painting and carpet work while I've been finishing up myriad little electrical and mechanical issues.   This is the overhead fiberglass in one of the forward cabins. The window frames are taped prior to painting.  

This is all area that was smothered under an inch or more of foam rubber and vinyl wall covering when we bought the boat.   We haven't yet decided what we want to replace the vinyl/foam with, but in the meantime we wanted to make the boat more 'livable' by making the raw fiberglass cloth look a little softer inside.

Our thoughts are that someday we'll take the boat to someplace like Honduras or Columbia and have the entire interior remodeled in tropical wood.   Meantime, we've been looking at scenes like this, except of course normally there are bolts in those holes around the window.

 And don't get me started on these bolt holes.  Because I am of the firm opinion that one should not be able to look out through holes in this type of installation.  I think it's a horrible design, but then I'm probably biased against it because I've spent so many long hours dealing with it. But I'm operating on the basic premise that holes and hulls are at cross purposes when it comes to water management.

Even thought I suppose one might consider the boat itself just a big expensive hole in the water. A squall moved in just as we got the bolts all removed from the window.  This is what it looked like through that window about fifteen minutes after that photo above was taken.

 Great timing, eh?  And yeah, we had some leaks.  Some of them could have been named Niagara.  Thank goodness for bilge pumps and sedatives.

Our friends at TCI Paint and Supply have mixed up some latex paint that matches the buttery color of our boat.  This is a high quality latex from Benjamin Moore paints. We've used a variety of methods to prep the inside fiberglass, and are still having a lot of trouble getting the old glues off.  We're using some Goo Gone type of citric solvents, but honestly, they are not working worth a tinker's damn.  So we scrape by hand, dig into the weave with knife points to dig out little globules of glue, apply a wire brush in some spots, and we always finish up with sanding sponges to remove residue and to rough the surface enouth to give the paint some teeth. It's not a two part paint, but so far it seems to be pretty tough stuff.   It sticks well and dries to a very durable coat.  It fills some of the weave effect of the fiberglass cloth. We're seeing a lot of cosmetic improvement with the very first coat.  And it's all getting at least two coats, or more.  I'll use fiberglass body filler to fair the rougher sections prior to painting.

Well I think that's more than enough for this one.  I could ramble on a bit more and I have tons of photos of various bits and bobs of  boat boogers, but  I've got this new plan to post something every week going forward, and if I'm going to get this posted on a Monday, well.... it's Monday.

See you next week.

Mid Winter Check In

Working on an old sailboat has  become our major extracurricular activity.  Some might say our only extracurricular activity. And it feels that way sometimes although it's not totally accurate either.  It's been like this for quite a while now.   We keep finding things on the boat that require repairs or replacement.  There are little things and big things and little things that could turn into big things if left on their own.  Well one upside of all of this is that we never have to ask each other "What do you want to do today?" any more.   The answer to that would usually be to just finish our coffee and head to the boat. We're working toward the day when our morning coffees will once again be brewed on  board s/v Twisted Sheets  instead of at the house. We're getting itchy to do some coastal cruising.

By now I suspect that you've realized that  this is going to quickly degrade into yet another of these DIY-old sailboat-fixing posts.  I'll try to fit in some tropical scenery to dilute the boat stuff.  That's why I threw that photo of the coffee cup in there.  Well, it was taken at sunrise.  We just didn't have any horizon that morning.  We're feeling guilty after watching the Boston weather this morning.  A blizzard.   Not for us, thanks.  Been there, done that, didn't buy the t-shirt.

My son Jacob has been visiting us this month from Massachusetts and that's why we're paying attention to the Boston weather at the moment.   And he's definitely not wishing he was on Cape Cod right now.  He and his step-mother have been out cruising around  on the paddleboards quite a bit this week.  This is our version of winter sports.

They like to paddle out to one of the Five Little Cays and loop around it.   I handed him my camera  to snap some photos. He's not fooling me.  I can tell by the angle on this one that he was sitting on the board.

I think maybe he forgot to mention that La Gringa led the way around the island, with a dog on board.  I wasn't there for this, but can tell from the photo that this is the seaward side of the little cay, as they rounded it heading back toward Providenciales.

The ocean water is simply disgusting here, isn't it?    Would it help if I reminded you that this is really just melted snow and that I'm sure this water has all been prominent in a New England storm at some point in the past?  And will be there again, in good time.

Dooley wasn't stuck on the board the whole time, either, by the way.  He gets plenty of swim time in on these excursions.   I entertained myself by roaming around taking photos of the shore area while my entire immediate family was off floating around in the ocean. On third hand fiberglass planks.  Without life jackets.  In shark infested water. I thought this rock formation had some potential from a photographic standpoint.

I held the camera near that hole in the rock to see what a video  would look like.  What do you think?:

I guess Dooley's returned from the paddleboard trip.  Our own personal Tropical Disturbance, in action.

Jacob is another inveterate beach comber, and takes a camera on his walks here.  Having visitors here from the US reminds us of how different this little island is from places like Cape Cod.   After ten years here we've gotten jaded.  This all actually looks normal to us.  This is our day to day life.  Not his. He sees the differences.  He tells me that he's never noticed a bug like this on Cape Cod, for example.

And for some reason I like his photo of the last days of a sand dollar as it gently blends back into the earth which formed it.   There's just something about that thought that this photo seems to bring back to me.  Makes me remember that life is short.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. An organic version of turning to rust.

It also reminds me that it's time I got back to work on the boat.  How's that for a segue into what I really wanted to talk about anyhow?   Hey, I DID put some tropical photos in here.

If you can remember back to the previous blog post,  you might recall that I put up a photo  of the mast while we were out sailing.  This photo, in fact.

My son took that photo and what was of interest to him was the sail and the boat logo.   I look at the photo and see the cause of a definite problem and a passel more DIY jobs.  At least.  There might even be two passel worths.   The DIY jobs that leap out at me are replacing the VHF antenna  and removing the lightning damaged junk from the top of the mast, and running a flag halyard up to the starboard spreader, and removing the fried radar antenna, and installing a speaker, and repairing the spreader, anchor and deck lights.   Oh, and the Catalac logo needs repainting.  Sigh.   Lets make that a series of sighs.  Tapering off into low sobs.  This boat has definitley been keeping us tied up pretty well, lately.

I'll explain what caused the problem for us, too.  Look at the halyard that's tucked behind that second mast step  down from the top on the right side.   "Halyard" is sail boat talk for the ropes that run up to the top of the mast and back down to the deck.  They are used to raise and lower things like sails and booms and dinghys and salvaged treasure when it's too heavy for us to lift on our own.  Ha ha.  

Actually, we're about to use one of those halyards to haul me up there to do some of these repairs.  Not that I'm any treasure.  Look at the rope that goes right to the top tip of the sail.   We have roller furlers on our boat, so we don't use as many halyards as most boats, but we have a bunch of them installed on the mast. And from time to time this conglomeration of lines causes some issues.   Usually the halyards are just loose and making that annoying slapping noise that sailboat halyards make in the wind.  Anyone who has tried to sleep in a marina full of sailboats in the wind most likely knows what I'm talking about.  I've long thought that "The Slappy Halyard" would be a good name for a marina bar.  Anyhow,  In this case, that loose halyard became snagged on the top of our main sail roller furling, and we didn't notice it at the time.  You can see it in that photo if you know what to look for.

Late in the day when we were finished sailing and  trying to roll the main sail back up we ran into problems.  That snagged halyard prevented the roller furling from  rotating as designed.  The problems were that I cranked entirely too enthusiastically on a  winch, and tore the sail and overstressed the furling hardware.   Getting the sail secured in a 20 knot wind was  quite invigorating. Especially since we hadn't been sailing but once in the past year and were way rusty and not all that clear on the proper sequence of events as we remembered it. Differently.

We got all tangled up with the furling line jammed on the winch. It involved cutting lines and  a fair bit of improvisation.  When we returned to  the marina, I discovered that one of the mast fittings for the roller furler was bent and about to fail.  I think one of the previous owners of this boat must have constructed this piece from heavy stainless steel wire.  I don't think it looks like it came from a marine chandlery.   And I'm sure you can see that one good tug and this thing would be coming loose from the mast.   I realize that not everyone reading this is familiar with sailing activities, but in general it's bad news whenever hardware comes flying off of whatever it was supposed to be attached to.  

I could see that this little bent wire t'ingum was going to become a problem with the next big tug on that line. And after looking at the local marine hardware options several times, I came to the conclusion that the only way I was going to get this repaired in time to go sailing again next weekend was if we just fabricated a replacement ourselves. We do a lot of that here. Also, we noticed that the block (which is a nautical term for a pulley) was putting the line (rope)  down low on the furling drum (which is that spoolie thing with the red rope wrapped righteously round it) and this was something I wanted to fix, too.  But the whole point of this photo is to show you how precarious the grip of the pop-riveted wire was to the mast.  Whoops.

Having never fabricated a piece of mast hardware before, I was a little unsure as to what was going to work best.  Here's a photo of what I came up with.   The first object there on the left is that bent piece from the photo above.  I hesitate to call it original, as I'm fairly confident that this wasn't a professionally designed and manufactured piece.  It was failing anyway so it really doesn't matter.  I removed it to get the dimensions I needed to duplicate and I also wanted to see if perhaps I could just simply fix it by re-bending the eyes.  This is a good, time-honored lazy way out of a job I really didn't feel like doing in the first place.  I've gotten pretty good at that over the years.  But at some point this annoying sense of responsibility kicked in and  I decided that rebending the steel would  weaken it.  I also felt that this approach left something to be desired from an engineering standpoint.    I do not think that using rivets with that bent wire was the best idea.   I mean, a bozo like me just bent it, right?  I also thought it just basically looked ugly and unsuitable and that alone was more than enough justification to do something about it.  I didn't want someone looking at this and thinking it was something on the boat that I approved.  Know what I mean?  

That piece in the middle is my first attempt to copy the function of the  bent wire "original"  on the left.  I basically just mutilated a  perfectly good  piece of stainless rod that started out as salvaged rigging from a shipwreck on West Caicos. I heated the ends with a propane torch and then wailed away at it like a maniacal drooling blacksmith  with a claw hammer and a cheap bench vise as an anvil.  I think the hammer marks give it an air of hand wrought authenticity, like I just screwed up a miniature horseshoe.

After it was all said and done  I was a little nervous about the thin material around the eyes.    And yes, I know it's even uglier than the piece I was trying to replace.  It's perfectly okay if you want to tell me these truths.  You won't hurt my feelings.  I'm a big boy, and  I knew my creation was hideous when I heavily hammered it hairless.  I realized it,  I cried, and moved on.  We just have to try to use these little failures as stepping stones to our next little failures. Which is at least a change of scenery and a chance to wash up and get some sleep. Or something like that.  The really important part of what many call a failure is to consider it just a learning step in the process of getting it right.  Failures can be very useful with the right attitude.  At least that's what I told myself after hitting my thumb with the hammer and screaming until my own eardrums hurt.  Time to move on.

Now that third piece of metal  in the photo of the DIY mast pieces, the one on the right, is the result of  taking a Dremel tool and cutting a 15mm wide strip off the stainless holding tank that we also salvaged from that a wreck on West Caicos.  We sure got a lot of mileage from that wreck.  I wish I knew who owned that boat.  I'd like to contact them and tell them their old boat was living on, and parts of it were sailing again.   I know I'd be tickled to hear that if it was me.   And I think this second attempt looks almost like it was intended for the application, if you squint your eyes just right and suspend most of your standards for a moment.

I think this is a better application for the rivets, for sure.

I also made the replacement just a few millimeters shorter than the one I destroyed, er,  replaced.  This should do a slightly better job of feeding the furling line onto the drum in the middle so that it doesn't clump up in one area and cause hard feelings amongst the sailors.    I know it's difficult to see what I'm talking about from these photos.  And I notice it looks better from a distance.  So much so, that I am expecting that looking at it from the distance of a couple years will make it look even better yet.  We'll see.

In the early day of stripping this boat I  never realized that I would ever get  this far into it.   I thought I'd  just take a quick look behind the vinyl and find the places where the rain was leaking in, and that would be the end of it.  But no, it's gone much deeper than that.  I don't know if this has become a challenge, or an obsession.  But I've noticed a change in my attitude as this whole old-boat-refurbishment thing has progressed.  I noticed it again just yesterday, in fact.  We're working on stripping the forward cabins in preparation for painting and installing the new hull liner.  The ventilation could use some improvement, and I decided to take a break from stripping old glue to install a new 12 volt fan.

I know this doesn't look like much, but it represents something to us.   This is something new being installed on the old boat. I wish I had taken photos of the old, rusty, cheap  discount store fan that I removed, but that's long gone to the dump.   And there was something satisfying about putting those two new stainless screws into the wood.  So many of these projects have been done in the past using whatever hardware was available.  We've thrown an amazing amount of rusty steel away so far.   But now, things are starting to come back together.  And  wherever possible, it's being done right.  I used the right sized screws.   The right length.

The fan is a good one.  Designed for use on a boat, not plugged into a cigar lighter designed in 1950 for an automobile.    There is a feel about a good product.  A heft to the motor.  A solidity to the parts.  It's clean and white and new and if nobody was looking I'd probably fondle it for a few seconds before installing it.

We hadn't put up the new hull liner at this point.  We were working in the cabin to clean the rest of the old glue and foam rubber from the fiberglass.   We were using solvents to loosen up the glue.   It was decided that installing ventilation was probably a good idea.   We'll remove it to install the hull liner under it when we get to this part.

And there we have a new, marine grade, functioning fan that works just great.   I realize this doesn't sound like a big deal to most people.  They'll figure "what's he on about?  It's just a little fan."  And yeah, that's accurate.   That's all this is.   The first of six new fans.   What makes it a little red letter nanosecond for me is that finally, things are being installed back on the boat at a good clip.    The destruction phase is over.  Now, we rebuild with good stuff.

Jacob has been working on the interior of the forward cabins for us. An extra pair of hands is very welcome, as there is a huge amount of boat work yet to be done. He's learning a lot about old English catamarans on this vacation.  For example, he now knows that the  hatches over the bunks double as emergency escapes.

We've been organizing lines, sorting them by size and application and getting rid of the old and worn out ones.  This, too, has become satisfying in some strange way.

I wonder what kind of a manuscript we'd have if we'd logged every little repair in the two and a half years since we bought this boat.    I don't put all of this stuff in the log book for the boat.  It would take up way too much room to talk about all the little things.  I do list the important stuff, like major changes or engine repairs.  But we don't bother listing every stitch to a parachute drogue, for example.   We do have a sewing machine on board, but sometimes the old ways are more convenient.

Like with a curved needle and 40 lb. test monofilament.  And these stitches don't come loose.

We've got a big roll of hull liner, which we've also heard some sailors refer to as "mouse fur carpet", in our living room for months. We're pulling the old stuff off the boat and taking it home to trace and cut the new pieces. There is a huge difference in smell between 30 year old hull liner and new hull liner, by the way.  Just in case you wondered about that.

We're spending as much time at the marina as we can get away with.  The boat is functionally just about there, awaiting only a certain yellow bellied captain to climb the mast and fix a bunch of already listed issues there. I would have done it today, but I dropped a socket overboard between the boat and the dock, and well, I believe in omens.

Can you believe that the water is 12 feet deep there ?   Or how I changed the subject from me climbing the mast?

I can't avoid it much longer, so I'll be up there as soon as this dreadful wind abates a bit.  Or something like that.  In the meantime, we're still here on the south side of the island of Providenciales, dreaming of casting off the lines and heading out for some new adventures.   The 'cruising season' is just starting up here, and we're starting to see other sailboats coming through South Side Marina.  

Speaking of South Side Marina, recently I was finishing up  another of my latest little projects-du-jour and looked up to notice a decent looking sunset.  Not that they're all that rare here.  I looked around  and noticed that my crew was gone. I was on the boat alone.   

This is usually their subtle signal that it's time to gather up at the bar.  So I went up to take a look. 

Yeah, it's a much better view from here.