Heaving Down Rock

I've written about this time of year before. It's a transition zone between seasons. There's something almost magic about a lot of the days in late September and early October.  We get most of our rain this time of year with frequent  squalls blowing through. We also get periods when there's not much wind for several days in a row.  The ocean smooths out into slow, lazy, glassy swells.  And we get some spectacular, Dooley rattling squalls, too.   He slept in his 'thundershirt' last night.  Well, "slept" is not very accurate.  I doubt you could have closed his eyes with a three pound hammer.   So I'll correct myself.  Dooley hid under the bed shivering and shaking  in his thundershirt during an impressive electrical storm  last night.  All night. 

 And it took the power company until noon today to restore power.  Now that's a squall.   Why do these things always seem to happen at night, and on weekends?   Oh well.  Price of admission, I guess.

 Here's a recent sunrise from La Gringa..

  Rain is welcome here, within reason.  We heard parts of downtown were flooded this morning. These next couple of photos are from another morning rainstorm last week when I was trying to get a good photo of a sunrise through a local squall.  It didn't come out the way I hoped, but hey you never know unless you try, right?  Can you see the raindrops in the photo?   Little dark smears in the open part between the sun and the clouds.

You might just be able to see the line across the surface of the ocean where the edge of the squall is fingerpainting the top of it. The sheets of rain looked like transparent curtains drifting across the ocean. Of course I wasn't actually in the rain taking the photo.  Nah, I was up under the roof overhang with my morning coffee, fat dumb and happy. And dry.  My momma didn't raise no fools.   Well, maybe one.

That PVC pipe you see coming under the roof is part of our rainwater collection system.  The rain runs into the gutters, and then into these pipes, which connect to  two 9,000 gallon cisterns built into the house foundation.  We  usually get enough rain to cover almost all of our water needs throughout the year. We sized the roof with a four foot overhang all the way around.  This collects more rainwater and also provides shade when the sun is high.  We typically do have to buy about two water-truck loads of water a year, or 5,000 gallons, at six cents US per gallon.  US gallon.    And that usually happens early in the year, during the start of the 'dry' season.  Which also typically corresponds to when we have a number of house guests still left over from the holidays.  Once the guests go home, the rain alone is enough for the rest of the time. I should mention that this is also one of the last parts of Providenciales to get town water, so eventually we won't be relying on rain water.   I didn't say we won't use it,  because even with town water available.We prefer the soft rain water to the hard RO (reverse osmosis) desalinated water.  It's okay to mix it.

We went down to Leeward-Going-Through last Sunday to see if anything of interest was going on.    We miss hanging out at Leeward.  We were there quite often in our first two years here.  It was a different place in those days. It was quiet for a Sunday afternoon. This is typical for the season.  The overall population of Providenciales is at its lowest this time of year. A lot of local people take their yearly vacations during September and October.  Many of the people we know here are 'off island' right now.  And  the number of visitors from the USA, Canada, and the rest of the world is way down this time of year. They have their own autumns to enjoy, and kids  in school, and let's face it, this is the smack dab middle of hurricane season here. And I am not going to say anything else about that at this point because I'd have to go touch wood if I did.  I don't want to  jinx anything. We do get a lot of divers this time of year.   The diving and snorkeling is about as good as it gets. The calm water lets all the little particles of sand settle out, and the clarity is astonishing.  Some of the best underwater visibility on the planet, in my experience.  Thirty meters would be average, with more not uncommon.

This is a Google Earth satellite view of where we took our kite and camera setup last Sunday:

This is a photo looking down at a local point called Heaving Down Rock, which is at the tip of that big yellow arrow in the above photo. This is right at the very end of the Leeward Highway, with Leeward-Going-Through there between it and Mangrove Cay across the channel.  Don't you just love the names here? So descriptive.

Leeward-Going-Through is self descriptive, I think.  It's a channel that lets boats through between the islands. I sometimes tend to forget that not everyone who reads this blog is up on their nautical terms, so Heaving Down Rock might be a bit of a puzzle for some.  It's not the seasick sailor  kind of heaving.  Here's the simple definition from one of the online dictionaries:

heave down

vb

(Transport / Nautical Terms) (intr, adverb) Nautical to turn a vessel on its side for cleaning.

We don't know  what this area looked like back in the "heaving down" days.   I think you can see how this area would have lent itself to pulling a wooden boat over on its side to clean the hull.   That's no longer done this way, here.  These days we pay for a travel lift to pick the boats up out of the water and they use pressure washers  to clean   hulls. I know my own imagination can easily erase the man made marina, and picture a wooden boat snugged up alongside the rocks here  200 years ago.
"Pressure Washer Rock" just doesn't have the same cachet, does it.

This area has a lot of significance for us.  Finally, for the first time, we can see the bottom over which our former boat Cay Lime got swept along with the floating docks that got torn away from their moorings during Hurricane Hanna in '08.  The boat was upside down right there where I am standing at the bottom end of  that kite string. By the way, the pickup truck in that photo contains two of the notorious Stubbs boys, Preacher and Joe. They had come over to say hello  after coming in from a fishing trip.  The back of that truck is half full of live conch.  And one barracuda.  These guys love barracuda.   And we've tasted it.  Not bad.   We've just got an irrational and ingrained worry about ciguatera.  It's irrational because we don't seem to mind eating grouper, and they eat the same small reef fishes the barracuda do. 

This is actually a better photo.  I had walked out onto the end of the rock itself.  This photo shows it all, Heaving Down Rock, Sherlock Walkin's Leeward Marina, and in the distance, the Conch Farm.  And that's Leeward Highway taking off to the right, up island.   Or is it down island? I'm still confused about which way is up when talking about islands and beaches.  Thought I had it almost figured out for a while, but then I gave up.  Or gave down, as the case may be.

That sandy spot between the floating dock and beached boats in the bottom right corner also serves as a local boat ramp for those who don't want to pay the $5 Mr. Walkin charges to use his boat ramp.  La Gringa thinks that this side of heaving down rock makes more sense as a place to  haul boats over.   There have been so many modifications over the years, I'm not seeing much evidence of where the original "marina" would have been 250 years ago.  I guess we need to mentally subtract all the man made stuff and try to visualize what the natural shoreline would have been.   I suspect the basin in front of today's marina has been dredged in modern times.

I find it interesting that such a simple thing as a well placed rock outcropping could have so much impact on the local history here.  I can't find much information from the early years.  I know there must be ships logs and personal journals somewhere.  Maybe in the museum on Grand Turk.   I'll have to look into that, because it interests me. For example, in modern times, this is where the very first motor vehicle on Providenciales was offloaded onto the island.  It was in 1966, and the vehicle was a jeep.   What an experience that must have been for the several hundred people then living on Provo.  That was the year I started driving in Texas. Legally.  There were sure a lot of cars on the roads in Houston back then. And one beat up jeep on Providenciales, with no roads at all. Cart and foot paths.

Discussing this with La Gringa, she had just recently read a story about that jeep, and how it influenced driving in the Turks and Caicos Islands.  We naturally assumed that we drive on the left here because this is a British territory.  I was somewhat surprised to find out that this isn't the case.    The 28,000 inhabitants of the Turks and Caicos islands drive on the left because of that first jeep.   No kidding.

According to a correspondent on the Turks and Caicos Islands Historical Society's Facebook page:

"The story behind why we started driving on the left. According to Mr. Bengt Soderqvist, the first vehicle which came here in 1966, which was a jeep had an accident, the tie-rod was bent and began to favour the left, hence the driver found it more comfortable to drive on the left, "and we started to drive left from that day". That puts paid to the belief of those who insist that driving on the left on the island is due to the fact that the traffic rules are patterned after the British."

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Turks-and-Caicos-Islands-Historical-Society/463878000377601

   

So the driving laws in the Turks and Caicos Islands are based upon steering damage to a US built vehicle, and are totally unrelated to England.  Still doesn't explain why someone thought badly designed roundabouts would be a great idea at intersections, though. 

This next photo is not totally unrelated to England at all. The rather nice little home there in the middle of the photo is the former residence of the former Chief Minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands.  He's been on an extended vacation in Brazil awaiting extradition by the Brits for quite some time now.  Nice house.  But I bet he has some 'splaining to do.  Eventually.  This is going to be one of the most expensive Portuguese language courses in modern times.

This next one is another view more to the north west looking up Leeward Going Through.  We had noticed a "new' catamaran anchored out in the channel,which you can see in this photo.   We found out that another of the notorious Stubbs boys, Jay, had just bought that boat and sailed it down from Florida the week before.  We spoke for quite a while with Jay about his trip down. It took him a week.  He told us about some of the troubles he had, and why it took him an entire week.  We heard tales of having to wait a day for wind while anchored in the Exumas.   

That same trip took us 40 days.  Lack of wind was never an issue. I'm not going back into all that here. We all have our sea stories, don't we?  

As you can tell, the ratcheting camera-turning gear is still working fine on the kite setup.  We get photos in all directions just by tugging the kite string. This view is out over the Caicos Bank.   I  walked out to the end of the   remaining floating dock at the marina  for these next few images. Before Hanna in 08, there were three.

This is the view  looking back up the dock.

It's not  too difficult to take a look at the water on each side of that dock and tell which way the wind and current are running.


And I thought you'd appreciate what might be considered a somewhat rustic approach to ferry boats or water taxis. Yes, this started out as a home built conch boat. One of many here, of identical design, from the same pirated hull mold.  And now here it is a commercial ferry, tied up in the Pine Cay slip at Leeward Marina.  

A view from the end of the dock in x and y, with an additional z component of a couple hundred feet of altitude....

The camera just keeps rotating, so we get hundreds of photos to choose from on these excursions.  Don't worry, I'm not going to post hundreds of photos.  But I mention it because if anyone has any good use for an aerial image of anything in this area, there's a good chance we have it.

For example, I think this is a decent photo of the layout of the Conch Farm.   You can see the circular pens where the conch are allowed to grow until they are big enough change from looking for sea food to becoming it.  I know you probably won't be able to make it out, but on the horizon just to the right of center is a black dot.   That's the wreck of the old freighter La Familia Express.    You've sure seen plenty of images of that on this blog.

If you ever find yourself on Providenciales looking for something unusual to do, try taking the tour of the Conch Farm if you can. It's been going through some legal hassles lately, which is understandable. That's some prime real estate right there. Only a matter of time before someone figures out that a whole lot more money could be made than is justified by raising conch.  So, you might not want to put that tour off for too long.

Speaking of land issues, we just spent almost three weeks away from home during the growing season here. That creates issues of its own. I found a good use for the stainless tank we salvaged on West Caicos.  It makes a great little portable incinerator for sand spurs.  Or grass burrs.  Or stickers.  Whatever you call those things that puncture the bottom of bare feet and stick to your clothing if you let them get out of hand.  And  three weeks is definitely long enough for them to get out of hand.  I rip up the thorny little boogers and burn them.  Then I spray the area with herbicide.  Buys me about a month before I have to do it again.

And when I mixed up my herbicide, it necessitated another little DIY thing.  I discovered that particles in the stuff were clogging up the screen on my little hand pump sprayer.  So I balled up a piece of cotton fabric to use as a filter,  and siphoned the mix down through it. I can see four different projects going on at my work bench.  It doesn't always look this bad. The siphoning and filtering worked like a charm, by the way.  This is good info to have here.   Bugs and weeds grow year round, and the regular application of  'cides of various denominations has become a way of life for us. It's  definitely a case of better living through chemistry.

 
One more little DIY photo and then I'll end this. Several people have expressed an interest in the 3D printer.  I've continued to improve and tune it, and now have it printing surprisingly well for a home-built kit of plywood and cable ties.  It's to the point now where I can actually print projects taller than a few inches. The precision of the various carriages has to be pretty tight in order to stack this many layers and have it come out well. I've also learned more about printing things with  supporting
columns to hold up overhangs.  That all gets broken and cut away when the print is finished, leaving the supported part. It's still very much an old dog/new trick scenario with this thing, but I'm learning.

We're getting a fair bit of use from this Printrbot.  It's fascinating to watch it. I'm convinced that 3-D printing is going to be making some big changes in the world of manufacturing and home hobby projects. Do you remember that line in the movie "The Graduate" about plastics being the way of the future?  These days, I think it's 3-D printing.  And graphene, of course.  That's going to be even bigger.

Well, that's it for this post.  We should be able to get back out on the water in the  next few days as life gets back to normal after being away.     In the meantime..... keep smiling.

300th Post

I find it surprising that this blog has continued for 300 posts.  That must be the equivalent of a book or two. I  thought of several  cliche'-sounding things to write about that. But after my maximum sustained effort of three or four seconds of unusually deep thought, I decided it just means that we must be reaching people with dreams and interests similar to our own. And that's the whole point.  As long as people keep reading it, we'll keep posting it.
 
La Gringa  has gotten back into taking sunrise and sunset photos.  This is the wet season and we have a lot more clouds this time of year.  Clouds make for some dramatic celestial scenery. I was just looking through a bunch of photos she took on a recent morning. I was noticing how much the scene changes as the morning light develops.  This was just before the sun broke through a cloud bank on the horizon one recent morning:

There's a lot of atmosphere going on in that photo. 

It was one of those calm, clear days when the water looked like a big lake more than it did an ocean.  It's quite common for us to get thunderstorms and squalls  in the afternoon on late summer  days that start out like this.  But they're great days to get the skiff in the water if we do it early.

And this next photo was taken on the same day as that first one, just a short time  after the sun had risen above the clouds.  

We didn't do anything special for our 300th blog post.  We had already planned to take the skiff over to West Caicos on the next calm day, and this turned out to be that day.   They all get here eventually, don't they. We launched it with the KIA instead of the Land Rover for the first time, and that was a little different. Backing a boat down a ramp while sitting on the left side of the automobile and peering over my right shoulder seemed easier after these  past several years of backing boats with a right hand drive Defender. I guess by now we're backidextrious. And the little KIA handled the light skiff just fine.  I'm pretty sure I'd never hook up the Contender to it, though. Oh, I don't doubt that it would pull it. Just not very fast. Nor very far. And not for too many times.

By the time we got the boat into the water the wind had picked up a little bit and the ocean was not as smooth as it had been at dawn.  This little boat is okay in some slight chop, so we headed over to West Caicos as planned.   It's not hard to recognize the water over here.  It's got a look of it's own:

We were heading for a specific spot this time. Back in October of last year we ran across this old sluice way over on West Caicos.   I noodled around on the internet and found out that it's probably the ruins of a salt exporting plan that was ongoing back in the 1850's.  We took photos and wrote about what I had found in a post called " Local Histories Little Mysteries" almost a year ago.  I also planned to come back someday when I had the ability to take some aerial photos of this place.

Dooley the Delighted was way happy to be boating over to West Caicos again.  He likes this place.   It's a beach lover's paradise, and Dooley likes to explore beaches.

I won't go into the details of what we've been doing with the kite cameras lately. All of the fiddling around that I do with those things would be a blog post all of its own. This rig is the one that rotates clockwise as the kite string jiggles it.   I'll post a few of the images that I consider as most representative of what we got.   One thing we're learning is that we only need to put the camera up for a few minutes.  Leaving it up while the camera goes around and around doesn't gain much. All the good stuff is in the first dozen images and after that it just keeps repeating the same general scenes.  Unless you're moving.  The wind varied between about 6 to 9 knots this trip.  It was good for boating, but  borderline for the kite we had with us.  At one point it dipped so low that the camera went underwater. I think La Gringa put some of those photos on the Face book page. I'm not going to post them here. Too embarrassing.

This is looking down at the old sluice way, and shows most of the  masonry and rock structure that extends out from the shore.   I call it a sluice way because I haven't yet come up with the correct name for it.  I'm pretty sure it was a ditch to get fresh ocean water into the interior lake of West Caicos so that it could be evaporated for sea salt.   I'm puzzled at all the effort with the stone work, though.   This had to be a tough job.

Here's a photo with the boat in it to give you an idea of the scale.  And we are getting a much better view of the structure we had noticed directly offshore when we were here a year ago.   The rectangular shape of it immediately becomes apparent when viewed from above.

This is just more of the same scene.  I'll upload a few of these so you can get a good idea of what this stretch of coastline looks like.   

This is another view of that structure offshore.  It could be my imagination, but I am wondering if I am seeing similar sized blobs equally spaced out in the same vicinity. Possibly this was part of some planned structure to protect the sluice inlet from storms and waves.  Maybe it was an offshore loading platform. Perhaps it's the remains of an old barge or other vessel. The problem with all of this in my mind is that the water here is only a meter deep.  It gets three meters deep out where it turns blue, but this thing is in waist deep water.  Too shallow for a boat of any size.  It would be easier to bring a boat up to the island on the opposite side, in the lee protected from the wind, and where deep water goes right up to the shoreline.

This  next one is another shot of where we dropped the anchor near the ruins of the sluice way.   .  We actually don't know for sure what this all was about. You can see how straight the stones were laid, and how they're still holding together in places. Keep in mind that this is on a sand beach, in the surf zone, in the hurricane belt, below the tide line, after 160 years of exposure on the windward side of this cay. I'd love to know how they  mixed that mortar. That's some good stuff right there.

At one point we noticed two guys on PWCs zooming down the coast of the island. As you can tell from the photos, there was absolutely nothing other than our kite photography going on.  We were the only people in sight. They zoomed over to see what we were up to, and the kite camera caught some images.

This is the point when they changed course to pass well out away from us. When we got a look at them, we got the impression that they might be associated with the resort development that's been in limbo here on the island. The word in the newspapers is that the whole Molasses Reef resort is starting up construction again.  We think these guys might be security for the new contractors.

There are roads still in place from back before the development plans halted, some five years ago.   I marked each end of the remains of the old sluice way that we're investigating. You can see the old causeway that crosses the pond here, and how the roads still follow the ones originally laid out back in the 1800's or earlier.  The man made waterway is filled in with sand and vegetation, but is still clearly visible from the air.           
         

I posted this one because it shows all the pieces in one photo.   And where the roads are.

This is looking almost directly down onto the remaining parts of the submerged portion of the structure.   You can see that the finished, straight sides of the stones were all facing inward. And very carefully laid out. I wouldn't have thought that precise control of the width of that structure would be very important if all it did was carry water.  Yet, obviously, someone took a lot of care with it.

I was winding the camera and kite in during that photo. This one was taken just a few minutes later from that same position.  This is what those rocks (above) look like from beach level.   Getting the bird's eye view has spoiled me. The shadow is  the camera's self-portrait as I was unclipping it from the kite string.

And this shadow, hanging around my feet being a nuisance, is Dooley the Dehydrated telling me he's had enough fun and sun for one day. I also notice that the camera was beginning to fog up around the edges in these photos.  We have yet to solve the humidity issues with sealed up water proof cameras in the sun.

So that's basically what this post is about.  We had wanted to go back to take another look at those old ruins, and having the kite setup was the perfect excuse.   We still have some more exploring to do, now that we know the limited extent of the ancient water way.   We'll have to bring some decent hiking shoes out with us.  I also want to dig around a little in that offshore structure.  If I find the remains of wood and iron out there, it was a boat.  If it's all rock, that will tell us something else.

We wouldn't want to solve all the West Caicos mysteries at once, of course. We like having excuses to keep going back. I don't know what it is about this stretch of water, but it's become one of my favorite beach combing places. And the undocumented history is fascinating to me.  We have  plans for  getting more images from the kites on the rest of this island.  Heck, we'd come back just to look at the water alone.

I had originally thought I'd end this post with a couple sunrise photos  that could pass for sunset photos if one didn't know better. But these were definitely taken at dawn. I had just poured my first cup of coffee, looked out across the Caicos Bank, and thought "well, that looks like some potential for a decent sunrise. I'll go grab my camera".    And so I did.  And walked out into the calm morning and took this image:

And slapped at the clouds of bugs that  were zeroing in on the fact that my dawn coffee stroll put me immediately in the middle of their menu.  No wind means mucho mosquitoes.  So....here's what a nice sunrise looks like through a hastily slammed screen door...

Not wanting to end this with a screen door sunrise photo, I'll upload a few more and then angle in for a better ending. We just put our old sailboat, Twisted Sheets, back into the boatyard for some additional work. I brought the boat around from South Side Marina to the Caicos Marina and Shipyard.  If you read this blog much, you know both places pretty well by now.

La Gringa was on the patio with her telephoto lens when I came around the bend.   Still photos don't show the motion very well, but you can tell that there was a little bit of chop.

I had already had to shut down the starboard engine at this point.  It had an overheat alarm blaring and we don't ignore those. I had also had to climb down into the port side engine room to be sure that the low oil pressure  reading was not critical.  This stuff gets interesting on a bumpy day when you're the only one on the boat.    

All this while remembering to keep an eye on the rocks.

Until finally I was able to turn into the mouth of the marina.  I was still running on just the port engine.  I guess it's a good thing we have so much experience getting this boat to a dock on one engine, because it seems to be a required skill.   And yes, we realize that thousands of sailboats do perfectly well on one engine. But things get a little trickier when it's a catamaran. Getting these engines right before we take off on another long sail is one of the reasons it's going back into the yard.

And now after that distraction, I can get back to a proper 2 Gringos blog post ending.  With some of La Gringa's' photo stuff. She took this one looking out over the salina just before sunset.

I thought that was good enough, myself.   But then she noticed a disturbance in the water there in the foreground.    The bone fish were starting to feed.  There were some larger fish streaking in from the edges, no doubt headed for the same bait the bone fish were chasing.

A few minutes of patience and she caught the sun breaking through the clouds for a sunset and the bone fish breaking the surface of the salina at the same time.   The sun reflected off the ripples caused by the fish,  on the otherwise still and glassy surface.

 And that makes for a pretty good blog-post finishing-up photo.

Running Amuck

You'll probably recognize this scene if you've  been reading this blog.  This is the view from the top of our garage.  It's looking back generally to the west, and shows you the only road into and out of this peninsula.  I mention that for a reason.  Background, as it were.

That body of water just on the other side of the road is called Juba Salina.  It's a big, shallow, tidal flat.  Great bonefishing on the right tides. Flamingos love it.  We've seen flocks of over 70 of them here. Off in the distance in the middle of the photo you can see the hill overlooking South Side Marina.  You can just make out some of the Little Five Cays offshore.   There.   Got you all oriented now?

This is the same photo with some notes added to give you an idea of what we were watching on a  Friday afternoon not long ago.

Yes, another sloop full of refugees from Haiti has landed.   This isn't anything new or unusual here, but this time we had front row seats because the boat landed during daylight hours, and within sight of the house.  La Gringa took these photos with a hand held telephoto lens so they're not quite as sharp as some of our stuff.  But good enough to tell  you the story.

I can't imagine what the captain of that boat was thinking by putting those people ashore here.  At this specific location.  There's only one path off this peninsula if you're walking.  It only takes one or two police to completely close it off at one of the narrow spots.  The Marine Police detachment is a few hundred yards away.  The new Coastal Radar installation is just a few miles in the other direction.  WHY would a boat captain run into here with an illegal cargo? And HOW did this boat get past the radar station and the Marine Police? 

If you're looking for Haitian sloops, this is a classic. A wooden boat that fits the profile of an illegal Haitian sloop just about as well as that profile can be fit.

See that road near the top of the distant hill?  That's the little road we've been launching the kite from for our aerial photo experiments lately.  There's a reason I mention it. The apparently abandoned boat drifted from this location to a spot close to that road.

We had police all over the place that day. They were hot footing it in their uniform trousers and good shoes all across that salina.  Maybe hot footing it is not the right description. Nobody was moving with much alacrity in the salina.  The same  muck that was making it difficult for them to walk also indicated the fresh trail of those they were seeking. A mixed blessing.  But wet sock city, for sure.

We watched this little drama unfolding  as we stood on our garage roof with our camera and binoculars. I mean, it was a little drama to us.  As observers.  It might perhaps be more like a life changing experience for some of the participants. We couldn't hear what was being said between the detainees and the detainers, of course.  And we wouldn't have been able to understand it if we had  since it was almost certainly in Creole.  It can't be much fun trying to assist a cable-tied miscreant across a place as difficult to walk in as the silty bottom of this salina.

Not too hard to tell which is which here, is it.

The police were having a difficult time even without the responsibility of herding the prisoners.  This is some tough stuff to walk through.  Some of it took both feet and a hand for balance.

We watched as small hordes of hapless Haitians had their hearts' hopes hacked  into hash.  I was trying to imagine how they felt as it finally got to this point for them. It must take quite an effort to accumulate the money for the passage.  We've heard that it's $1,000 per head, in a country where the minimum wage is  $1.75 per day. Making the arrangements in Haiti for leaving, and at this end for help from their friends and families already here. Grabbing what  minimal resources they'd been told to bring. A dry change of clothes.  Some money. A phone number in Providenciales to call if they elude capture long enough to be picked up.  And they do elude, and are picked up by people in automobiles.  We've seen it.  A rattly old car with a single driver comes slowly down the road, and suddenly two or three people step out of the bushes and climb in.

But not yet, in this case.  The cars come after the police have left.

The police treated them fairly gently as far as we observed.  There was nothing like  the SWAT equipped local police departments you see these days in the USA.  Not a single automatic weapon or body armor.  No helmets, or clubs, or riot shields.   Just some sympathetic law enforcement officers trying to do their job,  with no evidence of anger or animosity toward the "criminals".  And even though the unarmed police officers were substantially outnumbered , we also didn't see any violence or disrespect on the part of the Haitians.  I think they must be accustomed to accepting bad news and disappointment.

Eventually, the mangroves were combed and the detainees were all herded over to the road.  The last of the search party made his weary way back across the salina.

The groups were assembled into van-sized loads for transportation to the Detention Center.  We could see some other small groups off in the distance, and assume they were more of the same boatload.

And eventually,  after a couple of hours of 'catch-me-if-you-can" slogging through the bushes and mangroves, the police loaded up the temporary visitors and took them  away.  

At least, the ones that got caught in the first sweep. About an hour after everyone left, we saw another half dozen emerge from the bushes along the road and assemble into a small group near this same spot.  They seemed uncertain what to do, which way to go. They dropped the few belongings they had in their hands right there on the edge of the road.  It was as if they realized that carrying clothes made them appear unusual. They saw us watching them from the hillside. A few small waves, some brief nervous smiles, and they walked down the road toward town.

We weren't sure what to do.  Call the police?  Ask the refugees in for refreshments? In the end, we just let them walk away. We did make a call to the Neighborhood Watch organizer.  We figured that they may as well know that another batch was headed their way.

The Immigration Officers  take the Haitians to a Detention Center.  They are fed, receive a medical evaluation, and then they are flown back to Haiti.  So these guys probably got one weekend in Providenciales under lock and key.   And then I guess the whole thing starts over at that point. Nobody really blames the Haitians for making the attempt to escape to what they believe is a better life.  The TCI  Government picks up the tab to fly them home.  This Haitian situation's a real drain on this small nation.

A few days after this all happened we took the kite over to the small ridge above South Side Marina.   We had some new kite cam goodies to try out.   And we drove up to that notch in the hill that I mentioned in the last post.   And there, lightly anchored just below the hill was the same sloop.  It had drifted across.  Someone had tied some kind of anchor to it.  Probably to keep it from smashing to pieces against the rocks.

We took our photos, and made our  camera adjustments, and I noted what needed changing and we went home. We thought a lot about that sloop over the next few days, though.

I didn't mention it to La Gringa.  But I had thoughts about possibilities with this boat.  I mean,  it DID make it all the way from Haiti without sinking.  Here it was still anchored and riding okay days later with nobody taking care of it.  I was thinking... if someone were to get rid of the t-shirt and torn sheet caulking between the planks and replace it with something good... and get a better mast for it.. wouldn't it be cool to own a Haitian Sloop? 

Well, of course we didn't do anything about it. We packed up our kites and cameras and went home.  A much more comfortable place to ponder life's reality show than a detention center. Or apparently, anywhere in Haiti.

By the next weekend   I had printed up what I hoped was the final version of my little kite rotation device.  We took it back to our favorite kite testing hill and put it up in the air again.   We were curious as to the status of the sloop after a week of calm weather.   Well, it wasn't good.  That's it off the coast there. 

The boat didn't sink, exactly.  It  just sort of gave up on being a boat. 

I guess without all those frightened eyes to spot every new leak, and desperate fingers to push the thin cloth caulking back between the planks, she just gave up and filled with water.  Obviously, the flotation of the wood in the boat was slightly greater than the weight of whatever ballast had been aboard.   We've seen bags of sand used in other boats.

And this was our last view of  this little vessel.  Hand made with the most basic tools, using yet more of the precious wood that is fast becoming depleted in a nation that seems doomed to misery and disaster.  She made one trip, probably about 130 miles.  We don't know how many people risked their lives to make that trip in a boat with no motor, radio, life jackets, flares, or future.  We haven't read a word about this one in the local papers.  It makes me wonder how many times this scenario is being played out here, with no publicity.  It also saddens me to wonder how many of these boats don't make the entire trip, but break apart and sink somewhere in the deep water between that island and this one.  Many, I suspect.  We find pieces of these boats everywhere on the beaches.  Big pieces, with jagged edges.

And now, another week after this little drama, the stage is reset for the next one.  Some of the immigrants undoubtedly made it into the bushes and got picked up by a jitney driver or friends and family with a car.  Most got arrested and shipped back to Haiti.  Some drugs came in.  Maybe some guns.   The disposable boat is quickly turning into loose planks and memories.   And the only signs of  this passing through our little world  are the abandoned piles of clothing, shoes, and water bottles that were thrown away by the group that eluded the police in the immediate aftermath.

I suspect that a dry change of clothes is carried by all of them.  They know they're going to have to swim ashore, and then try to blend in and avoid arrest.  And  I thought the TSA at the airport in Miami was a pain.

Kinda makes ya think, doesn't it?  

I realize that this isn't in our usual mien of blog posts.  I've kept it short, sort of.  And we've got a nice more tropical one coming along shortly.

This blog is intended to be about our experiences living here.  Not all these experiences are good.    This one wasn't  about us personally, but it definitely is about an aspect of living on an island down here. This just isn't the kind of thing that ever happened in front of us living up in the USA. It's happening all the time, here. And in the Bahamas.  And probably even in Cuba.

It's not difficult to ignore the plight of an entire nation when it's just a brief mention on the Nightly News every couple of years.   Not so easy to ignore when it's right in front of you.  Thin, wet, desperate people with haunted eyes and another shattered dream being rounded up and returned.  Their choices are to either give up, or try again.  I hope their next boat is at least as good as this one was for a few days. Too many aren't. And the builders don't worry about refunds or complaints.  It's a one shot deal.  And somebody is making money at it.

And now we'll return you to our regularly scheduled tropical blog program.