Flotsam, Timbers and Termites

I hope some of you are not yet bored with all our recent West Caicos trips. Because this is another one. Now, we did break it up a little with the previous post about Grace Bay. But right before that, we had taken the skiff back over again. On the previous trip it was windy and we had taken our little sailing kayak over. We've developed a general game plan regarding boats. On windy days the skiff beats us like rented mules if we go fast, and tosses up and down like a cork if we go slow. But the Hobie is a fun scoot when there's between 10 and 20 knots of wind. Traveling at ten to twelve miles per hour in a skiff can be boring. It's not so boring in a plastic kayak when your posterior is at water level. Really.

On flat calm days with no wind the Hobie becomes more of an exer-cycle than a sailboat, while the skiff skips over flat water like a flat stone. We'd been waiting for a calm day to finish our little mission.



We have been looking for what Dr. Don Keith has called "Maravedi Cove" because of the ancient Maravedi coin found just sitting there on the rocks. Like it had fallen out of a pirate's pocket when he went skinny dipping. I know I've already told you about all that. This story piqued our interest in coves. There are other stories about the French pirate hiding in a cove here and ambushing treasure ships. No kidding. This is an interesting place to us. Practically in our back yard, yet only accessible by boat. Perfect place for a couple of old gringos to explore. Well, one old gringo, with a couple of younger assistants.

The kayak limits us as to what we could reach in a day, and still get back to Providenciales before dark. We think that one of the coves we saw on that trip is probably the one where the coin was found..... BUT those coves near the Molasses Reef development are not all the coves on West Caicos. There were a few we didn't get to on the sailing trip. We needed the skiff. So we loaded up some refreshments and the dog and headed toward the appropriate cloud bank. Who needs GPS?

There was one stop we had to make before we continued on to West Caicos. Just a few minutes out of South Side Marina we noticed Dooley getting agitated. He seemed to indicate that he knew where there was a rock shaped exactly like a fire hydrant on one of the little uninhabited cays on the way. We decided to humor him. We encourage him to let us know these things.

We pulled into the lee of the little beach and Dooley swam ashore to conclude his business. He's pretty finicky about location. He then wanted to swim around for a while. Not uncommon for him.

I was playing with the video, and watching his shadow on the sand bottom below him as he swam. I also wanted to show some of his concerned readers that he does, indeed, swim just fine without a life jacket. We make him wear that mostly because it makes it easier to grab him when he falls overboard. And it would make it easier on him all around if he did fall off the boat while we were doing 30 mph.



Aiming for the proper cloud mass got us to the part of West Caicos that we were most interested in exploring on this trip.



After our last little sailing trip to West Caicos searching for Marevedi Cove, we felt we had found the spot where that old coin was found after sitting there for a few hundred years. BUT we had also seen several coves on the Google Earth satellite image down around the southernmost end of West Caicos. If you look at this image below, you can see some indentations down there at the bottom right corner. The ones on the south eastern shore of the island face that very shallow reef just a loong swim off the island. Not a lot of bathymetry data, is it.



See where the little shipwreck symbol is up there on the beach, right in the middle of the chart? We decided to start there, of course, and work our way south down the beach at least as far as the tip of the island.

In the years we've been here there have been at least two incidents where wooden sloops full of Haitian refugees have hit this reef and come to grief. People and debris from a boat hitting here would naturally head for West Caicos. The wind and current are in that direction. It's the only land in sight. It's the only chance. West Caicos is famous locally for the native shark population. We think these conditions have always existed here, so of course we wanted to look at what this part of the island was like. We wanted to see what shipwrecked people would be forced to try to swim or float to. Not only in 2012, but in 1600. So we went to take a quick look.

We intersected the beach right about at the middle of the top edge of that chart photo. Looked like great beachcombing right from the start.



We went into putt putt mode, with the motor raised six inches straight up on the jackplate and tilted until the skeg was just about the level of the bottom of the boat. We can move around in about a foot and a half of water like that. We can plane in less, but we like to look in the shallows.


It's nice to have a broad band of this water to drive the boat over. When the bottom is rocky or reefy, it becomes nerve wracking trying to determine how shallow something is because of the exceptional water clarity. And it is almost always deeper than it looks. That doesn't stop the heart palpitations when you suddenly see a coral head going below you at 40 mph when it's too late to do anything about it. Smooth sand under a boat is relaxing.

Except to Dooley the Diligent, of course. He doesn't do mellow relaxing very well. He's either asleep, or he's not and he runs full scale from one extreme to the other. Not a contemplative dog. Terriers like action.

This works out okay, because he's definitely another set of eyes on board. And he's particularly interested in fish, of any size, shape, or temperament. He likes to bite barracudas and talk with dolphins. So he really gets alert when he spots a fish.



...and in this case he had spotted what we think were a couple of small sharks basking in the sandy shallows. Took a few seconds to shift the camera from still shot to video, because I knew a still shot would just show another blur in the water. We needed motion..



I'm not 100% sure what kind of fish they were. They were about the size of a decent barracuda but they swam more like sharks, I think. Barracuda don't put so much body motion into it. They're more short tail flip. Quick acceleration. Sharks kinda sashay along with a more sinuous motion. At least, in my observation. Did you know what us east Texans call a 'sashay' is actually from the verb (or noun) chassé, which is a gliding dance step? Blame it on the Two Step.

We continued on down the beach to the south to where that wreck is marked on the chart. You can see what that refers to off in the middle distance here:



This was such a nice day, I thought we'd try to give you an idea of what it's like to just be slowly motoring along, looking at the beach. Looking for anything interesting. Does this help visualize what's shown on the chart?



We dropped our anchor right next to the wreck and gave the crew shore leave. Except for a few birds distantly wondering about our lunch plans, it felt like we had the whole island to ourselves. Nice view of our 'home cloud', too.



The wreck itself appears to be an old grounded freighter or barge. It's pretty hard to tell without doing some digging. Whatever it was, it was big enough to have a truck on board.



I just now noticed the large fish in the water out past the wreck. I wonder if it followed us.

The entire beach in both directions looks like some version of this:



It's a huge mass of debris stretching for miles. Seaweed cushions and displays everything from enough bamboo to build a substantial shelter to big hunks of timber and entire tree trunks from some river on some continent. Somewhere.

This could have come from a lot of places. Honduras. Mexico. Bahamas. Africa. Guyana. I wish I knew more about tropical wood. The Haitians use a lot of these 'knees' in building their sloops. Maybe this was a reject. Or an escapee, that ended up its days on a distant, deserted beach instead of as a structural element in a sloop full of desperate people. A hull designed to last only long enough to sail 130 miles into the trade winds. They would both sure have some sea stories to tell, though.



And of course there's plastic. And metal objects. And shiny things and dead things, and this is just the stuff you can see on top of the piles. Some is easier to get to than others. This fishing net float is now on my desk.



There is a lot of interesting "stuff" here. This is the stretch of sand that Preacher refers to as "Flea Market Beach". The prevailing winds and currents sweep in from the open Atlantic to the east, and the Caribbean immediately to the south. Things that float pile up. Every tide makes some changes. Storms make major deposits and completely rearrange all the display.

I always tend to start trying to think like Robinson Crusoe when I find myself on a beach like this. We saw enough bamboo alone to build a three bedroom home and detached garage/workshop. I was actually looking at this potential barbeque grill ...



When I noticed the size of the knot under the gas valve.

Easily distracted at my age, I totally relegated the BBQ pit to my faulty short term memory and followed the new and exciting Big Rope. Sometimes I feel like a crow who just spied a handful of shiny broken bits of discarded Christmas decorations.



Of course once Dooley the Detective figured out that I was interested in taking photos of the rope he had to come confiscate it. Or guard it. Or whatever it is that makes him want to be right in the middle of whatever I am looking at. Is there a psychology term for that? I've always thought of it, mentally, as more or less some 'obnoxious dog syndrome' But hey, I'm a total layman in these things.

Anyhow, while he was deciding what to do with HIS new rope, I thought that at least he could provide some photographic perspective.



He left when I told him it was his new leash. Something about going for a swim to wash the sand out of his hair. And eyes. And nose. And ears. This dog really gets into beach combing.

We saw a lot of driftwood type things of course. This is really the kind of thing I am interested in. I see something like this, for example, and start thinking about standing it upright, bringing out the wood with tung oil, and bolting it through the bottom of a piece of limestone and calling it.... something. Not sure what. A piece of driftwood on a rock. Now I feel silly, having told you that but hey I still think it would look cool on a patio or something. There is a lot of texture here. The grain would look pretty cool with the wet look tung oil would give it. It's a good idea to get a coating of some kind on wood here. More on this later. Trust me.



We walked down maybe two hundred meters of beach, and saw enough stuff to keep someone busy picking through debris and flotsam and jetsam and junk for years. There is a lot of just trash, of course. Mostly trash.

When one of us saw something deemed interesting from that individual's perspective we would stop and do some digging.



Or poking or grabbing and yanking. These are all highly developed techniques, of course. Next time, we need to bring a.) sensible shoes or boots and gloves, b.) something to dig with. Perhaps a few basic demolition tools.

I did grab a couple pieces of salvageable mahogany, there on the seaweed. I thought I would take those home and see if something came to mind.



And of course, plastic shoes. I don't know what the half-life of these things is. They are everywhere. Along with empty plastic water bottles. I know, I know.... same old rant.



When the sun hits a treasure and it glints just right, I go right back from badger to crow mode. Shiny metal! Must have it! Well, 316 stainless steel isn't quite the same as gold. Until you really, really need a piece of good reliable hardware. These stainless bolts weren't the cause of this little disaster. They held firm.

But I wouldn't bet against gold being involved as well.

It's when lead comes into the story that things start going downhill fast. Heavy metals are problematic. Especially at high velocities.



We were pressed for time, as we wanted to see the rest of this shoreline before we had to skedaddle back to Providenciales before dark. No lights on the skiff but that's not the issue. The issue is running into things in the dark. I'd do it on a full moon and calm night, though. Might be a lot of fun, come to think of it.

As luck would have it, we spotted a fairly freshly gutted sloop up on the beach well above the high tide mark. I'd be willing to bet that this was a parting gift from Hurricane Irene. We really had spent more time than we planned playing in the garbage, so we just had to mark this as a destination, and excuse, for our next trip over. We'll plan to get some close up and inside photos of how a Haitian sloop is put together. Future post in the making. But for now we just kept motoring. Sadly, these leaky escape pods are not all that uncommon here. Nobody knows how many never make it across the deep ocean between here and Hispaniola. They don't file float plans or fill in visa applications.



This is the point where the beach stops and the rocks begin. You can see that fairly well on the chart up above. On the chart, it looks like this is open water allowing what's called Lake Catherine on the maps to be open to the ocean. It doesn't really look like that these days. What it does look like is an excellent spot for a boat ramp, when the wind is right.



And there are several mysterious and interesting looking structures just through the trees in that photo. There is also a pile of rusting machinery. Heavy machinery. We have asked around about the origin and history of these five armed, arched, space-age (circa 1970-ish) looking buildings. We've heard some stories, but don't yet know the correct set. We've heard both sides of the drug war were involved, that Trujillo from the Dominican Republic tried to buy the island, that this was just a construction camp for the people who built the landing strip. We don't know, yet. This is a long way from the new Molasses Reef development on the other end of the island. But it might warrant some exploration on a future trip, too. Maybe on the same trip when we come back to check out the construction of that sloop. If we keep it to two objectives and keep Dooley and I from digging on the beach, we have a chance of fitting it all into one day.



I realized about here that maybe a Google Earth image would be a good idea. This is better than the chart to show you some things, but both the chart and this image are years old. This shows you the reef, the beach, the rocks, the "ramp" where that photo above it was taken.

Oh, and the little coves that caught my attention. These might have been the nearest sheltered spots to take a boat and keep it off the beach if the winds were right. That wouldn't be often, but who knows. We thought it worth a look. Or maybe to be precise, it was good enough excuse to go look.

We put a lookout on the bow as we nudged up into that area I marked "cove" on the satellite image.



I didn't get the impression that this was a likely spot to choose to go ashore. Just too steep, and the beach isn't that far away. I wondered if Dooley might see some reason to pull a boat close to the rocks here.



We were keeping an eye on the time and weather, as usual. We still had time to head down to what is almost certainly the southwestern most point of land in the entire nation. Sounds grandiose, doesn't it? This is like the equivalent of Land's End in England. South East West Caicos. Wonder if Oliver North was ever here...



The stretch of beach heading up to the left (west side) in that photo is supposedly the site of a fossil reef. Lots of fossilized, stone sea life. I bet you know what I am going to say next, right? yep. Future Blog Post!! hey it isn't always easy to come up with something new here. And remain wholesome, cheerful, sane, and un-incarcerated. Oh, and I left out educational and with redeeming qualities. Fossils will be more fun than "how sand is made" or "clouds 101". Not as much fun as the care and feeding of planetary gears, though.

Another of the nice things we like about running over to West Caicos is that on the way back the sun is not in our eyes. When we head up to the east as we often do, it's very difficult to see coming back late in the day into the blinding sun. Coming this way, of course, it's behind us and no problem at all. It even makes for some decent photos sometimes.



This was a peaceful trip back, just the way we like it. I mean, exciting trips have their place in life, for sure, but there is exciting and then there is exciting, you know? We've learned to be the kind of people who really hope not to have interesting flights. Peaceful is good.

We thought you might like to see that scene in motion:



It really wasn't as late as the light in this photo would appear. The sun was behind a thick cloud and the auto exposure on the camera did this. I liked it, anyhow.



I thought of a bunch of captions for this photo of Dooley, but in the end just decided to show you what he is doing about thirty seconds after insisting to be allowed ashore. Yep, he sits here and keeps one eye on me and the boat, and the other eye on La Gringa backing a Land Rover and boat trailer down to the 'ramp'. He is officially on guard duty here:



Now, before I go into the next part of this post, I wanted to show you those two pieces of mahogany I picked up on the beach. Been soaked for eons in salt water. Should be pretty pickled, right? I thought so, too. And then over the past month my education in these matters got a little upgrade.



Here's what happened. We took a vacation. We went to the USA for three weeks, and did a camping trip from Dallas to northern Colorado. Had a heck of a good time. We took scads of photos but I'm not sure why. They have no place on a tropical blog. None of you guys want to look at photos of snow. Yes, snow, in October. We were all quite surprised, and that leads into another story in itself. But enough about that. Of all those photos I'll just put one quick one up to let you know how very very much contrast we experienced. And to be sure there's no misunderstanding, NO this is not in the Turks and Caicos Islands, British West Indies.



Okay to be fair here, I should say that this next section is ugly. It's not exactly DIY, but it leads into a DIY. For those other handyman wanna-be's out there, you might check the photos here because I got into a DIY that I am pretty proud of. It might be something you can use.

For everyone not interested in DIY, I hope you enjoyed the tropical island stuff. This next bit is also tropical island stuff, too. It's some of that which goes along with living here.

First off, remember the mahogany? I stuck that next to a pile of miscellaneous junk piling up in the corner of my garage. An area where I put pieces of wood, pipe, pvc, that I think I might need in the ongoing performance of life here. It's a mess, and I fully intended to re-organize this whole area. I left the mahogany leaning there, and we took off to the USA.

Three weeks later I opened up the garage to find all these termite tunnels everywhere. Across the floor, up the wall, around and under. I started tearing into it before I remembered to grab a camera, so the photographic record of all this isn't that good. This is that 2x3" timber:



All those trails on the floor were to the part of this that contacted the concrete. And they spread out from there in several other directions.

This is where they came off the top of the mahogany and over into some of my other wood supplies. To call them 'little buggers' at this point... well... let's just pretend that was the worst I said about them. I do confess to some evil thoughts, though. Who am I kidding.
I went on a killing rampage.



They crossed the floor, went up the back of my workbench, even set up camp on pieces of wood I had trimmed off the corners of La Gringa's Tortilla Mashing T'ingum!!



I discovered some things. They will cross anything, but won't eat treated wood or through paint or stain. Just raw, untreated stuff. In this case they went for the light wood I used inside the tortilla making whatchamacallit. I think it might be poplar. Some smooth white wood. They ignored the red oak, and seemed to prefer mahogany over casuarinas.

This is a one inch diameter "hardwood dowel", whatever wood that is. Beech, or birch perhaps? They had just started on it when we got home. Sheesh.



I'm going to shorten this up a little and get to the point here. I pulled everything out of that corner of the workshop and started to clean it up and reorganize it. I took the workbench and scrap rack I built outside and decided to paint them white, so I could see any future sneaky termite tunnels easier. It's something I've been wanting to do, anyhow.

I had some white exterior deck paint left over from the construction of the house. And stashed up under my workbench, a nice airless paint sprayer that was totally unused. Still in the original box. La Gringa had bought this about ten or twelve years ago for a planned project long ago and far away. It never even got opened. I was the first person to touch this paint sprayer since the day it was purchased. It got brought down here with our household stuff in 2005. It has been tucked away for six years here, completely out of the elements. You must wonder why I am setting this up like this. You'll see in a second.

I unpacked my new old paint sprayer, read the destruction manual even though I know real men don't read manuals. I filled it with paint, ran the power cord and started painting the underside of the workbench. First thing I noticed was that this thing made a LOT of noise. I didn't remember them being that noisy. The second thing I noticed was the sudden and total lack of noise. Yep, it stopped dead after about twenty seconds. I got exactly this far along:



I had to believe that this was something simple. A clogged thingamabob. A de-convoluted whatchamacallit. I mean, this was untouched, inside a plastic hard case, which was inside a cardboard outer package, which was tucked under a workbench, inside a garage. I kinda figured the whole issue of warranty wouldn't come into it, and opened it up.

The first thing I noticed was that what I suspect must have once been something like thick red rubber O-ring shock mounts had turned to a dry paste. "Aha! (thinks I) That explains the excruciating buzzing noise.

I then worked my way through the circuits in a very general manner and discovered that the electricity wasn't getting past the trigger switch. I wired past that, and discovered that while power was getting to the speed control board, nothing was coming out of that to run the electromagnet that drives the piston that pumps the paint that Jack built. Whoops, sorry, wrong fable.

So in a nutshell the size of a medium coconut, this is what I found:



We weren't too happy about getting about 20 seconds use from a 'new' Wagner sprayer, but hey what can ya do. We went to the local store that sells these kinds of things. Thinking to just buy a new one. Well.... no, come to find out, that wasn't an option. Nothing like that in stock. Not for less than about $ 150 anyhow. Hey I haven't needed one for six years. I don't want a new one.

Now it became a challenge. And this is the part I wanted to show you. Finally. I took the little problems on one at a time. First, the shock mounts. I noticed that there were little pegs molded into the sprayer case, that held the vibrating pump assembly in suspension between these shock mounts. I found a stainless 1/4-20 bolt was just about the same general size as the peg. A little smaller, which I figured was a good thing.



I filled the cup for the former shock mount with a high temperature black RTV silicone. I coated the bolt with silicon grease and sank it into the RTV filled shock mount cup:



Did you know RTV stands for "Room Temperature Vulcanization"? It means that it sets up and turns to silicone rubber in ambient conditions. I've been using this stuff for thirty years and never bothered to look it up. I just thought RTV must be French for 'makes your eyes water' or something.

I let the silicone set up and then just easily unscrewed the bolt. It left a greasy threaded hole in the now vulcanized silicone, which just fit tightly on the mounting peg. While that was setting up I clipped the leads off the useless control board. This thing just gave me five different pump speeds. I figure these things always end up getting run at full blast anyhow, in the end, so I just wired it up permanently on the full power position. I didn't plan to use this for any fine detail work. I have an airbrush for that, but have come to terms with the fact that I'm not the kind of artist that needs a fine brush of any kind. In fact, people that know me normally take paint brushes away from me if they see me in possession of one. As a painter, I'm a decent mechanic.

I flipped the motor over and poured another shock mount on the other side. After that cured and I soldered or crimped or shrink tubed all the places that needed any of that done, I put it back together. I wired a toggle switch to where the trigger used to be, and here we have it. Something that was headed for the dump a couple hours earlier is now Island-ized.



I now use my thumb to flip it on and off, until I can find some kind of push button switch to replace this with.



And does it work?

Heck yeah. The bench is done and the bottom shelves and the little pipe/scrap rack are next.



And that's the end of the DIY section! Hurrah! I know some of you will appreciate that one. And I was just so... so inordinately pleased with myself on the shock mounts that I just had to tell SOME body. I showed Dooley and he yawned. La Gringa expects this kind of behavior from me and isn't that easy to impress anymore..... so I told you.

Why is this relevant to living in the tropics? Well, this started when I was opening the door to the garage to start trying to figure out why the clutch on the Land Rover didn't work after sitting for three weeks. Opening the door revealed the termite damage. Fixing the termite damage included painting the workbench. Painting the workbench needed fixing the paint sprayer. No place to buy parts for that here, and well, you know the rest.

I had to fix the Land Rover before I could drive it to the store to look for another paint sprayer. I replaced the clutch master cylinder and slave. I am sparing you that one. Out of a number of unplanned projects dropped on me after our absence, I thought this DIY was the best.

And there has been more, but this post is way, way too long. I thought about breaking it up into smaller posts. Termites tell me smaller posts are easier to digest. But finally I decided to cram as much of it as I could into one post and get caught up.

I will post one other little DIY that is working surprisingly well. I took a piece of the steel rail that used to be part of the electric garage door openers that never worked. I ground a hook on it, and epoxied it into a piece of dowel that is glued into a piece of bamboo. You wouldn't believe how good this little sucker is for digging weeds from between our concrete patio pavers. I no longer have to bend over to yank each weed by hand. This sped it up by a factor of four.



And to our reader who told us about their friend's new house on Juba Salina, is this the one?



We love that design. I have been looking at several versions of that one, in fact. If we ever built another house here, it would incorporate a lot of what we have learned building ours. And it would be a lot like a bigger version of this with some modifications.

Well, that's about it for this post. I hope we are essentially caught up. We don't have any plans to leave again for the winter, so should be here to watch the cruising sailboats come and go. And meantime, I've discovered that with proper fine tuning I can cut limestone with a pressure washer!!


La Gringa took one look at me and instead of wanting to hear what I had discovered about pressure washers and limestone, she insisted on me testing the outside shower. Personally. Immediately. In the middle of the afternoon. Go figure.

Oh yes, we have lots of posts planned going forward.

And by the time the next post rolls around, the sunset will be in the ocean again. Right where it looks best in the winter.

Grace Bay Beach

For our first couple of years here we lived within a short walk of the Grace Bay beach. We spent many a mellow hour there. Snorkeling, swimming, picnicking, reading, beach combing, annoying the dog. Then we built a home far, far away on the other side of the island (maybe 2 miles across) and we got more and more into boating. And now we rarely get back over to what is undoubtedly one of the nicest beaches in the entire hemisphere.

Here's a satellite image of that part of Providenciales, for those unfamiliar with the beach I'm talking about:



Don't worry about that "light on post" notation. That's to show you the area where these photos were taken, in case anyone is curious. There is a light on a post. And it is very near where I marked it on that image, and there is a photo of that post in this post. There. Feel better now? I know I do. It's a pretty good picture of a light on a post, too, by the way. As these things go.

That Google Earth image clearly shows the large white sand beach that lines the island of Providenciales all along that north west shore. You can even see the large offshore sand bars that move along the bottom here. This place has plenty of sand. This beautiful beach is the natural attraction that originally brought the first resort investors to Providenciales. From the stories we hear, there doesn't seem to have been much of anything of note here back in the '60's. There were only a few hundred people living on Providenciales, in several small separated settlements. There were no roads, and no vehicles, and no protected harbors.

A group of investors put an airstrip and the Turtle Cove improvements in and built the Third Turtle Inn back in the latter part of that decade, and there developed a very low-key, barely known, extremely small tourist industry for almost the next twenty years. There is a photo of the ruins of the original Third Turtle Inn in at least one of our earlier posts about Turtle Cove. It wasn't much of a tourist industry. The Third Turtle Inn had a few guest rooms, and that was essentially the extent of the resort industry here until the Club Med was built on Grace Bay in 1984. And that's when things started to grow at a steady and increasing rate.

If you ever do a Google search for resorts in the Turks and Caicos Islands, or ask a travel agent for brochures, you are going to see a lot of listings for resorts on Grace Bay. This is the most popular beach in the country, as far as numbers of visitors. The majority of the tourism industry on Providenciales is centered here, and with good reasons. Grace Bay is one of the nicest beaches you'll ever see. It's covered with smooth sand from one end to the other, except for some rock outcroppings in a few places. The offshore reef protects the beach here, and the indentation of the shallow bay slows the long shore current effects. It's shallow enough for non-swimmers to be comfortable, warm, and with a mostly smooth sand bottom. When the travel magazine writers all do their yearly "Best Beaches" articles, this place scores consistently at the top end of the scale. We kayaked along the entire bay in an earlier post, if you would like to see some photos of the resorts and beaches.

On this particular visit, we parked at the end of a small dirt road and walked along the beach. This erosion control barrier has suffered some damage since the last time we were here. I suspect Hurricane Irene might have been involved with this.



We typically take some of the back road approaches to the northern end of Grace Bay, and don't use the easy access points. And there are plenty of easy access points. The Turks and Caicos Islands has some kind of rule governing beach access. I don't know the details, but have noticed all the designated beach access spots along the commercial areas of Grace Bay.

We tend to visit the north end of the beach because it's away from the center of the resort area, and because we like the rocks. We like watching the boat traffic in and out of Leeward. We know many of them. Not many people walk all the way to this end, so it's a good place to let Dooley run free without having to constantly try to keep him away from other people's picnics. This dog will lick the chocolate right off a startled toddler's lips. There's no actual harm done, but it sure does seem to excite some people. New mothers, especially.

Looking back at that sea wall from this angle it's easy to see where a large section of it rolled, or toppled over. I'm impressed that the wire netting held together.

You might notice a relative flexibility in the positions of the stone wall and the ocean.



The undamaged section of the wall looks pretty square to the level surface of the water, doesn't it? I thought so. There is a photo I took later as we returned in this direction that made it look a little different.

I picked up a section of bamboo root that had washed ashore and jammed it into the netting. No real reason for it. I just thought it looked whimsical or something. Okay, the complete story is that I wanted to pry and wiggle the wire and see what kind of steel it was. Just curiosity. Maybe someone else will wander along and get a smile out of it.



Terriers weren't bred to be water dogs. They're designed to rapidly and aggressively escort undesirable agricultural nuisances to an early end, providing assistance as required. Bred to exterminate foxes and rats, these are tunneling and digging dogs. And ours loves to tunnel and dig, but more than that this terrier loves to swim. I think he must have been a Labrador Retriever or Portuguese Water Dog in a previous life. This is not a complaint. We really appreciate a dog that not only enjoys a salty splash of the ocean in the face..... but seeks it out at every opportunity.



When he first arrived here he would follow us into the ocean, but only because he had to. These days he doesn't wait for us to go in first. Or at all.

I swear he's grinning as he chugs his way back up through the outgoing rip. That's chest high, to a short legged Jack Russell. It's one of those kinds of receding waves that tickles the bottom of your feet as it sucks the sand right out from under wherever you stand. Maybe that's why he seems to like it. Maybe he's remembering what a trip to the fire hydrant was like in northern New Jersey with a foot of fresh snow on the ground. A foot of snow becomes a personal factor when your legs are only six inches long. It makes me shiver just to think of the logistics of it, even today. This may not be the dog's life that whoever coined the phrase had in mind. But it's not bad.



Dooley will happily trot along in the edge of the water with us, ahead of us, behind us, up and down both sides of us all day long. The minute we show any interest in anything whatsoever he takes it upon himself to inspect it. Thoroughly and closely. This busted up section of the fiberglass liner from some deceased power boat, for example.

Here I am thinking of how the first new owner of this boat must have felt standing on this deck afloat for the very first time.... and all Dooley sees is a possible hideout for undesirables. Maybe he was a police dog in his earlier life. Or a hit man.

Trying to get a photograph of a piece of beach wreckage without getting Dooley in the photo reminds me of spear fishing, a little. The trick is to not head directly toward the target, but to angle by it obliquely, like you are on your way to someplace else. The head is kept straight, eyes directed forward and it's a mistake to face or look directly at the target. This signals intention, and alerts the attentive. One has to use their peripheral vision to time and set up the shot, right at the most effective moment. I obviously didn't do it in that photo above. He's fast, I tell you.

In Dooley's case, the moment he determines what it is that I'm interested in he'll beat me to it ten times out of ten. I think he likes to position himself for when I finally get there with my opposable thumbs. I might turn something over and expose something else fun to chase. A lizard, or even better a rat... and I just this moment started asking myself exactly when did this dog train me to flush game for him....??

Maybe this is the plastic boat's version of a fitting end. At rest on a peaceful dune, overlooking the ocean it once proudly rode.... there's gotta be a good graveyard epitaph for something like this.



Of course I could also get with the other point of view, which is that it's a man made eyesore. Trash. Garbage. Cluttering up a perfect beach. Funny how something can have so many different perspectives from which to view it.

This is the part of the beach that interests me the most. There are exposed rock outcroppings right in the tidal zone here, and I like to watch the interaction between the waves, the sand, and the current.



It's pretty difficult to get a good dynamic photo of the waves. They never seem to do well with still photography, unless of course they are gigantic things towering overhead. I think it's much easier to visualize waves when you can see the rhythm and motion. Some of you have asked for the actual sound. You can hear some of it, with the wind effects, here, on a calm summer day:



I know I've admitted in an earlier post that I still like to play in the sand at the beach. I never got over that. I won't let La Gringa post any photos of me doing it, no way. BUT I do admit to it. I get fascinated by the movement, and by the natural forces that shape our world in such small increments that they are rarely even noticed. Nobody notices if a little wave carries fifty grains of sand three inches to the west, but multiply that by all the waves in tens of thousands of years.... and by golly you begin to have some noticeable effects.

The outer edges of these rocks form a ledge several feet in height. You already know how clear the water is here, so you can see that the water in this photo is murky looking. That's simply because of the sand being picked up by the waves as they break over the rocks.



It's a slow process, but it goes on endlessly. I get mesmerized by watching. I realize I probably have an inordinate interest in marine geology by normal standards. I can't help it. I grew up in the oil patch. But for those of you who enjoy observing these mechanical aspects of our universe, this is just a short clip, with a close up of the sand being moved around on top of the rock by the waves.



I know those little grains of sand don't look like much, but looking around at the rocks here it's not hard to see what the constant wearing and motion of all that fine sand is doing to the rocks. It's as if the island is very very gently being sanded smooth over the years.

Here's a video of the wave action speeded up by 500%. Can't you just imagine this going on for twenty thousand years? No wonder big hunks of these islands fall off into the sea from time to time. The soft limestone based bedrock gets undercut by a sand blaster in very slow motion.



I mentioned early in this post that there was a photo of a light on a post in here. This is the photo I was referring to:



That is the light that I marked on the satellite image at the beginning of this installment. I am starting to really like that photo for some reason. I think it's the way the sand is being picked up by the receding wave delayed by the rock. I think I'm going to use that for desktop wallpaper.

My ongoing fascination with the sand and beach erosion became the theme for this afternoon, obviously. We were noticing how the wet sand changes color from the dry sand. It's not just a darker shade, it's a different color. Whether or not you'll be able to see this will depend a lot upon your monitor setup, but the swirls of sand in the bottoms of these depressions is still damp from the wave that just splashed them in there. The wetness disappears in seconds.



And this whole stretch of beach is the wet sand color, as the waves are still washing up over it every few minutes. I was trying to get the interesting patterns in the untrodden sand, when a couple of things interrupted me. The first was that I was looking at this photo (below) which was taken with the camera parallel to the beach we were standing on. You can see that the ocean surface is way out of level, showing you how much tilt there was to the camera.



Something about this looks a little wrong to me, and I'm not sure what's causing it. Something about the perspective. If you look at the undamaged wall, it looks perpendicular to the sand, doesn't it?

I cropped that little bit of the photo that shows the wall and the water, and I rotated the image so that the water surface is horizontal, as it should be. But there is still something strange about the wall. I can't figure it out. Something to do with the perspective, I suppose.



Oh, the other thing that happened while I was trying to get some good smooth sand photos was 'you-know-who' traipsing up, and back, through the scene before I could get another angle on it. Oh well.



That was pretty much it for our brief trip down to Grace Bay. I know some people who read this blog have vacations planned and will be staying at some of the Grace Bay resorts on Providenciales. If you feel like taking a walk up to the end of the beach, there's a light on a pole up there. Some old Gringo seems to be obsessed with it.

We actually could have hung around the beach a while longer, but there was a squall developing not too far offshore, and just to the north and east of us. This angle shows it starting to rain on the reef just about a mile out from the beach.



And this is a view a little to the east of the previous one to illustrate how the squall is getting heavier as it gets close to the island. I think it has to do with the updrafts but I am not going to bore you with all that meteorological stuff. Lets just say it was a good time to climb back in the truck and head home.

Looking for Maravedi

In Which Two Point One Five Expats Sail Their

Plastic Boat Around in Splendid Weather.

A Quick Visual Survey of Some of The Far Side of West Caicos.

Some Fabled Coves are Located. A Small Dog Is Lightly Punctured.

La Gringa managed to spot a couple of early rising conch fishermen headed into the morning sun.



We seem to be spending a lot of time over at West Caicos this summer. There are some perfectly good reasons for that. The island is essentially uninhabited. It's miles of peaceful, quiet beach. We have the whole thing to ourselves, or it feels that way. We have very rarely seen anyone else on the beach there. And this big deserted beach, to a pack rat like me, is the equivalent of a shoe store to Imelda Marcos. It's high tide line is rich in a variety of interesting objects. There are things on this beach that have drifted across the Atlantic Ocean, and up from the Caribbean, and over from the Gulf of Mexico. When we once mentioned to our friend Preacher where we had been exploring, he referred to it as "Flea Market Beach". Good name. I like it better than "Trash Beach".

West Caicos is also fairly close to us. At it's nearest point to Providenciales it's only about six miles across open water to get there. Now, for us to get to that nearest point on Providenciales is a mini-expedition in itself, as we've shown you a number of times. Now that we have the little skiff, when the winds and seas are right we can launch it from the canal near the Southside Marina and it's an easy 15 mile trip over.



We need a light or westerly wind for a comfortable round trip by skiff. When we have our normal easterly trade wind situation, it's a bit bumpy coming back in a small power boat but the same winds that make the skiff ride uncomfortable make for great kayak sailing. And that's what this post is about.

Launching the boat from the, uh.... let's call it "unimproved" boat ramp over near Osprey Rock. I found it only moderately strenuous and relatively simple to just unhitch the boat and trailer and roll it down to the water by hand. I didn't have to back the trailer around that bush to the right, and I like to avoid getting the truck wheels near the ocean. Besides it's an easy push when it's downhill.



I've been thinking about getting some wider tires for this trailer. This is a far shot from the paved freeways of the USA. I think golf cart tires are too squared off but I'm sure there are some balloon tires for 8 x 3.75" wheels some place.

We put the GoPro Hero camera up on the top of the Hobie Tandem Island mast again. This time I had the open back cover on the case for it, and we used it in time lapse mode. This let us get through about two hours of images without fogging up. It's all in a video at the end of the post. I have pulled a few images out to use as still shots, too. While the photo quality is not as good, the view from the top of the 18 ft. mast adds some perspective.



I am not even going to show you yet more photos of Osprey Rock. Anyone who reads us on a regular basis knows all about it. The sail over was great, with wind and waves cooperating for once. When I remember our only previous sail to West Caicos in the inflatable kayak two years ago, there is no comparison to this boat.

You can see from the video that it wasn't exactly smooth water, although it was moving in our favor. La Gringa spliced a second video onto this that shows the change in the water as we approach the island. You can also see Dooley exercising his nose as we suddenly sail into the collection of scents blowing from the island. Getting downwind of a new place is like opening a travel brochure to him. Complete with a menu.



We didn't hit the beach on the trip over. I had a specific destination in mind and wanted to be sure we got at least that far before we had to turn around to start home. We knew that we would have a slower trip into the wind and waves to get back home.

The spot I was looking for is a place I have wanted to see since first reading about the Maravedi coin some years ago on a visit to the Turks and Caicos. In a nutshell, over 20 years ago a diver was relaxing in a small pool next to a cove on the far side of West Caicos when he picked up a bit of metal that was in the bottom of the little pool. It turned out to be a coin that might well have been sitting there on that rock for hundreds of years. Imagine some pirate relaxing by that pool, maybe taking this opportunity to wash some clothes in a fresh rain water pool, and go for a swim... and losing a small coin. Or imagine a confrontation at a secluded rendezvous, and somehow money getting spilled in the process. I mean, it's not very likely that a tourist, conch fisherman, or diver left a coin from the early 16th century here. Of course my imagination runs wild with it, as some imaginations are fain to do.

If you'd like to read part of that story, one version is at the Turks and Caicos Museum site.

On the way over we pretty much steered for the easily seen structures of the former Ritz-Carleton Molasses Reef Resort. They're good as a landmark. (And I want you to notice I spared you the 'clouds over the islands' dissertation this time around.)



It's difficult to see much of the condition of the condo section from this far out. I would imagine that someone, somewhere is paying to keep some security and basic maintenance going on over here. Until such time as the future of this big money development becomes clear.

I found a brochure online, to give you an idea of what this was intended to be. It's a Molasses Reef resort newsletter from just six years ago.

We could see that the buildings are standing, and the roofs appear to still be sound.



We know that there is a boat bringing some workers over every morning from Southside Marina these days, so perhaps there is some good news for the people who initially invested in this project. The last financing was secured through Lehman Brothers Holdings, if that tells you anything. But it looks to me like someone could pretty much pick up where they left off on the construction, after cleaning this place up. Of course there should be some damage somewhere. Three hurricanes have been through here since then. And these were probably the closest structures to the middle of Hurricane Irene when it came by in August.

We continued on up the little channel alongside the island to the site of the marina that was built for the resort. It's nice to see that the buoys are still in place after the storms. Here we pass one red buoy to the right and you can see the next one off in the distance ahead:



We scooted on up to the series of coves right past the entrance to the marina. It's not hard to see that these are likely spots for the Maravedi Cove story.



I haven't been able to find out much more about the Maravedi, beyond what Dr. Don Keith wrote in the article I linked to earlier. We know Don, and I'll ask him about it at the next opportunity. But I am pretty sure it was one of these coves, and that it's been checked out pretty thoroughly since it was realized that Mike Spillar found a coin here. It seems to me that the Turks and Caicos Islands have rarely had a shortage of either pirates or treasure hunters.

There are some fun looking caves to explore with snorkeling equipment.



This is one of the coves with a slight cave or overhang at the far end of it.



We followed the coastline in and out of several of the coves. I didn't take a huge number of still photos because I was assuming that the mast mounted GoPro camera was getting a lot of it from a better height.



One has to have faith in a GoPro type camera, left alone eighteen feet in the air all day. There's really not a good way to make sure it's working until it can be hooked up to a display. I pulled one of the still images off of the GoPro to show you what this part of the shore looks like 'from the air'. Well, maybe a 'seagull's eye view' would be more accurate.



I'm sure that somewhere in all these two hundred and fifty plus posts in this blog I have mentioned coral heads. What, a dozen times? And I am sure I have mentioned that we've learned to watch the brightly colored ones the most. Here's an example of a shallow coral head with bright colors on it. These colors are from organisms that like the sunlight and do best within a few feet of the water surface. The brightly colored coral heads are the one's that will really get ya.



Another place to mentally file under 'spots I would love to come back to and spend hours exploring but probably never will':



We were sailing closer to the beach on the way back. We knew we would be picking up the chop on our nose when we cleared the end of the island so we maximized the time spent cruising in the calm water up close to the beach.

As we came back by the resort much closer than before we did spot some signs of storm damage:



This is the view from the mouth of the marina looking into it. No boats to be seen. We did not see any people, either, but would assume that there are some security guards as a minimum.



That could be a peaceful job for a while, couldn't it. Boat to work in the morning, or at dusk. Spend a shift alone on a deserted island, with nothing around but sea birds, iguanas, and marine life.

I don't know the layout of the resort but would assume this is the main entrance to the clubhouse or condo central section. It looked to me to be open to the weather. That's not always a good thing around here. This climate looks easy and benign the way hydrocloric acid looks like clear water.



This photo didn't come out very well because it was hurried and the boat was moving and then I am officially out of lousy photo excuses. I meant to show you a big flock of birds. They were following a school of bait fish.



What I failed to capture there was that the bait fish must have been following the edge of the shadow on the water from the cloud overhead. I say this because the birds were staying over the quickly moving fish, and their white wings were flashing in and out of the sunlight and shadow of the cloud. It was visually eye catching. Unfortunately, it wasn't photographically eye catching. Oh well. It's a picture of some birds. If we had been in a power boat and set up for fishing, we would have been all over that.

We all wanted to stretch our legs a bit before heading back across to Providenciales. We knew it could take us up to two hours. We had already been sitting in the Hobie for over two hours at this point. This was a mid-trip rest stop, more or less. I had seen some things washed up on the beach and Dooley was in search of a fire hydrant or the functional equivalent. His standards had been dropping by the minute and I wanted to let him off the boat before he started looking at the mast with evil intentions.

If any of you are Tom Hanks fans, you might appreciate the laughs we got when I found an inflated ball on the beach. One of these by the same manufacturer became the character "Wilson" in the movie "Castaway".



There. That's more like it.



Please notice Dooley the Delinquent scurrying around the vegetation in some of these photos. You might also notice we tend to stay on the sand. There's a reason for this. I'll get to that in a minute.

Of course this beach, like just about any beach on earth now, has it's share of plastic water bottles and yes, shoes. Always, there are shoes.



We had stopped at what looks like a small cove on the charts and satellite images of West Caicos. This is the same place we stopped on our only other sailing trip when I had to find some shoe laces to repair the Mirage Drives. This was the maximum extent of our earlier trip.



I was looking at the beach between this rocky little outcropping (above) and where the rock ledge came back to the water's edge just past where the boat is anchored here:



I have an idea that this area might, at some time, have been a good sized cove. I pulled some of the still photos from the GoPro to give you an idea of what I am thinking. I drew a dotted line of where the little limestone ledge comes down to the sand.



This is from the top of the mast of the sailboat in the photo up above. You can tell that there is a different, more permanent type of vegetation above the rock line. And the ledge extends all the way around in a curve to that rocky outcropping in another of the above photos.



Here's a closer shot from the mast-cam taken as we were sailing in, before we anchored:



Anyhow, that's neither here nor there, but makes me wonder about how the moving sands around here affect the accuracy of some of the charts, and even Google Earth images that are online. I mention it, because the actual shape of this spot where we anchored looks nothing like that satellite image from 2004.

And I had mentioned Dooley and his cavorting around the vegetation. Well, now I can tell you the price he paid. After about thirty seconds of chasing lizards through the edge of the plant life, we had a whimpering, limping, Dooley the Debilitated doing his best to look like a pitiful dog in need. So I got to sit down with him and pick aproximately twenty 'sand spurs' out of him. He gets the easy ones out of his feet by himself, but runs into problems with the ones under his armpits or anywhere else he can't reach. La Gringa grabbed the camera just as I was finishing up, dropping the nature's caltrops I extracted into the current going away from us.



Now that I think about it, this is the exact same spot I was sitting in to drill holes in the Mirage Drives to limp home on two years ago. The camera was in time to catch one of the last ones.



Thank goodness his sticker-proof vest caught that one.

The sail back was about what we expected. Much longer trip on a close reach. The wind was okay and the chop wasn't too bad. Just enough to keep a certain grass burr magnet from his afternoon nap:



Getting back is easy, and fun if you like sailing. Hauling the boat back up the 'boat ramp' is a little tougher than letting it roll down to launch it. We rolled the trailer down into the water, over the rocks, by hand, got the boat onto it, and then pulled it up the beach as far as we could. I backed the Defender up to the hookkup and away we went. Sounds simple doesn't it.



At least one of us was more than ready for a restful ride in the cool shade.



And I've saved the best for last. This is another of La Gringa's time lapse video compilations of all the still shots from the GoPro camera. This catches most of the trip, from the initial launch all the way to the coves and back to the last point of land before we left West Caicos on the way back. The camera ran out of battery at that point. But what we have is pretty good, in its way. It's a much better view than we got from the water. She sped things up a lot when we were sailing over the big stretch of open water, but I think it gets interesting to watch the bottom conditions change as we tack back and forth up the side of the island. Let us know what you think. This seems to be a good use for the GoPro.



By the way, any time you want to stop that video and look at a specific frame, you should be able to do it with the normal pause control.

And that's going to be it for this post. Our interest in West Caicos continues. There is a fair bit of history there, and a lot of it is still relatively undisturbed. There is a hundred year old abandoned steam engine I want to see. So far I figure we have explored maybe ten percent of the beach. And there has to be a 'fresh shipment' of flotsam since the hurricane.

I've also been reading that West Caicos has some unusual geology for the area, and that the south west side has an exposed fossil reef. To us that's all worth investigating. The hurricane season is also the time of year when we get these calm seas for days at a time. It's the best time of year to anchor off a lee shore like "Flea Market Beach". In a few months it will be continuously rough water there.

I think I want to make a few more 'shopping trips' with the family wagon (skiff) while the weather is good.

In the meantime, I think this is one of the most interesting sunset photos La Gringa Suprema has taken lately:



and the sun is creeping further to the south every day again. Won't be long until cruiser season is upon us. "Oh great" I hear you saying... "More boats. Somebody stop him."