And now for something completely different...

I'll tell you right up front that this is NOT our usual type of blog post.  For five years now we've been posting photos of the Turks and Caicos Islands.  And not much else.  That's all about to change, Big Time. We hope it's for the better, but lets face it, we were getting into a rut.  How many photos of the dog's rear end on a sailing kayak can one guy post?

We just  bought another boat.  Yeah, I know.  You would be perfectly in line to ask why on earth we would need another boat.  But wait until you see this one.   It's a big one.   We just spent the first half of May in Jacksonville, Florida getting this boat ready to go.  It needed a lot of work.  We thought we'd never leave the dock.  Finally the day came when we ran out of excuses, just had to bite the bullet, start the engines, untie the lines, and leave the dock for the first time.  I was on the boat alone and had never run it before. La Gringa had to return a rental car to the airport and she took a taxi to meet me at our first stop.  I only had to make it from the Naval Air Station to downtown Jacksonville Landing, but let me tell you that little trip took a very long time in my mind.  I think I aged ten years in ten miles.  A strange boat with two diesels, a strange river with turns and channels and currents, a strange city with bridges and pilings and busy boat traffic, and approaching a dock I had never seen before.  I also had to negotiate a railroad draw bridge, and did I mention I was on the boat alone?  I think I might have started talking to myself at some point.  When I got to Jacksonville Landing, I was beyond happy to see La Gringa waiting at the dock to catch my lines.   All I had to do was stop 41 ft. of catamaran just exactly at the right spot in a moving river, and throw some lines ashore for her to catch and tie. Was I nervous?  Yeah.  I was. (You couldn't have driven a twelve penny nail up my butt with a three pound framing hammer).   It sure felt good to shut the engines down and relax, and realize that yeah, we can do this!

The S/V Twisted Sheets is an old cruising catamaran. Maybe the original cruising catamaran design. It's called a Catalac 12m, and it was built in England in 1985. There were only 27 of these built, and they're fairly rare. We'd been aware of them for some years, but never saw any come onto the boat market, until this year.  They're known as safe, solid boats.  They're roomy.  And slow. And at the more inexpensive end of the 40 ft. catamaran scale.  Suddenly, there were three of them available at the same time. We grabbed  one. If you want more information on the boat and it's history along with some interior photos there's an excellent website run by a friend of ours at Catalac 12M.

I'm not going to ramble on about the boat itself right now.  That'll all come in bits and pieces as we go.  What I can tell you is that this is a dream we've had for a long, long time. Even living down in Providenciales, doing all the exploring that we've been able to do, we felt limited. We always had to plan our trips to be home before dark. There are many places just in the TCI alone that we want to visit, and explore, that require us to be able to camp out for days to adequately look at and write about. Twisted Sheets is set up to be what's known as a "liveaboard" boat.  This means she has all the basic systems we need for extended travel.  We could take this boat around the world, if we wanted to.We have 1000 watts of solar panels, two wind generators, and can make our own fresh water.  There's no more having to be home before dark.  Or even before next year.  We think we just might be able to expand the scope of this blog substantially.  It's still going to be about 2 Gringos in the Caribbean, but our footprint of the Caribbean just got a whole lot bigger.  I don't think we're in Providenciales any more, Toto.

Here's Twisted Sheets  tied up at the downtown Jacksonville Landing docks. By the time I got my nerve up enough to cast off the lines and head down river for the first time it was late afternoon. Ain't it funny how many reasons one can find NOT to do something that makes one nervous?  We decided to spend the first night here.   It took me that long to stop shaking after the initial trip.  I think it was kind of like your first solo, if you're a pilot.  Taking off is easy...but now what?  You're committed.  Nobody but you is going to land this thing.   After one good landing, we decided to stay put and celebrate. The dock was free, anyhow.  (And there are some interesting people in downtown Jacksonville after dark.  I think we've led a somewhat sheltered life in Providenciales for the past seven years.)

That bridge in the background is the Main Street trestle bride.  Obviously it's too low for our mast to fit under it.  We stick up 52 ft. above the water.   We have to radio the bridge operators and ask them to raise the bridges to let us pass.   It's a funny feeling to see the barricades go down, and all the automobiles stop, and traffic being forced to wait for us to travel through.  Some people smile and wave.  Most of them use all their fingers to wave.  Some take photos.  This is all very new to us.

I had to show you what this city looks like at night.  Pretty cool, isn't it?

Looking at that photo later, I realize I left the navigation lights on.  Duh.  Newbie mistake.  This wouldn't be the last one.
So we left Jacksonville behind after weeks of getting to know the place.  We decided to take the Intracoastal Waterway down to south Florida, and then to cross over the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas.   We'll island hop down the Bahamas and eventually, several weeks from now, we should be back in Providenciales at South Side Marina telling Bob about our new adventures.

 This is early in the trip, getting ready to pass under one of the first of what would turn out to be many, many bridges.  Jacksonville behind us, and about 300 miles to get to the ocean, and a thousand miles from home.  We were still in the St. John's river at this point.

The Intracoastal Waterway (or ICW for short) is a long series of linked rivers, bays, and canals that let boats travel around a significant portion of the east coast of the USA without having to be exposed to the weather in the North Atlantic.   We had a lot of issues with equipment on the boat, and thought that taking a week or so to cruise under power would be prudent.  Heck, we knew the sails would work.  It would give us time to go over all the systems  and learn them and how to operate and repair them.  This turned out to be a good idea.  I've spent a big part of each day down in one of the engine rooms, working on a diesel engine.  No chance of escaping the DIY part of this life on a boat.  No way.  But we have two diesel engines.  And several sails. This boat is built to cruise. I'll show you a few of the images we did take on the trip so far.

And yeah, I did say 'so far'.  I am writing this post from the galley table aboard Twisted Sheets. We've been living aboard for almost two weeks now.

This is a narrow portion of the ICW between the St. John's River and St. Augustine.  We've been chugging along at about six knots for hour after hour, day after day.  Watching the channel markers, and our depth readings, and the weather.  Studying charts of far away islands, and making plans.

We've seen a lot of variety in the types of homes and camps along the ICW.  This is one of the smaller setups.  We've seen plenty of mega mansions, too, but this one caught my eye.  A boat, a shack on the river..... it could be enough for a lot of people.

The weather has been good for the most part.  We've watched two tropical cyclones develop just north of us so far.  We're hoping to get all the way back to the Turks and Caicos without having to deal with a hurricane.  That would just  make us really nervous.   I'm trying to avoid nervous whenever I can .  We've had a few days of rain, many days of sunshine, and one morning of  fog.  That's a jaw tightening experience in a canal, too. There are other boats coming the other direction.  In fact, MOST of the boats we've seen are headed north, getting away from the tropics for hurricane season.   Some of them are big. Some of them are moving a whole lot faster than we are. We're headed south.  We must be nuts.

The boat does have radar, although we haven't needed to use it yet.   We'll use it at night, or in the fog on the open ocean.  Or when I'm trying to find an island and don't want anyone to know I'm lost. Here's La Gringa at the outside helm, pressing onward though the fog.  She looks really miserable, doesn't she?   We've been grinning a lot lately.

Our first major stop after leaving Jacksonville was St. Augustine, the oldest city in the USA.  I'd read about this place all my life but never thought I'd get the opportunity to actually see it.  We ended up spending three days there, buying parts for the boat and getting things 'squared away' as they say.   That means buying groceries for the trip, and fixing everything that we can find to fix.  Some days, we even gain some ground.  But not always.

This is the Bridge of Lions in St. Augustine.  It's a drawbridge we had to pass under the previous day before docking here at the Municipal Marina.   Those are school buses stopped for the raised drawbridge as another boat passes through on it's way north.

When we took possession of the boat it had all this netting lashed to the stanchions and lifelines.  We had originally thought that we would leave it on the boat to help protect Dooley the Deranged.  But after a few days of looking at the stuff we decided that the boat would look better with it removed.  That took most of a day to do.  It wouldn't have stopped Dooley, anyhow.  Might have even been an entanglement issue.  Getting tangled in nets is a pet peeve of mine.     In later photos you'll be able to see that it's now all gone.

St. Augustine is a really cool old town.  We were docked right in the middle of the historic section, and were eating in restaurants and bars that have been here since the 1700's.

We wanted to look around town a lot more but all of the work and heavy activity involved with getting the boat going wreaked havoc on my remaining biological knee.  It swelled up the size of a large soft melon and stopped bending.  I had to have the fluids changed in it.  Thanks to the St. Augustine Orthopedic Center I was walking again by the time we left.

Here's what Twisted Sheets looked like docked just south of the Bridge of Lions.  Better without the netting, isn't it?

We did get the chance to see the close by parts of St. Augustine, and saw some of the fantastic old architecture.   After years of living in the Turks and Caicos Islands where we mostly see palm trees and Casuarinas, it was nice to see old oaks covered with Spanish Moss again.   (These trees reminded me of the Texas blues band ZZ Top, for some reason.)

This is a cool old boat called the Black Raven that takes people on excursions up and down the river and historic section of St. Augustine.  Do Ravens come in colors other than black?   I'm just asking.

I don't want to dwell at length on all the places we've stopped so far.   Daytona, Titusville, Juno Beach, This post would drag on forever.  I'll try to pick up the pace a little here.

This is the welcome view of  a drawbridge raising at our request.  Six knots doesn't sound very fast when you first think about it.  A brisk bicycle ride.  But when you're moving the equivalent of a three bedroom, two bathroom condo weighing 18,000 lbs at six knots, a solid bridge in front of you seems to be coming at you very fast indeed.   And when the current and wind is behind you it starts getting complicated to hold the boat until the bridge is open. Alternatively, the current is in your face and ripping through the bridge abutments.  You have to add power and pay attention.  This all gets even more interesting when your port engine decides to quit, again. 

  We were white knuckled the first half dozen bridges we had to travel under.  Even the high ones.  You know your mast will clear, but still you hold your breath until it does.   And those drooping power line crossings.  Oh my.   And lightning.  Did I mention the lightning yet?  No?  Okay, I'll shut up about it.  Dooley might be reading this.  He hasn't seen the boat yet. I'm planning to tell him it's thunder proof.

Portions of the ICW are littered with these  abandoned boats that are never going to float again.  I couldn't help but think about the stories and adventures these old hulls could relate if they could talk.   These old boats were once somebody's dreams.   But those days are gone, as all days eventually are. And now  they spend their remaining time above the water in silent witness,  watching young boats like ours, full of fresh dreams, heading out on their own adventures.

We've made almost all of the trip so far by engine power.  In fact most of the first few days we were traveling with only one engine working, as I worked my way through the Yanmar Diesel manual the previous owner left on board.  I've been chasing down fuel and air leaks, loose belts, leaking stuffing boxes, tripped circuit breakers. The wrong size fuel line.  Burnt out this, disconnected that.  We are the fourth owners of this boat, and everyone seems to have had different ideas about how to do things. I can't even remember all of it now to complain about.   But we do want to remind ourselves that the engines on this boat are auxiliary power.  They're made for moving the boat when it's not sailing, because primarily it is a sail boat.  And we did get the chance to put the sails up, finally, for the first time when we stopped to visit Rick in Melbourne FL.  We had five people on board, and were sailing 5 and a half knots in about 9 knots of wind.  That's not too bad for a boat this size and weight.   We expect to do better once we get out on the ocean with her, and learn how she likes to be trimmed and sailed.   We have a huge genoa and a big spinnaker, and are just waiting for the chance to set them and go. 

We can thank Rick of the Catamaran Site for browbeating us into trying out the sails.  I had been totally engrossed in chasing diesel engine gremlins, and knew the sails would be a simple thing.  Sails ARE a simple thing, when it's all said and done.  But the fine tuning of sails, well, that's when it starts to get interesting.  For now we were happy just to get them up and to spend a few hours driven by the wind. Thanks, Rick.  We needed that.

We tied up for two nights at the skinniest dock we've seen on the trip yet.   I brought the boat into this slip on one engine the first time.  I'm still nervous about that one, and that was four days ago.

La Gringa called this dock the "Sobriety Test".   Somewhere between walking a straight line and walking the plank.

And yes, she could do it using only one hand and  with her eyes closed. Sort of.

I noticed she wasn't so anxious to try it out later in the evening, when the daylight and rum were both running toward dark. I think we had our first unofficial cocktail party on the boat while we were here.  This cockpit would seat ten people, at least.  We do need some cushions for it, though.  All in good time.

We made several new friends here in Melbourne.  The owner of this sloop, Irish Wake, is planning a trip down to the Turks and Caicos to visit us after he retires next month and after hurricane season is over .

Come on down, Brad.   And bring Rick with you.  

The pilings I had to negotiate on one engine don't seem so scary at dawn, in the still air, with the boat safely tied to the dock.   Come to think of it, we docked it three times at this same spot without a mishap.  It would almost look like we knew what we were doing, to the untrained eye.

It's all different when it's windy, and wavy, and one motor doesn't work and you don't know where you're going.  Trust me.    

Good thing I got a great crew.

We left at dawn, headed south.   We've stopped in several places, and have met dozens of new people,  but  we're homesick for clear blue water and uncrowded islands.

I didn't plan for this post to ramble on forever, but did feel like I owed you an explanation for where we've disappeared to lately.  We've spent twelve days on the boat to get from Jacksonville Naval Air Station to Juno Beach. Yesterday we passed by the St. Lucie inlet and saw the ocean again!   We were pretty excited to see the brown water of the ICW turn turquoise and then momentarily blue as we went by the inlet.   We realized that living in the TCI has totally spoiled us for clear blue water.   We are anxiously anticipating our next big step here...

...and that's going to be tomorrow, maybe .  We plan to move the boat from the marina where we're presently tied up and anchor just inside the inlet at the north end of Lake Worth.  Then, if the Tropical Storm presently to our north behaves itself, sometime before dawn on a morning very soon, we plan to head out into the Atlantic and do our first crossing of the Gulf Stream. With some luck, we should be in the Bahamas just in time to kick off the start of hurricane season.   Then we should have some more tropical photos to post for you.  We have fishing gear on board.  And spears.

Thanks for your patience over the past few weeks with no new posts.   This should start getting a whole lot better very shortly.  And once we're back south of 22 degrees N, we'll be back in our home waters.  But to be truthful, after experiencing life aboard Twisted Sheets I don't know if I'll ever define 'home' exactly the same way again.   Homes don't have to be nailed down to one piece of the planet, and life's too short not to try some new things out.

So soon, We'll be showing you  the Gulf Stream and  the Bahamas.

Catch you on the other side.

Blog Rejects and Loose Ends

 I  confess to a having a compulsion to record photographic images and store them away by the thousands. In years past it was paper prints and fragile negatives, and now it's CDs and thumb drives, but the process is pretty much the same.  La Gringa has the same addiction and she didn't get it from me.   We were each into our own amateur photography habits long before we met.  We're shutterbugs.  No getting around it.  When we discovered this blog thing it finally gave us an actual excuse to take  photos.  Finally, we had a valid reason to do what we would have done anyway.   We really like it when people  make the effort to look at our photos. It's a bit like having visitors ask  you to show them your vacation movies, instead of bolting for the door yawning and making excuses about the time.

We typically come back from one of our  excursions with a couple of hundred images.  I try to keep individual blog posts  to somewhere around 30-40 images. Otherwise they  can take forever to load on slower computers.  So a lot of decent photos never get used.  Many are never seen again.

This post is to show you a few of those photos that got passed by during the past few weeks.  This sunrise, for example.



And the boat trips! It probably seems like we write a blog post for every time we step on a boat.  But that's not even close.  We write up maybe half of our boat trips.  Sometimes on the spur of the moment we'll decide we need a 'Sanity Sail', and half an hour later we're out on the Hobie.  We might spend two or three hours sailing and exploring, and never mention it here. I don't want him to read this, but sometimes we even go sailing without the dog. On real windy days we leave him at home and tell him we're going to the veterinarians office.  He's always happy to miss those trips.

Here's a good example of a Hobie trip from a month ago that included the dog.  We decided spur of the moment to go for an afternoon sail.  No destination in mind, no plan.   While we were sailing along we saw a nice stretch of beach, and Dooley the Drizzler was making those noises that I think mean that rocks are starting to look like trees and fire hydrants, so we pulled over for a rest stop.

We found a nice little stretch of beach, with a sheltered cove for the boat.



We'd seen these rocks before, but this time we had the new camera with us.  I decided to wander around and see if I could find any interesting subjects.  We saw this bit of orange colored material bobbing in the edge of the water and went over for a look.  I was hoping it was a fancy life vest with rolls of money secured in a pocket.  It wasn't.



I just bought this little hand-held mono-pod thing that lets me extend the camera up about a meter above my extended hand.  It doesn't take up much space, and it's stainless steel.  I was playing around with it, raising the camera up higher than the rock ledges with the 2 second shutter timer. It's a new perspective.   It's also a good way to get an angle down onto this sharp 'iron shore' rock around here, without having to climb up onto it barefooted.   This is not good barefoot material.



Almost all of the windward sides of these cays are like this.   The soft limestone is eroded by the wave action.  The tops are eroded jaggedly by the intermittent splashing water during rough weather, and the undersides near the sea surface are worn smoother by the steady, daily wave action.  Eventually, these ledges get severely undercut by the waves.   And they do break and fall off.



For some reason I have forgotten, Dooley the Delinquent was off exploring and unavailable for me to put in the photo as a scale.  I tried resting my hand on the overhanging ledge to give you an idea of the size.   This rock is about my eye level while standing in the water.   The cold, dark, murky miserable water.   You aren't buying that one, are you.



This ledge is amazing.  It's shaped like a suspended hook, or arm, barely attached to the main shore.  I was expecting it to fall off any moment.  But realistically it could be here for years to come. 



And it could break and fall off in the very next hurricane.  Which we hope is years to come.   Never would be good.

Like many marine limestone formations, these rocks have a number of small caves eroded into them.  They're everywhere, in fact.   I was experimenting with our new camera, and took this one with the flash on.



Many of these caves are plenty big enough to hide in, should someone be inclined to hide in a cave on a sunny day for some reason.  And if that someone were very quiet, and muzzled a certain dog, it might be difficult to see them inside the darkness if you were standing outside in the bright sunlight looking for them.



I also found out that just because it's possible to quietly sneak up behind someone looking for you, that doesn't also mean that it's a good idea to sneak up behind someone that's looking for you.   I've now heard it suggested that there may be some medical applications for such a waterproof camera. 



At least, that's what I think she was talking about. 

We decided to move on,  hoist the anchor, raise the mainsail, and see what's around the next bend.



 This is another of our little sailing trips you would never have read about.  It didn't merit a blog post on its own.  Another ho-hum day in paradise.

We spend a lot more time at South Side Marina than we report here, too.  It's only a few miles down the road and we get involved with the cruisers who come through there from time to time.  They have a couple of traditions that we appreciate.  Every day at sundown  the visiting sailors gather for drinks, and to watch the sunset.  We like to stop by and meet the people that belong to the voices we talk to on the radio.  These next few photos are not very good, because I had the camera set wrong.  I'm still learning about it.

I found out something useful about the software that Nikon ships with these cameras, too.  When I took this photo of the little shelter where the imbibing tidal tribe subsides, I had no thoughts of making a panoramic photo of it.  I was just taking a photo of La Gringa in conversation with Jo, from the sloop Xanadu (which is for sale should anyone here in the TCI be interested in a nice boat).  I also wanted a photo of the TCI Customs and Immigration Land Rover.  These guys come to the marina and clear your boat into the country. And out of the country. And around the country.  And money changes hands each time.  Every island nation does it. Two of the cruisers were in the South Side office with their paperwork clearing in through customs while we were there. I thought it was nice that they could enjoy a few beers ashore while waiting.  The Customs guys here are generally pretty mellow professionals as long as they don't get any grief or the feeling they're being mislead.    The job is part of the game.




Then, I took a couple of steps to the right and snapped this photo of the several visiting monohull sailboats presently visiting Providenciales on their cruise.  Again I had no intention of putting these shots together.  There are some things you do when  planning to combine images to make them fit well.  I didn't do any of those things.



And I didn't take more photos of the monohulls because, well, to us die-hard multihull aficionados, a monohull is sometimes referred to as 'half a boat'.   Of course this is all friendly rivalry.  The monohullers have their pet names for multihulls, too.  And no, I am not going to list them here.   I'm on the other team, remember.

Well, when I was looking at these photos of South Side while trying to make up my mind whether or not to even post them here, I saw these two and decided to try a program called "Panorama Maker 5" that came with the Nikon AWA100 camera.

In the past I had sometimes used a program called "Stitch Up" that will put up to three images together, but to be honest I haven't been that happy with the results.  You have to get everything just right.   I was curious as to whether this "Panorama Maker 5" stuff would work with two lousy photos like this.   I only had to load them up and pick three common points on both photos.  I picked that street light, the corner of Bob's gazebo, and the corner of the short concrete wall.  I didn't expect much, since the photos are admittedly pretty lousy, and the perspectives were different.  I was very surprised when the software munched it all together and spit this out:



That's pretty good results.  Notice the two people walking way down the sidewalk along the quay?  Their legs and postures are different in each photo of course, since they were walking while I was taking the photos. And they are in the area of the overlapping zone between the two photos.  It appears that the software is good enough to handle that without blurring them.  I'm impressed.

So, eventually I did read the manual for the camera and discovered that it has a totally automatic panorama mode that eclipses both this software and the earlier 'Stitch Up' program.  I've now deleted the old program from the computer.  This new stuff is way better.    Now, I just need to pay more attention to the images themselves.

Not all of the photos taken that day are totally bad.  Here comes another cruiser making their first stop since leaving the Bahamas.   They're just in time to clear customs, too, if they hurry.



We'd hoped for a good sunset image over the water, but as is often the case, the sun and clouds had other ideas.   I did try, and although the sunset was a flop this was an okay image of Bob-the-marina-owner's own boat.  It's been undergoing a complete retrofit for two eons now. I think it's one of those things when you have to have the time, materials, and money all at the same time.  That happen a lot where you live?  I didn't think so.  Here neither.  But his boat is looking good.  We'll try to remember to ask him about it. He's trying to get a restaurant finished here, too. There goes the time and money for the boat, right off the bat.  But we can usually count on some decent weather here.   And I guess any sunset you can walk away from is a good one.



Yes, alcohol is sometimes a factor in these sundown meetings.



And with a 'like mother, like son' segue, here's another of my stepsons, Ben, on his first scavenging trip to West Caicos.  Does it look to you like he enjoyed himself?



You really didn't think you'd get through a post without a mention of another West Caicos beach combing trip, did you?  Ben wanted to see the place, we don't need much of an excuse, and we didn't let the threat of some ugly weather scare us off.    I'll try to keep this one mercifully short.



We did the usual shopping for mahogany and teak and anything interesting.  I found this little beach arrangement and thought it worth a photo.   I liked the glass bottle and fishing net float theme.



And when nobody was watching, I confess I picked that bottle up and gave it a quick rub, just in case.  There was no flash of light, no smoke, and no genie.  But I'm not complaining.  I already have a lot of what I would have wished for, anyhow. (A big part of which is sitting at her desk studying Spanish with that "Rosetta Stone" software as I write this).

You've probably heard something along the lines of 'one man's trash is another man's treasure'.  They don't mention that a lot of one man's trash can also be a dog's happy hunting ground.




He's lucked out with a lot of his wishes too, come to think of it.  Should have named him Riley.

(note from the future,  October 2012, I just looked back at these photos on a new computer, and see that the right side of many of these photos is being cut off.  Dooley's thoughts above, for example.  If you are seeing the same thing , sorry about that.  If you ever want to be sure you are seeing the entire image, just click on it.)

I wanted to mention something unusual that happened while we were strolling the uninhabited beaches of West Caicos.   We heard, and then saw, a USCG helicopter coming north across the Caicos Bank headed back toward the airport on Providenciales.   This isn't unusual, we see the USCG here quite a bit.  They have a thing going on with the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Bahamas called "OPBAT", and I made that a link if you want to read up on the program.

What was unusual was when the helicopter suddenly slowed up and descended into a hover  just above the water.   They were in this hover for 15 minutes or more, and kicked a lot of mist into the air.  I hope they have their WD-40 ready when they get home....

We could not see any reason for their interest from where we were standing on the beach about a mile away.  Nothing  was protruding above the sea, and we didn't see any rescue swimmers or basket activity.  Just a long hover, over one specific spot.



I cropped that photo to give you a better look at the aircraft and the water they were kicking up.  I did take a compass bearing  (121 deg. mag) from us to that location, and when we left to head home we drove the skiff out on that heading hoping to see what had caught their interest.



Privately, I was pretty excited.  I figured that maybe rubbing the funny shaped bottle might have worked after a fashion, and my third wish was in the making.  I was all set for a shiny, waterproof briefcase full of money to float into my life.   I was wrong.    I kept the bottle though.  This is getting interesting.  Does anyone know if it's possible to rub a genie the wrong way?

Well, what's interesting to me is just another distraction to Dooley the Destructive.  He was off exploring a really nice big solid hunk of boat that had floated ashore.  That's an oxymoron, isn't it?  A solid hunk of boat?      No clue as to what he was thinking.



Right before we left for the ride home we spotted a sting ray I thought was snoozing  in the shallow water off the beach.  I saw this as a good opportunity to get a close up and personal photo of one of these with my new camera, and without having to frantically flipper faster and faster to finally focus in frustration.  So I boogied on over, camera at the ready.  Sneaking up from behind, again.



And once again I got a different reaction than the one anticipated.  This one actually stuck his tail stinger up out of the water, to show me what he thought about me startling him. He also wanted to show me that he was 'carrying', I guess.  I wasn't trying to harass him, mind you. I do have a healthy respect for these guys.  I remember what happened to Steve Irwin, and we've used the 'stingray shuffle' when we had to walk through murky water.   Which doesn't happen very often here.  We only have sandy water for about two days after a big storm.   The rest of the year it looks like these photos we've been posting right along.



We see various flavors of rays all the time around here, and it would be a rare day on the boat if we didn't.  Rays, barracuda, shark... it all becomes part of the neighborhood gang if you spend enough time in tropical waters.  And the Southern Sting Ray is one of the most common.

They're not exactly cute, and while I would admit they're a bit standoffish, I'd never had one actually pull a weapon on me before.   I decided that I would leave this guy alone with his switchblade. I guess stingrays are grumpy when they first wake up or something.  For all I know, he was hiding from the Coast Guard.  Probably has connections to organized slime.

This is another example of a boat trip that I wouldn't have even mentioned if I wasn't doing some photographic house cleaning here.  Some of these images are worth posting, don't you think?

I  put some of my  DIY projects on the blog, but not, by any means, all of them.  And I'm not going to turn this into a DIY post, either. I don't scurry around with a camera taking photos of every little project I get into.  I never mentioned it, for example, when I was re-sawing beat up old driftwood to make this box to hold our binoculars at the house:



A lot of the auto and boat repair stuff involves greases, paints, and chemicals and I don't want the camera anywhere near that stuff.  But we usually don't even make any mention of it here because there's so much of it.  I don't think a day goes by that I don't have to stop whatever I'm doing to fix something that just packed up.  Or fell off.  Or rusted shut.  Or rusted open.  You know how it gets when you're afraid to scrub the paint on something too hard?   I couldn't even estimate how many tires I have changed since we moved here.  It would be less than 100, but by how many I can't tell you.  And a lot of the little stuff just doesn't merit attention, as it's no longer something we'd consider to be unusual.

I just went looking for an example of what I'm talking about and noticed a recent project sitting right next to me. My favorite sunglasses broke a few weeks ago.  I like these polarized ones with a reading insert right in the lens. I'm only fuzzy from my fingertips to my brain.  Like almost everybody over 40.  It's maddening, but there it is.   I was down to my last pair, and they broke.  I went through all the usual reiterations of Krazy Glue and duct tape, but the time comes when things just won't fly any more.  One of the advantages of a shaven head is that it extends the possibilities for a DIY artist with duct tape.  But there are social costs with that. People refuse to be seen with you.  Strangers seem to always be crossing the street.  And themselves...

Backup shades  just won't do.  They feel like someone elses shoes.   So looking at my favorites in three pieces last week, I had an idea.  I salvaged some aluminum satellite dish that the hurricane ate, made staples from stainless bicycle spokes  and I think I've managed to get a few more months out of these.



Not pretty, but they're not very likely to get stolen, either.

Some of the photos that usually don't make it are the ones we take for no particular reasons.  Oh, they seem to have a reason at the time, but then later I look through them and ask myself why I bothered.  What was I thinking, for example, when I decided to take another photo of yet another stick we picked up, brought home, and varnished?  I spare you a lot of those, usually.



Or those photos of moments that seem triumphant at the time that feel pretty silly later on.  For example, I finally decided to try my hand at growing tomatoes here.  It's tricky, because the dirt here is essentially the same thing as the bags of lime some people have to dump on their lawns to combat acidity.  Here, we seek acid.  I've had good luck with coffee grounds as an acidic organic, believe it or not.  My new tomato plants and I enjoyed our morning coffees for the past couple of months.

Until we ate them.

This was our first attempt, and the result wasn't going to win any blue ribbons out behind the pig squealing competition, but these were the best tasting tomatoes we've had in six years.



I guess there's nothing like home grown.    I need to find another strain, though.  Or plant a whole lot more of them.  I grew these from seeds I took from a Kew, North Caicos, tomato.

Some photos, well, they just kind of made sense at the time, ya know?  Like last week when we had to truck in two 2600 gallon tanks of RO (Reverse Osmosis, i.e. desalinated sea water).  We were sitting in the house and noticed that it took the guy only about as half as long as usual to empty a truck load into the cisterns.  So I went out to see why.  We've found it a good idea to pay attention when proven procedures suddenly get different, and to ask why around here sometimes.  Well, in this case, I spotted the reason right away.  They have a new Honda pump on the truck.  Vast improvement over their old pump, which worked when it felt like it, and was really tricky to start.  Kind of like an old motorcycle I once owned.  If it didn't fire up on the third kick,  you had another shot at it around the seventh one.  If you had the choke, throttle and spark advance  just right.  And didn't flood it.    This new pump starts right up as Honda products usually do.  I was grinning, the water guy was grinning, we were both just so happy about his new pump.  So happy I went in the house and got the camera.

What was I thinking?



About how much faster he can deliver water, and how that will help him make another couple of deliveries a day, seven days a week.  He gets $115 a trip.  His life just got better. I guess I got caught up in the moment. And we have a lot of those kinds of photos that never make the cut.

Oh, and the experimental shots.  There are scads of those.  Especially when we get a new camera.

This is one of my first tries at a full moon (photographically speaking, of course) with the new camera.



I've since found out how to better set up the camera, and know I can do better.  OF course, I gotta wait a month to prove it, now.

I think the last category of photos we tend to relegate to the cyber-dusty shelves of a thumb drive somewhere are the cute Dooley shots.  I think I told you about one of his new tricks when he thinks it's meal time, and I'm not moving fast enough for him.  He'll squirm his sneaky way up and try to wedge himself between me and the computer.




Don't let this furry little face fool you.  His, I meant.  He's a conniving little con artist.
And we somehow find ourselves taking a lot of photos of him, as you well know.



I recently found out that the new camera will also do both slow and fast motion video.  My first tries at Dooley the Delighted catching a tennis ball in the air are encouraging.  Remember those National Geographic videos of the Great White Shark chomping down on a sea lion in extreme slow motion?
 It's kind of like that except that none of the fuzzy stuff in Dooley's video bleeds.

I probably should lump this one into the category with the water truck.  One of our friends down the road (the first M of the M&M family) called me up for some ideas on getting this hunk of 1/2" steel rebar out of the dirt road near his house.   No, please don't ask me how this got there, or why it was so well embedded there, or why no one else had removed it.  I can't answer any of that.

But remove it we did.  And I thought it was worth a photograph at the time.   



Now that the adrenaline rush of 4x4 and chain is over, I can see that it wasn't. See what I mean?

Well, I seem to have nattered on here until another blog post is big enough to get away with.  I'll leave you with a photo of our lucky bottle,  recently found in the sands of West Caicos.    I'm still waiting for that briefcase full of money.  We're in the boat-buying mood again. Maybe one more rub will do it.  I just missed the full moon, was that supposed to be connected?




Oh wait a minute.  Even with a completely non-standard blog post with no plot, story line, or coherence whatsoever, I can't end it like that. Ending things with a bottle can get dangerous.

So I'll end it with a bizarre sunset from just last week.   When I first saw this one, I thought maybe someone had swayed too close to a tiki torch during Happy Hour.  I flinched and waited for the sound and shock wave, but nah.  Just another sunset..