Back in the D.D.I.Y.

We've  settled back into island life and started back into some of our old hobbies.  It seems like all the recent weekends have been marginal weather, just windy or rainy enough to give us an excuse not to take a boat out.  That happens a lot this time of year.  We can pretty much count on afternoon atmospheric unease. Last weekend we did finally roust ourselves from our post cruise lethargy for a sail on the little Hobie Tandem Island.  It seems strange that we hadn't been sailing for over a month.   Well we fixed that.  Dooley the Disgruntled was more than happy to get strapped back into his life jacket and take up his rightful spot on one of the trampolines. We tried to show him Twisted Sheets from the water, but he's not entirely clear on the whole new boat situation just yet.  

We think he might have a distorted opinion of where we were actually located  during May and June. He may think that we were hiding down the street.  He watched us disappear into the airport in late April. He knows things about the airport.  He's been there with us many times  when we're picking someone up or dropping them off.  He doesn't associate the airport with us leaving.  He never sees that.  He gets dropped off at the kennel on the way.  Then we come back and pick him up on the way home.   So on his mind, the airport is the place where we sometimes go to collect fresh laps for him to climb into.    I imagine he was confused when we walked into the airport and then people he barely knew drove him away to his home, in our Land Rover, and moved in. Time went by. Then one day seven weeks later he went for a ride with the new people and discovered us actually living down at the South Side Marina.   He's suspicious.  

 I don't think he's quite convinced that Twisted Sheets is a boat.  Why should he be?  He's never seen it move.   We go on board, we work a few hours on things, and then we lock up and leave.  We think he might believe it's a condo where we hid from him for all that time.  It's hard to tell what he's thinking.   He's been playing things close to his chest, lately.  Unless there is thunder involved.  Then he'll play it close to ANYbody's chest.  We've been pretty skittish about electrical storms ourselves lately, come to think of it.   We're all testaments to Pavlov's observations around here.

We took a quick sail around  the marina and then headed out into some open water with a nice 18 knot breeze.  I didn't take a lot of Hobie sailing photos because you've seen them all before.   This is our home sailing ground.  We were sure glad to get back on the ocean.  There's just something about the sound of the wind and water that appeals to us.   I did shoot a short section of video of Dooley on the windward trampoline, as we ran downwind back to the marina after several hours of sailing:

I know I've written that things are getting back to normal, but that's not precisely accurate.  Things have changed for us after that trip. We're   aware of a lot of new possibilities that have opened up now that we own a boat we can live on.   Of course we're not getting too adventurous just yet.  We're moving into the thickest part of storm season now and we are not planning on sailing much further away than we can scoot back from if big chunks of the atmosphere start spinning on a large scale.   I don't even like to use that "H" word. The Turks and Caicos Islands went over 50 years without a significant hurricane, but have been hit with three of them since we moved here.   What's up with that.

Here's a couple of the reasons we hurried  through the Bahamas and didn't stop for a day here and a few days there anchored near some of the fantastically beautiful islands we passed on the way home:

"Ernesto to the right of me, Florence to the left, here I am: Stuck in the middle with you....."

I think we'll keep the boat close to home for the next few months.   We've got a lot of things to accomplish before we take off for an extended trip again.

Before I get off onto one of my DIY rants, I wanted to give a plug for a really nice restaurant experience we had.  People are often emailing us and asking us about hotels and restaurants on Providenciales.  Recently we went to a long time old favorite that's got a new venue .  This is a photo I snapped from our table at the Mango Reef restaurant last week.  I wanted to show you how the restaurant is situated right on the dunes on Grace Bay beach. I don't know about anyone else's criteria, but we judged this to be an acceptable place from which to watch a sunset over libations.

We'd been going to the Mango Reef almost weekly for several years. Then they left their old location at the Royal West Indies hotel and moved to this beach-side spot at the Alexandra Resort.   We went by for a meal right after the move, and it was raining  and the kitchen was disorganized, and the service wasn't very good.  So we hadn't been back.  We figured that they would get it all organized eventually and  we waited  to give it another shot.  We were very pleasantly surprised at how much better the beach location is than the old spot next to a hotel swimming pool.  The view is great, and the food, service, and staff were as good as we remembered..  We believe in saying good things when we find good things to say.   If you're visiting Provo and looking for a nice beach side dining experience give them a try.   They've become one of our favorites again, I think.  Right up there with Coco Bistro and Las Brisas. 

We've never spent a single night in a hotel on Grace Bay, or even on Providenciales.  So we're not the best judges of the fine points of the local room situation.  But we have been out to eat at a number of local establishments that are associated with hotels and resorts.  We've been to Opus, at the Ocean Club East. We recently went to Pelican Bay at the Royal West Indies.  We've stopped by Hemmingway's at the Sands Hotel a few times.  We've been to Coyobas at the Caribbean Paradise Inn, Bay Bistro near Sibonne, and Fairways at the Provo Golf and Country Club.   We've been to a couple of functions at The Palms, but I wouldn't judge their restaurants by those catered experiences. Not that they were bad experiences, just that they had nothing to do with menus or service.    The only actual rented room I think we've seen the inside of was at the Seven Stars and a condo where some of Dooley's readers from the USA were staying.

Now, while I'm on the subject of good meals, just a couple days after we returned to Provo in our new old boat we were visited by our friend Preacher.  We'd missed his birthday while we were out cruising the Bahamas in our rag-top Catalac.   Preacher came down to see the boat and brought us a sort of a boat warming celebration.  I think he was surprised that the two of us made the trip on our own.     We had a simple but very tasty local steamed conch and grits picnic style lunch on Twisted Sheets.  We didn't realize he delivered.  Even the local pizza shop won't deliver on this road.

Our local friends here handle birthdays a little differently than we were accustomed to back in the USA.  The birthday boy throws the party, and cooks for all his friends and family.  I know I've alluded to this local custom before.  We've been to several of Preacher's birthday cookouts.  And I personally will never forget ripping the seat out of my shorts at Froggy's birthday party over at Bottle Creek. It's a nice way to celebrate when you throw yourself a party.    Well, for most of us, anyhow.  I'm still a bit red-faced about that last local birthday party I attended on North Caicos.  Way too much exposure.

Dooley the Deranged has been acting tough since we brought him a new skull and crossbones pirate dog collar home from St. Augustine.  We'd been looking for a dog collar with stainless steel hardware on it - and Dooley I'm sorry if you're offended but you ARE a dog despite all the funny expressions you keep promising to show me  if I'll just supply the peanut butter- and we finally found one along the ICW in Florida.

We got to the southern terminus of our Florida/Bahamas/T.C.I. "vacation" trip over a month ago. . It was a little strange trying to sleep the first few nights in a room that doesn't move with the waves. We've stopped waking up every hour and stumbling out on deck to see if the anchor has moved. I've once again gotten accustomed to the idea that the patio at the house doesn't change compass headings with the tides. After the trip that we had, one might think we would be glad to be home. But the strange truth of the matter is that we miss being on the boat. It's sure nice to confirm that you've been right about something you've only dreamed about for years. A big Whew. Nobody gets sea sick. We're still speaking to each other. Often! We've each now confirmed that we love the seafaring nomadic gypsy adventure of living on a boat. We're grinning as we recount every moment of the trip. Imagining what a really nice cruise would be like. It's one of our main topics of conversation. What a a feeling of freedom to realize that you can take your favorite hideout and go from country to country using only the wind and sun. It's a comfortably exciting and challenging set of experiences that can go on for as long as you can maintain it.     

We've been playing "catch-up" with a lot of domestic chores, maintenance, and a torrent of of Danged D.I.Y. issues since the moment we got back. I'm talking about oodles of DIY. Adding an elderly sailboat to the collection did not simplify things in any way whatsoever. Yes, I know that chucking it all and sailing away is how the dream is written.   I know this dream like a favorite bedtime story learned by heart. The perception is that sailing is a simpler life, and in many ways that's true.   But maintaining a boat and its systems is an ongoing job that seems to be proportional to the size, age, and complexity of the boat.   Maybe we just need a simpler boat.  And we're working on that.

Some of the DIY projects going on are from necessity.  Probably the biggest example of projects that demanded our immediate attention was a leak in a forward bulkhead.  Remember the pounding I wrote about in the last post?  Well, unbeknownst to us at the time, those three days of pounding into the seas opened up an old scar that we didn't know about inside the boat.  Something the previous owner forgot to mention, I guess.   A few days after we got home I was checking all the bilge access hatches while tracking down an electrical problem.  This photo is of the bilge under the port side forward cabin.  I've peeled the carpet up and opened the access hatch.  Doesn't look too ominous in this photo, does it?

But if you look closely you might be able to tell that both of those compartments are completely full of sea water.  No kidding.   

I stuck my fingers in it and wiggled them to show you the water surface:

We think this happened about a week before we got home.  We had sailed all the way down the Exumas with several hundred extra pounds of water in the port bow.  And never noticed it.   Normally, as the boat was designed, this water would have migrated from compartment to compartment and been eventually pumped out by the main bilge pump  that is located in the deepest part of that hull.  We have four automatic bilge pumps and several manual and electric auxilliary pumps as well.   We can pump a lot of water.  But since the previous owner had decided to close up the drain holes between the compartents, water that gets into the bow no longer drains down to the lowest part of the hull where the pump is located.  Not sure if I like this better, or not.  Still thinking about it.  I see the thinking in keeping the water in a given compartment, but then I  remember that was how the Titanic was designed, too.  This boat was not originally designed this way.  I am mulling over the thought that anything that keeps sea water inside the hull by isolating it from the pumps might just be an inherently bad idea.   Right now I'd say there is a better than even chance I will decide to open up the holes between these compartments and let them drain down to where the boat will discharge it all overboard.    It also would mean that I don't have to go looking for sea water under various compartments.  I can open one small hatch in the middle and inspect the pump and float switch and see the bilge water all at once. That kinda makes the most sense, doesn't it?

The leak was not in the hull itself, but in the fender storage locker on the bow.   Water that splashes up over the bow of the boat gets into the bow lockers.  They're designed to be free draining.   But at some time in the past the plywood bulkhead that separates the forward port cabin from the deck locker had been cracked.  And looking at it now, I can see that someone had repaired it before.  They fiberglassed it.    We cracked it open again.

That crack ran all the way to the bottom of the locker.  And waves that landed on top of the bow got in there and worked their way into the hull.   It's probably a good thing I didn't know about this during the trip.  I would have obsessed over it and we would probably have been sitting somewhere for days while I fixed it.   Truth is, it wasn't a problem if water wasn't getting onto the top of the boat.  We only had one or two days that were that rough.

And it wasn't a problem like these guys had shorty after we returned.   VHF radio operator La Gringa  got involved with some more cruisers with a problem.   This monohull hit a coral head about half way between us and French Cay.  They hit the rudder hard enough to jam it all the way over and they were taking on water.   Once again,  the radio at the house  allowed us to relay information about a boat-in-trouble situation to the Marine Police. They went out to tow them back in.   Made our little leak seem mild by comparison.

We keep telling ourselves to take a weekend and go sailing somewhere, but it seems that  we keep getting involved with upgrading, cleaning, and repairing the boat.   I ordered two new alternators to repace the ones that haven't been the same since the lightning strike.   The people I ordered them from sent me the wrong ones.   This is a real pain in the patoot when you live somewhere like the TCI.  It's difficult and expensive to ship the wrong parts back.  And time consuming.  And frustrating.  I feel like an old grump when I say this, but some days I despair of finding simple competence when I have to order parts. A warranty isn't of much use to me.  I need it to be right the first time, to be the correct part and to work as promised.  Is that unreasonable?

That's the new alternator on the left, the one I want to replace on the right.   You can see that the mounting 'ears' are not spaced the same.

At first, when I emailed the supplier and told them they sent the wrong alternators I didn't get much in the way of a reply.   For several days I thought I was on my own with these things, and decided to see if I could make them work.  I took some pieces of our garage door openers that never worked, and  cut them into pieces and welded up an 'alternator adapter' bracket.   I figured that if I could get the new alternator pulley aligned with the engine pully, and firmly attached, it should work.   Here's my version of the bracket while I was welding it up:

But  after spending a day on it I was eventually contacted by the alternator people and they are sending two new ones down to us.  We still take it in the shorts on the shipping costs, but at least we'll have alternators that fit.  Oh well.  I needed the welding practice anyhow.  I found out that thicker steel is easier to weld.

Dooley the Dangerous has been spending a lot of time on the boat with us while we work on these projects.  A few days back I noticed that he was sitting out in the cockpit staring staring at something intently.  I went to take a look and saw that he was completely engrossed in watching this big bird standing on the next dock.  And the bird was watching him.  Neither of them was moving.   Like a Mexican Standoff without the pistolas.

 I don't know what Dooley was thinking.   I'm sure the bird was upwind of us so he knew what it wa more or less.  Certainly not a cat. That bird was easily twice as tall as the dog, and it didn't seem at all intimidated.   It's good that he can find things to occupy himself with, because I've had my hands literally full going from one project to the next.  I won't go into the entire list here, but will show you just a few more 'for examples'.

For example, we had noticed that our port side navigation light was very dim.   We noticed this in a driving rain squall when we were wondering if this big freighter could see us in the dark.   This was our last night at sea, in rain squalls and crossing the Caicos Passage with a failing electrical system.  I worked my way up on the bow to see if all our navigation lights were working.  They weren't.  Boy ain't that a warm feeling when big ships are bearing down on you in the dark.  Fixing the nav lights became another high priority, after fixing the leaks, and before fixing the radar.

 I have more or less started working at the bow of the boat, intending to address and rectify issues as I move toward the stern.  And I had plenty of projects on the bow alone.   I took the nav light apart and found out that the wiring had chafed all the way through. The positive lead was shorting to the steel bow railing.  Take a look at the wiring. I'd pulled some slack in it to get the damaged part out where I could work on it.

This sure solved a couple of  mysteries about what was tripping the circuit breaker sporadically as I frantically tried to figure out what was going on in the middle of a particuarly dark and stormy night, with a boat that looked like downtown Manhattan heading toward us.

While working on the wiring, I looked up the regulations and found out that the lights installed on the boat were inadequate (and illegal) for a boat this size.  The one on the left is the one that was installed.  It's for a smaller boat, and only has to be visible for a mile.   And maybe it would have been visible for a mile if the wires to it hadn't been shorted out.  I never found out, because the light on the right is the new one I just installed.  It's the right size for this boat length, and has to be visible for two miles.  Big difference in the shipping lanes at night.

While spending a lot of time working down at the marina we've met a few cruisers coming through.  Last week we met Cory and Rob on  the sloop Calypso's Fire.  They were in a bit of a bind after their centerboard cable parted, allowing the heavy board to open up a crack in the centerboard trunk.    Their pump was running continuously, and barely keeping ahead of the leak in the hull.    Being the really nice guys we sometimes try to be we loaned them the hookah setup on Twisted Sheets.   I told them I hadn't tried the system out myself yet, but that the previous owner had swore he used it often.  Cory was able to patch the crack with epoxy putty.   They radioed us their farewells  as they finally got out of Providenciales on their way to Luperon.   Dooley didn't care diddly about their boat problems.  But he was extremely interested in the two cats they have on board.

The majority of  problems that we are working though on our own boat are electrical. We've got two sets of issues.  Obsolete/substandard equipment, and stuff damaged on the trip down.  We've got a lot of original breaker switches on the boat that I can't seem to find replacements for. I've been thinking of just buying an entire new breaker panel, and mounting it over the holes in this one.   So far I haven't had much luck finding one with fifteen switches that will fit over this spot.

I think you can see why I want to replace these.   I've been looking for a source for these now for several weeks, but not having any luck.  This is one of the issues with buying an older boat.

Working in the marina does have some positives.  I find it generally peaceful, and relaxing.  I think just being on a boat does that to me.  We get to watch other interesting boats come and go.  I was looking at this photo (below) and trying to remember why I took it in the first place. 

Then I zoomed in on this part of it, and notice that it seems to be a boat with no spreaders on the mast, no boom that I can see, and apparently being sailed by a guy with a shaved head and wearing a skirt.

There must have been SOMEthing about it that was unusual enough to get my attention... but I sure can't remember what it was.

And working in the marina means we get to spend time visiting with some of the other marina residents.  Or near marina residents, as the case may be.  This is someone you've seen on this blog several times before.  He's usually standing on his boat Five Cays, and verbally abusing us as we leave the marina to go sailing, or fishing, or beach combing.  Lately he's been stopping by to shoot the breeze with us at the end of the day.

And some interesting conversations, indeed.   We know this gentleman as Stanley here at South Side Marina.  And on North Caicos he's known as Burly.  He tells us that in the Bahamas he's known as Mike.  Unless he's using his middle name, Louise.     He's got a wife and daughter on North Caicos, two sons on Providenciales, and is either 75 or 58.  I have  a witness to verify that I did not fabricate any of this.   I mean I have a witness in addition to Dooley who you really can't put on the stand. He just keeps pleading the fifth amendment and saying he doesn't remember.

And while we're spending time on board repairing, cleaning, and re-arranging, we've also been been lightening the boat as much as we can.  This load of chemicals, etc. that we took out of one of the lockers is probably a fourth of the total pile of these rusting cans and half empty jugs of various concoctions.   Many of them are printed in Spanish.   Since we're pretty sure the boat spent the past four years in Jacksonville, I think it's okay to assume some expiration dates have been met.    Paint cans should slosh when you shake them, right? 

We've removed the old mounting for the now-deceased wind power generator.  The stern and transom area is starting to look a lot less cluttered.  We've also given away those fishing rods since this photo was taken.

I wish I'd thought to take more photos of the water line on the boat when we left Jacksonville.  I well remember watching the exhausts for the two diesels bubbling away as they discharged cooling water.  This exhaust pipe was about half submerged before our new Twisted Sheets weight reduction program got some momentum.  It was near the top of the black paint.    I wish it was that easy to lighten up the captain.

For those of you who are not sailors, I should mention that most sailboats, and catamarans in particular, sail and handle better when they are kept as light as possible.   This boat has a lot of storage capacity built into it, and it's easy to load it up with unnecessary weight.  I think it suffered from a lot of 'out of sight-out of mind' syndrome.  We're working on trimming it back down to its original draft of 3 ft.  Instead of the 3.5 ft. that we sailed it home with.   And touched sand with.

I previously posted that when we hauled our anchor up for the last time at Abraham's Bay on Mayaguana..... the anchor windlass broke.   Well, this became another DIY I had to take on.  I completely removed the windlass, took it home to my shop and repaired it.  While I had it off the boat I noticed that the four big stainless steel bolts that held it to the deck looked suspiciously ratty.

Imagine how happy I was when I took the top bolt (above) and held it in a vise, and then pulled it apart with my bare hands!! I wish that I could tell you that I broke the bolt because I didn't know my own strength.

But the truth is that all of these bolts exhibited severe corrosion issues.  This crevice was right where the stainless bolt and the aluminum body of the windlass came together at deck level.  I have since replaced all these bolts, and cut a piece of half inch starboard to raise the windlass off the deck enough to keep it out of standing water.  I also made some isolating insulators to keep the stainless steel from contacting the aluminum windlass case.   File this under things I learned in the tropics.

Oh, and I cut a new bottom plate for it from aluminum sheet I had lying around the garage.

I don't know what would have happened if we had to rely on our anchor and windlass to keep us safe in a storm.  Would three bolts have held us?  Two bolts?   Glad we didn't have to find out.

I also remember telling you that we'd managed to get the dinghy outboard running on one cylinder up in a marina on Grand Bahama Island.  We were pretty disappointed that it was unreliable.  We had planned to spend a few days anchored in idyllic tropical settings, and use our inflatable dinghy to explore.   When we realized that we couldn't count on the outboard we postponed those plans, too.

So after the cracked bulkhead, bad navigation lights, broken winch bolts, wrong alternators, I eventually turned to tuning up the dinghy motor. I took the Mercury home and after cleaning up the carb and fuel filter and putting two of the correcly gapped and right model sparkplugs in it, I got it running pretty well.   Reading that back to myself, I'm amazed at how easy it sounds.... now.  Ten minutes, tops, I would think.  If I didn't know better.  First,  I had to make up some way to run it at the house so I made a frame out of wood and clamped it to the Land Rover tail gate.   I think it looks kinda sporty, myself.

All the DIY stuff I've listed here so far has been boat oriented.   And for each little project I've mentioned there are several more that I haven't even told you about.  We're still waiting for parts for several of them.  There are a lot of projects still waiting.  I still haven't climbed the mast, for instance.   There's probably enough for a blog post in that all by itself.

And even that isn't all of it by any means.  Remember that we left the house and automobiles here basically without much ongoing attention for two months.  I guess I could call it benign neglect.   Not long ago I was looking at some photos of early Antarctic explorers base camps.  The coffee cans and tools and canned goods and utensils that they walked away from decades ago are still in pristine condition. Preserved by the cold dry Anarctic climate.   Well, this is the complete other end of that scale.  Things here rust and fall apart seemingly overnight.  So when we returned with the boat after two months we were hit with a lot of things falling apart at the house, too.  Want some examples?  hah. That's  EASY.   And I don't even have to go into the ugliness of the termite damage.

For example, it was pointed out to me that the outside rattan patio table that we've been using for the last four years was exhibiting signs of being close to its unofficial expiration date.  It had a glass top, until recently.  I removed the glass to keep it from falling onto the patio and shattering.  I put a piece of plywood across the top, but was so ashamed of it that I removed it before this photo.    I had to agree with her, this thing had pretty much had it.

I stared at it for a couple weeks, and no matter what ideas I had about fixing it, I just finally had to admit that rattan work is probably beyond my capabilities at the present.  I couldn't fix rotten.  So I took some of that wood we salvaged from the beach at West Caicos and used it to complete  a couple more table projects that I had been working on to replace it.

This is wood with a history.  It all came from boats, and floated for some unknown amount of time before being washed up on a beach.   Where it lay for another unknown amount of time.    I think it's seasoned.

I'm trying something different as far as finishing the wood.   The legs on that one above are what I am calling 'aggressively rustic'.  Meaning I didn't want to put a lot of time into finishing something that I expect to turn gray and weathered shortly.  The grating is teak, and the rest of it is mahogany.  It should last.

And since I still had some wood to use up, and we could use another outside table, I made this one, too.

It's also salvaged wood. The black holes are where iron spikes originally held the mahogany planks together. I don't mind working with wood. I hate working with grease.

A few days ago the battery went dead on one of the Land Rovers. I wanted to check the alternator to make sure the belt was in good shape and all the wires were connected. I pulled the 'bonnet' release, and it nothing happened.   You know when you 'pop the hood' on a car it comes loose and literally pops up enough to get your hands under it so that you can trigger the safety latch?   Well, when I pulled this bonnet release, none of that happened.  So of course I pulled it harder.  Hard enough that the cable popped off of it.  I removed it to see if there was anything I could do to fix it.  You can see where one of the mounting lugs that normally hold the cable end had broken away.  I knew it was going to be a waste of time to try to glue it.

BUT I had a thought.   Remember the stainless steel tank we salvaged from the catamaran wrecked on West Caicos?  I've now cut the ends our of that  and have been chipping away at it when I need flat stainless steel.  I used the cutting wheel on a Dremel tool to cut out some small strips.

Those big circular holes are from where I cut four large flat washers out to go under the mounting bolts for the anchor windlass.  I'm getting a lot of use out of this tank.

The first little bracket I made broke after I bent it too many times and fatigued the metal, but my second attempt worked:

So, I installed this back in the Land Rover, so that I could pop open the bonnet, so that I could check the alternator belt.  This took the better part of a morning, by the way. And I found out two things.  The alternator belt was fine and the problem must have been a battery connector.  And the reason the bonnet didn't pop up when I pulled the release was because the part of the latch that is attached to the bonnet/hood itself was rusted up.   This is the part where the spring that 'pops the hood' is located.  So I had to free that up, clean the rust off, lubricate and re-install it.    And this is how so many of these projects go.   Starting with a dead battery, I ended up working all day on a bonnet release.   The battery issue got fixed in passing.  The original problem was the simple part.  Getting to it, well, that took some work.

I'll throw out another corrosion related DIY.  We've been having ongoing issues with light fixtures rusting up on us.  I became so frustrated with dealing with the rust stains on the floor that I even built my own version of a rust-proof floor lamp.

This time, the problem was that our two bedside reading lamps were rusting up.  To the point where we needed to do something.  By 'we', of course I meant 'me'.    We like these lamps.  They're solid and work well.  They've been sitting on the two tables bracketing our bed since they day they came home from the store.  So this is what happens inside the house.  Protected from the harsh environment that we have to deal with outside the house:

I managed to get the old paint and rust off. I used Ospho (phosphoric acid) on the steel, and repainted the lamps.  I used an enamel, and gooped it on as thick as I could.   Totally changed the look of the lamps:

I didn't bother taking a photo of the other one.  I painted it the same, but different.  If that makes any sense.   The blue and red are swapped on the other one.

Oh, I did find one little DIY project simple enough.  I'll pass it on here in case any of you have a similar situation and find it useful.   I have one of those big Casio Pathfinder wrist watches.  I love big wrist watches.  I think it's part of the reason I took up diving.  My Pathfinder has a compass, altimeter/barometer, motion sensor, thermometer, solar power, radio synched atomic clock... shows me the moon phase and the tides... I really like this thing.    And about two weeks ago the little keeper thing (I don't know the term for it) broke.  This is the little loop that holds the loose section of watchband so that it doesn't flop around.  And when it flops around, it keeps me awake at night.  It also gets in the way during the daytime.   So I figured it was time to buy a new watchband.   These Casios don't use ordinary watchbands.  I went online and found out that the watchband would cost me about $ 45. Plus $ 50 Fed Ex feess and plus 46%  customs duty, for an approximate total of $116.  Ouch.

This didn't set too well with me.  I didn't need the whole band.  I only needed the little plastic loop to keep it nice and secure. I tried an 0-ring.  It lasted about an hour.  I thought about duct tape, but the logistics and mess of that was unappealing.  Finally I remembered that I have all these scrap pieces of polyurethane irrigation system tubing laying around.  (Doesn't everybody?) This stuff is tough.  And it's black.  And in cross-section, it's just the right shape for a watchband keeper:

So if you find yourselves in a similar situation, and need a good, rugged, cheap keeper for your Casion watchband, this will work.   In a pinch:

This has turned into another one of those long blog posts.  And it's not even one of the interesting ones.  Sorry about that.  But I did want to explain why we haven't posted anything recently.  We've just been real busy getting our house back in order while also trying to make some progress with the boat.   And while I see most of the house DIY stuff as a real pain, I find I actually do enjoy working on the boat.

 There are so many plans in store for the boat I don't even have them all listed yet.   In addition to fixing things that need repairs we have a lot of modifications in mind.   We want to replace this hard bimini with a better design, and it needs to accommodate most of these solar panels and it would be nice if it incorporated a dinghy/radar arch, too. That will be a big project.   I'm sure you'll hear about it if you're still reading the blog at that point.

We want to get the bow railing fixed, and I have to install an ice maker in the space where I just ripped out a refrigerator. And of course, there's always that stuff up on the top of the mast that was hit by a lightning bolt: the vhf antenna, the radar, and the wind speed and direction.  And the steaming and deck lights.  So much for the simplicity of sail.

We've been watching the weather here, and looking for the right set of conditions to take the boat out sailing again.   We figure if we keep fairly close to Provo we can get some time under sail without every little thing being repaired before we go.  Heck, if ya wait until everything is perfect, you never leave the dock.    I think we've proven we can get by on less than perfect.

But we do miss the sailing.

And I have to admit that even though I whined about it at the time, there are worse places to spend an evening than in a nice, calm, protected marina. Was this really only a few weeks ago?

Right now the forecast for next weekend is looking pretty favorable....

Now THAT was a Shakedown Cruise

We've  finally made it to the last installment of our " big boat-delivery" story.   This has been quite an odyssey for us.    And we never intended for this  to turn into another 'sailing blog'.  There are plenty of those around, including a few pretty good ones .    After this post, maybe we can get back to the "island lifestyle" blog that this one is really supposed to be.   We're hoping that having this boat will improve our blog content.     For example, we can now travel to more remote areas of the Turks and Caicos and spend the time it takes to properly explore places we couldn't visit in a one day trip.  We can branch out to visit  other countries.  Once we get the boat fixed up the way we want it, the sky's the limit.  And speaking of skies... we also now have a pretty good platform for some unobstructed sunrises.

I surely do wish that I could come up with a way to show y'all  the tropical night sky at sea when the only illumination in sight is starlight. It's pretty amazing. An incredibly complex array of totally uncountable stars stretching from horizon to horizon. It's that same strange feeling one gets looking at the unpolluted sky in any extreme wilderness.   Humbling and awe inspiring, actually.  Standing there with my mouth hanging open feeling about the size of a speck on an ant's  toenail.   If you turn all the lights on the boat off, and just wait a moment for your eyes to adjust, well it's hard to describe the effect of just this small portion of the cosmos.  And then imagine multiplying that by two for the half of the sky that we cannot see. It's a big universe when bobbing around in the ocean at night on a little boat.  And all boats get pretty small at some point.  But to get those photos from a moving platform is not going to be a simple thing.  Maybe a video would work.  We can look into that.  Always trying to improve, and besides that it might be justification for a new camera.  You know me... always up for an excuse for a new gadget.  I can claim I have an obligation to our advertisers.  (You guys ARE clicking on the ads, aren't you?)

Our last blog episode  ended as we left  New Providence and our mixed Nassau experiences far behind us.  We were sailing for the Exuma Cays.    I've marked out our whole trip on this Google Earth image.  The lightning strike thing happened behind Chub Cay.  You can see that we were almost half way home when the boat got damaged.   And with Murphy aboard, of course most of the places where we could have gotten help and support in fixing the damage were already behind us.   We were not about to turn around and head back to the USA.  We were headed for the Far Bahamas, and beyond.  They're also referred to as the Out Islands.   And while there are definite changes after leaving the USA and arriving in the Bahamas there is another, even bigger change once you leave Nassau.   South of Long Island you start to realize how much you are now on your own.  No more nice safe marinas.  No more shopping centers.  The infrastructure gets real thin, real fast.   If you get into trouble out here, you're pretty much on your own.   As my grandfather used to tell me, 'if you get your tail caught in a crack here, there's nobody else but you can get it out".  In today's world, how often are most of us really ever very far from help?  We tend to think in terms of cell phones and response times.  The ocean changes all of that.  There is no cell phone call.  There is no response time outside of your own.    Is this what taking responsibility for your own life and safety feels like?

I probably should have put that Google Earth image up earlier to make it easier to visualize where all these places are located.  It's easy to write "We got hit by lightning just north of Chub Cay" , for example, and of course WE know exactly where that spot on the earth is located.  In fact I doubt either of us will ever forget it.  And things definitely changed for us at that place in space and time.  We tried to buy a replacement GPS in Nassau on New Providence Island (next to the "Albany" pin on the chart) but couldn't find one.  I did manage to buy an outrageously priced VHF radio and a clamp-on antenna in Nassau, though.  So at least we had VHF communications again.   That comes in real handy sometimes even though VHF range is very limited on the open sea.  We do have a single side-band radio on the boat, too, but so far it hasn't been worth much from a practical standpoint.   I know a lot of the frustration there is operator error, and I've been through the operation manual several times.  We had hoped to be able to use it for weather forecasts,  but so far it's been useless to us.  We've yet to even overhear a conversation on it, much less a coherent forecast.   Weather information would be a good thing to have when in a sailboat in the Bahamas in hurricane season.  We planned the trip to stop in 'hurricane holes' as much as was reasonable but those dry up once you leave the Exumas.

From Nassau, we headed roughly east across to our next planned stop for the night at Highborne Cay.    If you look at that image again, the Exumas are the long skinny chain of beautiful little Bahamian islands that stretch for over a hundred miles SSE of Highborne.   I looked them up on the internet to see how many islands there are, and read that there are 365 islands in the Exumas.  Wow.  A island for every single day of the year.   Most of them are uninhabited.  The Google Earth image I posted really doesn't convey this very well.  The scale is too broad.  If you can, you should load up GE yourself and take a closer look and zoom in on  a few of these places.   I could do it here, but would end up with a coffee table book instead of a blog post.   There are just so many beautiful places to sail in the Bahamas.   We were sad that we were on a schedule.  We could happily spend months in the Exumas alone.  In fact, we plan to.

It was pretty smooth for the first part of that Nassau-Highborne leg.  La Gringa went forward to secure the lines and fenders before things started bouncing around.  And bounce around, they did.  There's our new, temporary VHF antenna clamped to the cabin top rail.   I haven't yet assembled what it takes for me to climb the mast to the very top and fix it right, and I'm not talking about hardware.  Funny how temporary fixes can tend to become permanent solutions.

And I know that by now even our regular non-boating blog readers will know that the cloud bank up ahead signals the location of an island.   Highborne is only about 35 miles ESE from Nassau.  That doesn't sound like far, does it.   Try thinking of it in sailing terms, though.  Six hours at this speed.  It's like moving a small three bedroom condo on a bicycle.

The wind picked up and it turned into a much rougher crossing than we had planned , but I think I've already whined enough about that. We can show you a little bit of it. This is what the shallow water on the White Bank looks like when you get the wind from the NE at 18-20 knots. You can see from the water color how shallow it is, and the 4  second wave period is kind of punishing when that chop is coming at you nearly head on.    This wasn't our idea of a fun ride after the first few hours:

Did you see those two coming at ya?  It wasn't interesting after the first few.  And the fun factor fell off real quick, too.  I kept reminding myself that I've often heard that 'the boat can take a lot more than you can'.  This, at least, was good to believe.

We got beat up a bit, but were still able to make pretty good time by sailboat standards and arrived at Highborne in mid afternoon.  We were really glad to sail into the lee of the islands and out of that chop.   That was the good news.    The bad news was that when La Gringa radioed the marina  to arrange a slip for the night, they told us they were full up.  No room at the inn.   We motored on up close enough  to see for ourselves.   Yep, looks just like a small marina chock full of boats.   Dang.   No comfy dock plugged into electrical power within walking distance of a restaurant for us.

That photo  has one of the BTC (Bahamas Telecom, or BaTelCo)  towers in it, over on the left hand side.  These are spread throughout the islands presumably within line-of-sight of each other for the country's microwave communication net.  We were glad to see these, as they sometimes have some basic sort of wi-fi setup.    We were told that they all did, but we found that not to be the case from a practical standpoint.  Maybe it was just bad timing or coincidence, but we were lucky to be able to even get cell phone connection, even when within sight of a   tower.  They have a lot of system problems.  Still, when it worked, it did work.   At least in this part of the Bahamas.

Okay, so we couldn't get into the marina.  We saw this as an opportunity we'd been looking forward to.  Our first official anchorage.   Oh, we'd put the anchor down and raised it back up a few times. Twisted Sheets has this manually operated windlass on it.  It's not like just pushing a button and watching a motor haul your anchor up for you.. It's a rattly, noisy thing to let chain fall from it, and someone has to work a lever back and forth to winch the anchor back up.  Fun and an upper body workout at the same time.  So we'd practiced before leaving Melbourne.   Now, we got to do it for real.

And it was easy.  There were already several other boats anchored outside the Cay, and the charts said that it was a good spot with good "holding".   For you non-sailors, that means that the bottom is a good one to stick an anchor into.  This whole anchoring thing is a science in itself.  Most experienced sailors carry different anchors for various bottom conditions. Hard bottoms, grass, sand, rock, they all have different characteristics.   Twisted Sheets has four different anchors on board, for example.

We dropped the most used one.  Which also happened to be the one already rigged up, and it also happens to be one of the best all-around anchors for these conditions.   And finally, after weeks of waiting, we were anchored in the calm tropical waters next to a small island in the Bahamas.   We immediately broke out the snorkeling gear and jumped overboard.  

As is my usual  habit, I swam over to take a look at the anchor  before getting too far from the boat.  Water visibility was wonderful, and it was warm and comfortable.

The drag mark is because I put both engines in reverse and pulled the heck out of it to make sure it was getting a good bite into the bottom.  It dug itself in pretty well.

This was the first time I'd used the Olympus camera in two months. I confess that I forgot that the setting that is good for underwater ( above) is not so good for distance shots in the air ( below).  But you can get the idea.  That's the first time we ever swam away from Twisted Sheets and left her alone on the hook.   That bump in the middle of the photo is the nearest rock to worry about, by the way.

I would have taken more photos, but the bottom here was pretty bland.  Sand and sparse grass.  With this being a designated anchorage on the charts, I would imagine every single square meter of this bottom has been looked at by snorkelers a few times.   What makes it good holding ground for anchors also makes it pretty nondescript for underwater scenery.    I did spot a suspiciously clean looking conch shell, moving along the bottom in a decidedly un-conchlike manner.   Conch move in little jerky movements when they get their single claw dug in.  They move like a one man game of leapfrog.  And they leave a trail where they drug the shell through the sand.   This one was floating daintily over the bottom, tip toeing,  with no jerky movments, and no drag mark behind it.  I went over to take a look, and found out that this is actually the mobile home of one of the biggest hermit crabs I've ever seen. You can just see his claws disappearing as he freaked at my shadow and slammed the hatches.

I noticed that the full grown conch shell he had appropriated for his home did not have a hole knocked in it.  I guess that means this is not one that was taken by fishermen, but died a natural death.   Of course, the term "natural death" has a wide definition in the ocean.   A  shark's definition of what constitutes a perfectly natural death might not be the same as yours or mine.

While we were flippering around I took a look at the rudders, props, and keels of Twisted Sheets.  We hadn't run over anything on the way down, but had been sitting on the soft, flat bottom south of the Berrys. I wasn't expecting to find any scuff marks, and didn't.  I realize that this looks pretty shallow in the photo, but we were anchored in 7-9 feet of very clear water. Plenty of room for a boat that only draws a little more than 3.   The anchor and conch shell photos look clearer because I dove down near the bottom for them.

We had a nice calm night on the hook, and were ready to get started for the rest of the trip home in the morning.

We decided to go through the cut between islands and make our way down the eastern, or windward side of the Exumas. This turned out to be another of my mistakes, in retrospect. (If one learns from one's mistakes, I must be near my PhD by now)  We had 18-20 knot winds on the port bow, and it made for an uncomfortable ride with a lot of slamming.   We should have taken the inside route, in the lee of the islands.   And we considered it, but that route involves a lot of GPS waypoints, shallow water, rocks, and coral heads.  We had a fairly bad recent experience sailing down the lee side of Bahamian islands, and thought the open, deep water was  safer.  It was better wind for sailing, but rough on us and on the boat.   We found out later that we opened up a previously repaired crack in a forward bulkhead.

After a nice long day beating into the wind we were really glad to get to Compass Cay.  La Gringa radioed the marina, and we were told they had room for us.   We held position in the wind and currents for over an hour while they kept delaying us, telling us they were busy tying up other boats.  When we finally got the go ahead to come in and tie up, we discovered that they expected us to snug up behind a big sport power boat, with about 12-15 ft. of dock available to tie to.  This would have left over half of our boat sticking out into the channel.   We told them to forget it, and decided to go anchor again for the night.   Basically, we have nothing good to say about the Compass Cay marina staff, so I will shut up about that.   Besides, anchoring didn't worry us.  We'd just had a very pleasant night up at Highborne.   This is the marina at Compass Cay.    We don't intend to ever see it again.

It was getting late in the day by the time we anchored, and we picked a spot behind a small island nearby called Pipe Cay.  We had some difficulties this time around.   The cranking lever got stuck in the windlass and I had to disassemble the whole thing to fix it.  What a pain.  But we did get it apart, fixed, and back together okay, and had another decent night.    The next morning we decided to again take the outside route down to our next stop.   The forecast was for the same winds as before, but we had a shorter day planned, so we were not too worried about a few hours of rough seas.

Getting out of Compass Cay was one of the most tense times in the whole trip. We had to get through a narrow cut, going into 6-8 foot waves caused by the shoaling.  We were barely making 3 knots when the port engine suddenly quit.  Now we were trying to get out to deeper water while getting slammed by the waves, and the wind and thrust of the starboard engine were causing us to drift toward the rocks off to our left.  Watching our speed, I was seeing numbers like 0.3 knots as the waves would stand us up and the wind got under the boat.   If the starboard engine had stopped at that point we would have been in fairly serious trouble.  We would have had to get the jib out really quick and hope we had enough room to either fall off to the south, or turn around and sail back in through the cut.

It's never going to come close to conveying what this was like on that morning.  It all seems so simple now.  But the blue line here is pretty close to the path we took from our anchorage out Joe Cay cut:

Please notice that the suggested path goes blank through an area labeled "Intricate Ledges". Notice "Strong Current".  And then, of course,  the narrow spot between the hard rock shoreline and "Breaks".    I wish I had some photos to show you how close we came to those rocks, but I was busy steering with one hand and eating the fingernails off the other, so didn't think to actually go looking for the camera.  It got real busy out that morning.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The starboard engine never missed a lick, though, and as we got into deeper water I saw the speed pick up to a couple of knots.   When we could turn south, we had enough room to put up the sails,  just north of where it says "Scattered Coral Heads..." ( sheesh!) and from then on things were okay.    I needed a reason to buy myself some new underwear, anyhow.

See?  We even had a rainbow to look at.

It seems to hold true that the water never looks as rough in a still photo.  Especially looking downwind, where you can only barely see the backs of the breaking waves.

But it was rough, and this was our third day in a row of pounding into the seas.  As we got clear of the cut, to the point where I engaged the auto pilot and prepared to finish my breakfast of fingertips and cold coffee,  I started having trouble with the steering. The auto pilot couldn't seem to hold the course. I turned it off and steered by hand again, but even I had a hard time with the boat constantly trying to turn to the left.

La Gringa finally figured out the problem.   The pounding had broken the weld on one of the wind generators support masts, and the entire thing was trailing in the water behind us.   She was able to get a line on it, and secure it to the boat.   Then she took the wheel while I managed to get it up out of the water.   The drag of the wind generator in the water behind us had been what was causing us to keep turning to the left.   This is what it looked like after we managed to get it tied to the boat again:

It wasn't until later that we realized that this could have been part of the problem getting out of Joe Cay Cut. 

Ah, nice blue tropical water sailing. Nothing like it.

After a day of this we were really, really glad to be able to turn downwind and into the Cave Cay cut.  This little private island and marina is like an ocean oasis.  Beautiful floating docks, and we were the only transient boat there.   We had the whole place to ourselves.

This is what Cave Cay Cut looks like from the ocean side.  We only have to sail between the rocks.  But then, there's nothing new about that.  We would expect nothing less after the morning we had.  Sailing between the rocks is one of the basic requirements of successful  small boat handling, I think.

And this is the entrance to Cave Cay marina.  It's a cut through the rock, into a beautifully protected little harbor.  The docks are a hard turn to the left after you get through this opening.

When we were tied up, and relaxing, La Gringa showed me one of the tomatos that had been hanging in one of the little net hammocks we use to store fruit and veggies.  The same pounding that broke the wind generator loose had also forced the tomato through the netting.  We ate it anyhow.

(Note to self:   We need finer netting if we're going to keep doing this.  Or tougher tomatos.)

We wanted to stay at Cave Cay, but the weather was holding, more or less, and we still had a long way to go. We were having a lot of electrical power issues, and I strongly suspected one of our alternators was broken.  The nearest place to even have a chance of buying parts was at our next planned stop in George Town, on Great Exuma.   We needed to keep moving.  

The wind had moderated a little the next morning.   It dropped to about 10-12 knots, which was good.  It came around from the South, which was bad.   No sailing today, we had to make the trip on the engines alone.  We were still having issues with the port side diesel.  I knew it was getting air into the fuel line from somewhere, but I spent a lot of time going over every section of hose and had not been able to find it.  The engine would run for an hour or two, and then stop on us.  I could go below and purge the air out of the injectors, and it would do the same thing all over again.  I ended up replacing every single piece of fuel line on the boat.  This took about thirty seconds to type.  It took me days to do, working in the evenings after everything else was fixed.

But I get ahead of myself.  This is the trip back out of Cave Cay the next morning, with an almost benign ocean awaiting us:

The Cave Cay cut is really the last easy cut through the Exuma chain going south.  There are a few more, but they get pretty tricky on the shallow side of the islands.  This one is pretty typical.  It's not a problem to navigate through it in calm weather.  There are rocks on the left...

And rocks on the right:

Before moving on, I wanted to show you a Google Earth image of the marina at Cave Cay.  Isn't that a sweet little place to duck in out of the weather?

The red lines are our aproximate path into and back out of the marina here.  I did this for the entire trip, just to get an idea of how far we actually traveled on this voyage.  It worked out to be about 1,010 miles from beginning to end.  It actually was probaby a little more, but  I didn't add in the sailing we did with Rick, Brad, and John up in Melbourne.

The trip from Cave Cay to Great Exuma was a lot easier, although we still got pounded by waves on the bow from time to time.  We passed more of the cuts through to the other side of the chain.  Some of them were pretty attractive.  I was imagining how one could get into trouble trying to navigate these islands without a good chart.

And the constant pounding continued.    We learned to cope with it. Little things, like using cable ties to hold your lunch plate down so you can eat.   I think the vibration is apparent in the image:

The winds had diminished, but we got hit by a line of squalls just about ten miles from our destination.  Ho hum.  What else is new.  It would have been nice to have a working radar, though.

Finally, just north of Great Exuma, we passed  Lee Stocking Island, and these rocks, called the Three Sisters.   The squall was almost past us by this point.

And Lee Stocking Island is another one of those places that brings back memories to me from an earlier life.  Back in the late 80's (I think) I was at the Caribbean Marine Research Institute on that island.    I was there to track the submarine that they were using for a television special.  It was totally different from my typical assignment.  Very laid back. If you ever come across the National Geographic special called "Sylvia Earle, Portrait of an Aquanaut", I was there.  And am in some of the scenes, come to think of it.  And I was flying right seat in the Beech Super King Air that buzzed the boat "Undersea Hunter" at the end of the program.  Of course all that was back when I was young, knew everything, and was ten feet tall and bulletproof.  All of that has long been changed.

We finally made it to the Emerald Bay marina on Great Exuma.  We were determined to try to fix our alternator issues, and if we had to stay a few days to do it, well, we were prepared for that too.  After tying up the boat, once again I was down in the engine rooms with a flashlight between my teeth.   This time, I took the camera.

We were hoping for a couple of nice days to get rested up and get things repaired on the boat.  There is an auto parts store in George Town, and we rented a car for the day.  The people at the store were very helpful, but they did not have the parts we needed in stock.  I guess I really didn't expect them to, but you know how that goes.  Hope springs eternal.   Either that, or it rolls downhill.  I forget my metaphors.

The weather kept us on edge the entire time we were there.  We think we have contracted the same neurological disorder that Dooley the Distant exhibits concerning electrical storms.  Now, every time we see a flash of  lightning, both La Gringa and I cringe and start shaking. If we start the drooling part, someone please send professional help.  In fact, don't wait for the drooling, we're close enough.

This is what the skies looked like over Great Exuma for most of our stay there.

The upside of this sojourn was that the staff at Emerald Bay were some of the nicest, most helpful people we met on the entire trip.  I wish I had taken a photo of Shane MacKenzie, who gave us a lift to the local restaurant every evening in a golf cart. In the torrential rain, thunder and constant lightning.  With a name like that, one might expect him to be a red headed white guy in a kilt.   One would be as wrong as one could be.

We did manage to pick up some provisions in George Town, and got ripped off for $ 40 by the propane dealer who didn't fill the tank we left with him, but charged us for it any way.  Oh well.  We were lucky to get the tank back at all.  Once again, the good folks at the marina made some calls and lo and behold, it showed up. La Gringa even tipped the guy.   @%#*&%#!!

We had to press on, and our next stop was a run across to the north end of Long Island.  It was another short day, and the weather was calm again.   We did have to enter Calabash Bay in another squall, but we were getting used to that sort of thing by now.

We worked our way up to the north end of the bay, and found a perfect place to anchor the boat.   The clouds cleared up, and we were treated to a glorious sunset while we grilled Bubba Burgers on the boat.

It was a wonderful anchorage, and we got the best night's sleep that we'd had in weeks.  I still think back fondly about that anchorage.  That was the last nights sleep we got on the rest of the trip, in fact.

There was a functioning BTC tower within range, and we were not only able to get a weather update, we actually got internet access for a while.   It's amazing the things you take for granted, until they become a rarit.  La Gringa called the Flying Fish Marina down in Clarence Town to see if we could reserve a slip for the next night, but just our luck, they were full up.    We had some decisions to make.  Either hang around Calabash Bay for another day and night.....which was an attractive option to be honest... or make a trip across to Crooked and Acklins Islands. This would mean a full day and then a full overnight trip, across open water.   I guess you know which we chose.   We were looking for home.  We decided to go for it.

Getting around the north end of Long Island is a bit of a challenge, as the reefs are way out away from the shoreline.  Off in the distance is Cape Santa Maria.  I know it's tough to see, but there on the bluff there is a monument to Christopher Columbus.  This is as close as we got to it.  If you looked at the charts you'd understand why.  The reef extends way out at this point.

The trip across was great.  We had clear skies, big slow rolling seas, and a wind on the beam.  We were doing 7 knots with the sails up, and had the best long day of sailing yet.  Life was good.

We were out of sight of land for a big part of it, but could tell by the distant squalls where the other outer islands were located.

La Gringa even had plenty of time to rig up a fishing lure to pull behind the boat.  It was really nice to have a smooth sunny day of nice sailing, for a change. 

I strung up a hammock to try out for napping later, since we planned to be awake all night.

And I would like to tell you how well that worked out.  But the truth of the matter is that it didn't work out well at all.  The motion of the boat set the hammock swinging too much to be safe, or comfortable.   We took it back down, and will just have to try it again when the boat is anchored in calm water one of these days.   Somebody please tell me that there are calm days ahead.

I don't have photos of that night, or the next day, or the next night. We had planned to be at a small stopping place called Atwood Harbor, on the tip of Acklins Island at dawn the next morning. My plan was to anchor the boat, and for us to get a few hours sleep, and then make our way over to the next stop at Mayaguana during the daylight hours.  It didn't happen that way. 

What happened was that we made great time, sailing along at over 7 knots.  We made much better time than we had planned for, that we passed Atwood Harbor (our planned rest stop) at 03:00 in the morning instead of at dawn as we had anticipated.  There was no way I was going to try to take the boat into this little harbor in the dark for the first time. It's a small place, and there are no facilities there. What could we do? Well, we decided to keep going. It was really the only choice.

We sailed past the Plana Cays shortly after dawn, and then turned down , crossed the Mayaguana Passage, and worked our way through some more horrible squalls into Abraham's Bay on Mayaguana in the mid afternoon.    We anchored the boat within spitting distance (almost) of another BTC tower at the little settlement there.  Batelco was down, with no cell phone signals.  Color us surprised.   We didn't want to take off for the final push down to the Turks and Caicos without a weather update.  We do have a single sideband radio on board Twisted Sheets, but I had given up trying to get anything useful out of it.  We needed just a few minutes of internet access.  

La Gringa managed to get about two hours of serious nap in while I made one more try at locating the source of the air leak in our port engine fuel supply.   And, believe it or not, sitting here after 36 hours of sailing with no sleep, I finally found it.  It was a small, hidden hose clamp that I could only tighten by feel.  I won't go into too many details, but the clamp was too far down the hose and wasn't squeezing it onto the barb.  Simple thing.  So many problems.  But after finding this, we had no more engine problems due to fuel issues. The sound you might imagine hearing here is me knocking on wood.

La Gringa woke up from her nap in the late afternoon and tried BTC one more time, and hallelujah, she got through. They were back in operation, and we had internet!  That's the good news.   The bad news was that the weather forecast was the same for the next three days, 20 knots  from the South East, or in other words, almost right in our faces.   We were pretty glum.  We really did not want to sit at anchor at Abraham's Bay for three or four days.   And there was no guarantee that the weather pattern would be any better in four days.  

We fired up the gas grill and were cooking dinner, when we suddenly looked at each other and said... let's just go for it.  We can do this.  Another overnight, and we'll be home.

By the time we got the boat ready to go it was dark.  The anchor windlass broke when we were pulling the anchor up.  La Gringa did an outstanding job driving the boat five miles out of Abraham's Bay in the dark.  She's pretty amazing sometimes.  Well, usually, come to think of it.

We set a course for Sandborne Channel, the western entrance to the Caicos Bank.  We got pounded by the oncoming seas again all night long.  I was approaching exhaustion, and needed some sleep.  La Gringa took the watch while I tried, but between rain squalls, pounding waves, and electrical problems, sleep was impossible.  We determined that our batteries didn't have enough juice to run everything we wanted to run, so we were down to just our low power LED mast lights, GPS, and autopilot.   We watched the battery voltage dropping from 14, to 13, to 12, to 11, to 10 volts....  I fired up our little Honda generator, and used that to power the battery charger.  But the generator kept stopping.  And still, the voltage kept dropping, although the rate of decline slowed.   We started seeing big ships crossing our path, as we were crossing shipping lanes in the Caicos Passage, and it was very, very nervous out.  One time I tried to call one of the larger ships on the radio to be sure they saw us, but the radio would not transmit.  It said "Low Power".   So I went out into the rain and used our handheld spotlight to shine at the ship, and to illuminate the side of our boat.   We'll never know if they saw us and altered course, or if they just blindly kept going and were unaware of us.  In either case, they passed behind us.  It was a real, real long night.

Shortly after dawn on the third day of sailing, West Caicos passed to our right.  This was an extremely welcome sight.   A familiar place, after two months of nothing but strange.

As the sun came up,   we saw the battery voltage drop to 9.8 volts.   The auto pilot was making funny noises before dawn.  The radio didn't work at all.   Isn't it amazing how long it takes for dawn to come when you're praying for it?   The generator ran out of fuel around 08:00. But by this time, we could have navigated our way home blindfolded.

West Harbour/Osprey Rock looked like home, too.

You can probably tell that we were still getting clobbered by the wind and waves in our face.  We were doing 3.5 knots at this point, and yet we still managed to pass a small monohull motoring in the same direction.

I finally realized where Turtle Rock got it's name....from this direction it actually looks like a turtle, sort of.  If you squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right..

We pulled into South Side Marina at midday.  Bob was there to grab our lines and help us tie up.  As an added bonus, the crew of the schooner Star of the Sea was in and we got to visit with some old friends for a few hours.   After hearing some of our story about the lightning strike damage, Capt. Bob handed me a spare VHF radio for the boat.   And you KNOW you've got  a good story when missionaries start giving you equipment.

We had friends from the USA who were looking after our other life for us while we were off playing sailors.  It's not good to let houses, automobiles or dogs  unattended for long in a tropical climate.   Something invariably goes bad.   This was our first time with people staying in our house while we were away from the island. It seems to have worked out very well.  We knew the house was being looked after,  they had a free place to stay and vehicles to drive for an extended tropical holiday, and Dooley the Delighted.... well he got spoiled silly.  The little booger is now on a first name basis with half the restaurant waiters on Provo.

They met us at the marina and after we cleared Customs and Immigration we were free to step ashore.  We had been gone almost seven weeks, and there was a joyful reunion as La Gringa and Dooley spotted each other.  By the time I remembered to grab the camera, most of the initial excitement had settled down as everyone caught their breath.  Oh my gosh it was something to behold.  Running up and down the dock.  Leaping in the air. Squealing, tail wagging, hugging, kissing..... Dooley and I had never seen La Gringa act like that before and could just watch her in amazement.  Then she finally  sat down to catch her breath and released him   so he could run over and tell me hello, too.

Since leaving our last nights sleep in Calabash Bay, we had been up for 54 hours.   My opinion is now that this is too much.   I don't particularly ever want to do that again, but it's also nice to know that the two of us can handle it if we have to. 

Of course the dog immediately appropriated the boat and explored every nook and cranny that he could get to with the hatches closed. And the S/V Twisted Sheets is now officially Dooley authorized.

He did want to know where I planned to install a fire hydrant.

We were very glad to be at South Side Marina, and to have a place to keep the boat just a short drive from the house.   We noticed that Bob has been making great progress on the new restaurant/bar on the hill.

We've got a great slip location, with a convenient place to park the Land Rover right near the boat. With some marinas there's a long walk involved in carting things to and from a boat.

It's convenient as we have a lot of  modifications  and repairs to make. And repairs have all become a whole lot easier now that I have access to my workshop and tools, have transportation, and know the local suppliers for hardware and materials. There are a lot of DIY fixes and modifications in our future but I'll save all that for future posts.  Sprinkle one or two in, here and there.  Since we got back we've probably taken another five or six hundred pounds of stuff off the boat.  Stuff we didn't use and don't want to haul around.  I would estimate that Twisted Sheets is probably at least 1,200 lbs lighter now than she was when we bought her.  She's floating several inches higher in the water, that's for sure.

We are now in what will eventually become our 'home' port.   I write 'eventually' because for the short term we had to bring the boat in on a cruising permit.   This means that it is only temporarily in the country.  In three months, we'll have to either extend the cruising permit ($300) for another three months, or leave the islands and go cruising somewhere else for a while.   We're actually okay with that.  We have a pretty big list of places to go live on a sailboat until the government here works through some desperately needed financial changes.  They have announced that there will be a revision of all the import duties in April 2013.  We hope that we will be able to then officially import the boat and change the hailing port  to Providenciales, TCI. Having a home base here with a cruising sailboat has been our dream since the beginning.  

This whole experience has been pretty intense, by our normal lazy laid back tropical life standards.  Counting the time it took to get the boat purchased and to make the trip took us almost seven weeks with the delays and problems we went through.  We had originally thought it would take us about a month. We were living on the boat continuously for 40 days.  It's become very familiar to us.

And we loved it.  We can hardly wait to get things fixed and changed, and get back aboard for our next adventure.