Season Opener

In which we respond to a heartening heap of  missives, comments, and emails

inquiring about our first Tropical Storm experience this year.

We awoke to an unusual sky on August 1st. We've become accustomed to a semi standard selection of predawn lighting arrangements to our east.  We've seen a lot of the available combinations of sky, light, and water. We know that rosy glow as the sun bunches its muscles to leap up above that clear line of horizon into a cloudless sky.   We've stood with morning coffee and watched  amazed as old Sol  painted, slashed and repainted a rapidly changing cloudscape. Like a maniacal cosmic Jackson Pollock with brilliant colors that change and fade even as we stare in smiling appreciation.  We've shared breakfast with  a lot of squalls and thunderstorms and we've had our eyes  assaulted by blazing dawns.  You know, that awakening burst  like the sudden surprise of a policeman's flashlight at a drive in movie.  But this was different. Layers of clouds. Different strata, as far as the eye could see.  I knew it wasn't going to be a spectacular, blog-worthy sunrise but it was so non-typical that I snapped a photo anyhow.  Just in case.

Life's been chugging along pretty much normally. Or as close to normal as it ever gets around here.  Just a few days before, we had seen a really nice version of this same view without the ominous parts.

I included this next photo because I thought it has a certain, well, fiddle dee-dee aspect to it.   That's one of our friends playing a little horn from our 3D printer.

I assure you, Mr Hinderaker is a different animal when he puts his architect's hat on.

Wait a minute.  That IS his architects hat... This could be trouble.

We're still spending a lot of time at South Side Marina working on the boat.  And there's still a traditional gathering most evenings at Bob's Bar for the sunset happy hour.

We'd been watching a bit of a disturbance working its way westward from Africa over the Atlantic.  Our weather watchdog, WunderMap, showed us the situation pretty succintly.  We were expecting Tropical Storm Bertha to run right smack dab over the top of us.  And soon.  The main question was what kind of footwear she'd have on during the process.  This thing  had winds of 50 miles an hour and was doing another 22 in forward motion.  Sailors think that's pretty fast.  Especially sailors trapped with no place to run to.

I'd been looking for a reason to see if I could take the U.S. Coast Guard's weather fax broadcast on Single Side Band (SSB) from a simple receiver to a fax program on an iPad. I'm slowly trying to move myself from PC dependency to the iPad generation.  So far, it's been a pretty rocky trip.   I can't work without a keyboard that makes clicking noises, I guess.   Touch screen is still counter intuitive.  I used to get my hands slapped for that. Anyhow, I set up a little Sony worldband radio receiver next to an iPad. That wire stringing off to the left is a 7 meter antenna.   The little black box behind the iPad is an amplified speaker.  I figured I needed some volume to hear a fax signal over the ambient atmospheric noise on the patio.   The plastic glass is full of lemonade.  Really.

It took me a few tries before I managed to get anything useful out of this little setup. Oh there was my usual grumpy impatience and irascibility to get through first.   I had some frustrated and ugly thoughts about the Sony, iPad, and probably even the Coast Guard's radio.  No hair pulling, though.  I don't do hair pulling.  Any more.

I was managing to get some data finally, and tried to take a photo of the iPad screen.   Duh.   See, I told you I was new at this.

Then in the midst of one of my diatribes about the current state of the computer industry, La Gringa pointed out that there were buttons on the iPad that I could  just press to preserve screen shots.  Hmph.  Go figure. Good thing I have her, isn't it?

So after getting my hand wringing  frustration and teeth gnashing behind me (she's been calling me Captain Cranky Pants after reading it on some curmudgeon-bashing women's sailing site)  I managed to actually start getting usable data.  This is from  a little $130 radio sitting next to a hand-me-down iPad on a noisy patio. Yep, a nice image, but not nice news.  I guess I was sort of hoping it would refute WunderMap. Not going to happen though.  I think all these weather guys are in cahoots.

I think that this was about the point where we realized that it would behoove us to start thinking seriously about what was shaping up to be the first storm of the season.  Of course it was pleasant to take my lemonade out to the patio and twiddle radios and computers.  I regaled the dog with tales of how it was back in the old days, of Loran C and microwave navigation.   He wasn't all that impressed with the Coast Guard's weather fax from New Orleans by the way.  He was expecting jazz, I think.  Or Snoop Doggy Dogg.

The first decision we made was not to haul the boat out of the water for this one.  This was not an easy decision.  We will never forget what happened to us back during another storm named Hanna.  It was early September, 2008, and the whole situation was remarkably like this one.   A tropical storm, nothing much to worry about, passing a bit to the north east of these islands.   And it did just exactly that.  Tropical Storm Hanna passed north of us, bumped us around a little, and then showed us her backside as she gazed up toward the USA.   And we had a boat in the water then, too.  And we decided not to take it out of the water for that storm.   And that boat was smashed upside down onto Heaving Down Rock .  The treacherous little tropical tart made a sudden hard left for some reason, and caught us all looking the other way.  She came all the way back down to Providenciales  holding a slip of paper with our name on it.  But as a full fledged hurricane this time.  There were 12 boats smashed from the dock we were tied to, and reports of dozens more lost nation wide.   And it's not a very wide nation.

This is the path of  Hanna through our neighborhood six years ago.  It looks like we were a triple victim of her side trip to Haiti:

Gosh, that looks a lot like the track of Bertha only a hundred miles further north.  And you can easily see where Hanna decided to get serious, headed back down south and did that tropical two-step all over us for three days.  Ouch.

So, back to the preset panic, we decided that if we were going to chance leaving a boat in the water again, this time we were going to tie it to something a little more substantial than Sherlock Walkin's floating docks in Leeward.  We decided to tie it to Bob's floating docks at South Side Marina.   And I do mean that we really tied one on this time.

You might reasonably ask why the clueless looking guy is out playing around  in the middle of the marina in a dinghy with a paddle, when he should be tying up his boat. Notice  that the clear Caribbean blue sky and water.....have apparently fled the scene.

Well I'll have you know I'm not as stupid as I look, recognizing that it would take a whole boatload of stupid  to facilitate that equalization.   We were tying up the boat.  This was our stern anchor point.   I lowered a big Danforth anchor and a lot of chain into the marina.   I ran the rope anchor rode along the bottom, weighted by the chain, and we attached that to the boat.

The chain laid along the bottom until the rope anchor rode came up right off the aft end of our boat.  We ran that through a center chock on our toe rail and then to one of our biggest sail winches.  I hoped that this would let me dash out in bad weather and put  a few cranks on this from a sheltered position if needed.

This also let us keep the dinghy attached across the stern of the boat, and I planned to use that as a big and expendable fender should some other boat break away and drift into us.  This orientation also made it easy for us to keep an eye on the most likely other boats to do something like that.

We ran three lines from each hull to hard points on the concrete wharf, not putting all our eggs into the floating dock basket again. Old dogs, new tricks, you know how that goes.

You can see that the other two  sail boats turned around in their slips with their bows pointed to the south.   This let them put their main anchors out.   We decided to keep our boat bow in.  My thinking was that if we did get a strong storm from the south and anchors let go, I wanted my propellers and rudders free of this mess of lines near the docks.   That might be the only way I could maintain position in some situations, running the engines in reverse.

If the storm tracked as forecast, it would be east of here and our wind should be from the north.  But nobody really knows how these things are going to track until they've left their tracks behind them.

There are two visiting sailboats in the marina, both mono hulls and both American.  I think anybody with any sense is long gone by now, safe and snug wherever they plan to spend hurricane season.    And we all roped back to the pilings on the concrete.  There's a lot of rope in this photo.

Sure hope nobody was planning to duck into this spot unobstructed at the last minute.  That would cause some problems.   I'd say this slip is 'tied up at the moment'.

If you were accustomed to the clear water here, you'd notice immediately that the water coming in on this tide is not clear.  It's murky with stirred up sediments, and that looks even more ominous to us with the failing light.  The crystal clear water of the Turks and Caicos Islands has spoiled us.

The marina was mostly cleared out for this storm.  One of the Molasses Cat crew boats was taken out of the water, and the other was secured against the fuel dock.   Bob's sailboat Valhalla is tied in her usual and well-protected spot in the little short stub canal, and that boat on the left at the far end belongs to Flamingo Divers.  And there was one small power boat pulled up near us.

And there was us.    That white line crossing behind the power boat ( above) went to our aft port cleat. I had to splice two lines together to reach around that boat.  Our  mid boat  cleat  was tied to the floating dock,.  And the bow cleats to the vertical posts which are bolted to the concrete.  Oh yeah, we put some line out this time, Hanna.  And we used the stern anchor to pull the boat out away from the dock so it wasn't actually touching anything harder than the ocean.  At this point, Dooley the Doofus realized that something unusual was up.  This wasn't our typical Go-Work-on-the-Boat trip.   We spaced the boat out with fenders and lines and the anchor, we wanted a clear area around it to allow for some motion.

The boat was more or less suspended like a fly in a spider web.  But hopefully without the getting eaten part.   Come to think of it, I'm going to change that to suspended like a relaxed tourist in a hammock.    I like that one better than the dead fly analogy.   But nobody was relaxing in hammocks at our house on this weekend.

The skies were actively engaged in a quick and quiet slide into serious gray scale.   We could still see isolated patches of blue through the bands of thunderstorms approaching from the south east.   I was going to use the old 'calm before the storm' cliche' here, but my better judgement prevailed.  So I won't.  

The storm was planned to pass through the next morning.   We decided to sleep on board the boat in the marina for that whole Tropical Storm experience.  We were fairly confident that the chances of the house breaking up or sinking were pretty remote.   And if we were at the house we'd be  awake worried about the boat.  So the three of us spent the night aboard, listening to the wind through the rigging.   And the neighbor's halyard slapping against their mast all night.   Hey! I think that would be a good name for a bar:   The Slappy Halyard.  A bar name with a built in sobriety test. Perhaps it should stock Pheasant Plucker, which is a pure Highland single malt whisky.  An Aberdoonian once told me "When ye cannae prrronoonce it, ye should naelonger be drrinking it."

We crawled out early the next morning to realize that I had not finished hooking up the gas line to the rebuilt stove just yet.  It's on The List, too.  It just keeps getting bumped off the first page.  We've learned that boats often establish their own priorities for these things.  Proper liquid management is always near the top of the list. We strive to exclude uninvited water from inside the boat.  So we couldn't cook on the proper stove, or "hob" as the Brits sometimes call it.   We did have an alternative, and although not perfect, we did manage to boil water for coffee and a couple eggs each on a portable propane grill.    It takes forever to boil water like this.   Do you think it was because I was watching?

Bob has been out several days fighting a bad case of Chikungunya Fever, but he managed to rally long enough to be sure that area boaters without access to television or internet were aware of the storm's progress.

We made a last trip to the house to be sure everything that needed to be closed was closed before heading back down to the boat to ride out the storm.    We looked at the latest storm tracking map, and it was showing Bertha to be right out on the Caicos Bank, about 25 miles south east of us and headed our way on a dotted line that ran right over Pine Cay.   Strange feeling to be just a few miles from the cross hairs like that.

And we looked out the window to the south east, and sure enough...... here she comes.  Tropical Storm Bertha  headed for our patio.  I think WunderMap pretty much nailed that one.   This is not a rainbow headed our way.   This is the view directly to the south.

We grabbed a fistful of dry t-shirts, locked up the house and headed back to the boat.    I'm thinking that most people would lock up the boat and head for the house. Somewhere in there is a clue.  The wind picked up as predicted.  We were seeing gusts that I feel were well over 30 knots. South Side Marina's location protects us from every direction but the south.   So of course Murphy's wind clocked around to the south. All the dock lines we meticulously adjusted and worried about  led to the north  and were slack.  The only thing that was keeping that boat  off the dock was the stern anchor.   Good thing we put that in.  That anchor and a piece of string from the bow to the dock would have done it.  No kidding.  All the force was from aft.

 We got the whole Cecile B. DeMille Tropical Storm treatment.  Technicolor.  Sound Effects.  We had Howling Winds.We got Lightning Flashes.  We had Crashing Thunder that tickled the insides of my ears when the loose stuff inside my head vibrated to that bass.  Of course this totally shattered our pitiful hulk of a dog with  his ongoing psychological issues.   He stuck to our feet like wet socks. The water outside the marina was forming long waves and the wind keptt blowing the tops off of them.   The sky, the air, the sea, it was all the same color of angry looking gray randomly lit by lightning strikes reflecting off  the whites of Dooley's eyes.

It was great.  We watched the whole thing from inside the catamaran.   I went out  to check on lines between squalls.   Scrambled up onto the top of the cabin to jam some butyl putty on a leaking cable feed through next to the mast. I crawled around inside the boat looking for leaks to mark with blue tape and a felt tip marker.   It's hard to find a good driving rain when you need one.  This was like a hundred fire hoses and a wind tunnel.   This is the cleanest that boat's been in months.    

We didn't get a full fledged hurricane out of this storm and we're quite happy with that.  The thrill of that whole experience wore pretty thin some years ago.    But we did appreciate the value of the training we got by putting ourselves through this instead of just hauling the boat.  Now we know the types of decisions we may have to make the next time we find ourselves threatened.   Perhaps experiencing what the ocean is capable of tends to engender some level of respect for it's potential.  At least with the survivors.

The storm started abating by late afternoon on Sunday. We felt confident  that the worst was past us and went back to the house for a good night's sleep. We left the boat tied up and the anchor out.   Take that, Hanna.   The next morning we could see that Bertha was well to the north and turning into a hurricane without us.  We were okay with that, and after a leisurely breakfast on a real stove we went back to the marina.  In one hour  we undid the previous day's labor.   We pulled the  anchor and put all our lines back where they normally are.  By the next afternoon, things were clear and calm and back to abnormal.

And other than her brief mention for the next few days on the evening news,  that was the last we saw of Tropical Storm Bertha.

Sailing Again

 The sun hadn't yet slipped up to that point of ambushing me over the pale fence of those clouds on the horizon, but it was close.   God's own laser was about to hit, but I had a few moments standing there on the patio, steaming fresh first cup of  coffee in hand.  It was still so hot I had to sip little bursts of the morning sea air in with the liquid caffeine.  Walking out onto the patio in that magic time just before the sun bursts loose has become somewhat of a tradition here. Sometimes we have a camera in hand, but usually we don't.  We carefully keep a weather eye to the east this time of year.   August is  the primary  proponent of our perennial prognosticated period of primo paranoia.  This runs from about right now into early October.   We know there's an ever increasing threat  as the heat of the African Sahara starts carelessly flinging off  those spinning tropical waves.   We watch the weather websites.  Have you seen the earth wind one?  Check that out.  Click on the "Earth" logo for the menu and then adjust the date. Whenever we see those whirling curlicues of wind and clouds escaping the Sahara and heading for the Cape Verde Islands,we know there's the potential  for another hurricane sooner or later. This is of some concern to us.    So far, this morning is looking pretty mellow.

We get a lot of mellow from living, sleeping, and breathing the very air on this small outpost of land surrounded by restless sea.   There are times when I walk past this view and it doesn't even register.  That's part of human nature I suppose.  What once was extraordinary eventually becomes the backdrop of your life.  It's just always there.  But with this as a backdrop, there are many times when something about the ocean or the sky just stops me in my tracks.  You've seen some of those moments in photos throughout this blog.  A few days ago, I was watching the waves as they interacted with the overhanging rock shoreline.  We've often noticed that the seas seemed rougher when we motored, paddled or sailed a small boat near the shoreline.   We'd figured out that it was twice as bumpy, because the waves were reflecting off of the island and crossing back through the incoming waves.  Well, I decided to try to get a video to show you.  If you just sort of trance out on the waves just below the center of the image, you can see the reflections going out to sea.

One of our readers had commented on wave patterns after our previous post, and told me that the Polynesians had predicted the presence of distant islands by observing wave patterns.  They have much more substantial waves to work with, and that all is starting to make sense, isn't it.  Big waves make big patterns.

We've picked up another outboard motor for the dinghy.  An expat friend of ours got it in a boat deal that he's explained to me twice that I still don't quite understand.  But I don't need to understand it.  He gets into a lot of good boat deals here.  So do we, come to think of it.   Anyhow, as I was saying we got a slightly bigger, much newer and only moderately broken motor out of it all.   It had most of the parts it needed, and has five more horsepower than the one that came with the boat.  So now we own two ancient Mercury two strokes, a 10 and a 15 horsepower.    I like two stroke outboards for small horsepower applications.  We do have a four stroke on our skiff, so I also appreciate the quiet and fuel efficient operation of the newer mandated designs.  But for pure power to weight ratio zip it's hard to beat an old Mercury  Well, actually, you can beat them.  Maybe that's the point.  There's just something about the chain saw scream of a two cylinder two stroke at full throttle that makes what's left of my inner ear rattle when human voices barely register any more. Or maybe it's knowing that they're a little bit like the Land Rover Defenders.  Forbidden fruit in the USA can be one of the perks of living here. Psst. Wanna buy a can of Freon?

After I identified, located, ordered, imported, mutilated and installed some throttle linkage parts  we loaded up the dog and the dinghy and did a little shakedown trip to see how the new old outboard performed. Theoretically, it should outrun the smaller one in  a contest between the new old motor and the old new old moto.  Huh?

I read a quote somewhere recently that I liked.  I wish I could remember where, so that I could correctly credit whoever wrote it but I'm not going to let that stop me from using it. Someone wrote that they were going to name their next boat Theory, because everything works, in Theory.   I wish I'd thought of that one.

It was another great day for small boats as so many of them seem to be down here.  Here's my version of a Paint-By-Number image of us heading up the Discovery Bay canal. Dooley the Delighted was all up for a rubber boat trip up the canal.  I've been trying to get to the point where I can do all this photo editing, layout and writing on a tablet but it's not easy for me.  I've been using an iPad and on my third keyboard for it.  I'm not there yet.  I need some good photo processing software for a tablet.  This one has some cute special effects and I tried out a couple of them in this post.  This does kind of look like a paint-by-numbers masterpiece.  By a six year old on a sugar binge.

Dooley the Destroyer always gets hyper on these canal trips. He goes all commando-in-a-rubber-boat-with-attitude on me. See, the little booger  knows that he can safely bark at bigger dogs from inside a nice secure boat. This brings out the obnoxious side of sharing life with the loquacious little yippy yahoo.  His version of liquid courage is a little different than mine, but the results are similar. Someone shooting his mouth off in a situation where silence might be a better option.  

He gets all steely eyed with his imagined canine version of Martin Sheen doing a thousand yard stare on the Mekong Delta. I could almost hear him humming the Ride of the Valkyries. 

Those readers who actually follow this blog will likely recognize most of these image locations.  This is the Discovery Bay canal system that opens into the same channel where South Side Marina is located.  We've made this canal trip dozens of times in a number of different boats.  The sights haven't changed much in general.  But I'll post up some familiar photos so you can sort of watch the slow decay of things here in the tropics.   And as we all should have figured out by now...everything changes.  Constantly.

These are the two 'obnoxious dogs who follow us up and down the canal barking insults at our own darling and blameless little terrieriest'.   According to Dooley the Defamist.  And he was in full voice at this point.  Apparently, dogs can't bark and swim at the same time.  I didn't realize that until Dooley pointed it out.   He became the canal king of trash talk.

Remember that old saying that if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem?  Dooley is a huge part of the problem.   He's as bad as they are. My ears are usually ringing after a few minutes of this.   

The dogs will run along the banks of the canal to stay up with us, barking and hurling canine insults, swimming where they have to. I almost called them the "local" dogs, but then I realized that Dooley has probably been living on this island since before these 'potcake dogs' parents were even born.   

 Do dogs bark in different accents?   Or is it all scratch and sniff with them?  

You may have noticed that we were having a difficult time even getting  a photo on this trip that did not have a dog in it.  They know every inch of this canal, and would take short cuts through the bush and come out barking every time we got close to shore.   I think they were entering into the spirit of the game.  At least, that's what I hope they were doing.  They look well fed and I haven't heard any missing person reports lately.

This next photo reminded me of something I wanted to point out about this canal network.   See that rusty metal thing lying there on the bank of the canal in this next photo?  The thing that looks like heavy steel plate welded to the end of a concrete filled section of pipe, looking alike a big drill bit?

Now look at the little scalloped shaped notches along the edge of the canal.  There are three of them in that photo alone. Can you tell that the radius of the notches knocked in the rock is the same as the heavy end of that hunk of iron?

That's because these canals were all dug with that hunk of iron doing the initial smashing of the rock. They used a crane to lift the iron battering ram high, and then dropped it onto the limestone. The weight of the heavy tool smashed and pulverized the soft rock enough that it could then be scooped out by bucket and front end loaders.  The man who did all this canal construction still lives near here, and we see him quite often at Bob's Bar.  That must have been a fun project.  And it's not finished, by a long shot.  I don't know if it ever will be, as Alan is pretty much retired now.  I believe that he's the same engineer who designed South Side Marina's lifting crane, by the way.  A good mechanical engineer will never run out of projects in a place like this.

We boogied up the canal, testing the outboard for reliability before taking it out into the ocean where we could open it up and test full throttle.   I'll put up some recent photos of the various same old sights along this section of canal.  And I'll tell you why in a minute.  I was playing with the photo software effects here.  Trying to spice up a dull photo.  Meh.

I suspect this part of Providenciales may be changing and in a direction we would prefer not to see. We're reading in the local newspaper that the people trying to put together the captive live dolphin prison have purchased land and apparently expect to go ahead with building this thing. There is some news on that in this article from the Sun.  The area where they were planning to build is right here, essentially. I posted a photo of the sign they erected near here in a previous post called Rusty Old Wrecks.  That sign got smashed to pieces, by the way. If this atrocity is allowed, this area will be  changed.  For now, it looks pretty much the same as it's been for the past several years.

We didn't go very far up the canal, as the purpose of the trip was really to test my repairs on the new old outboard motor.  We turned around at the big limestone smashing device and headed back over to South Side Marina.   Something about the names of these two boats tickled some distant memory that I can't quite identify.  I just know that  something that sounds a lot like " Moonlight  and Galliano" seems to set me off.  Is that the name of a country and western song?   It should be.

S/V Twisted Sheets is more or less seaworthy  most of the time, again. That sort of depends upon what's failed most recently and how critical it is to safe boat operation.  And it depends upon one's definition of "seaworthy". This old boat has been taking up most of our time so far this year but I did realize we're way overdue for a blog update so I threw this one together.  It has no central  theme, other than a loose shuffle of snapshots of this life we've chosen.  And recently, that's all been all about getting our sailboat ready.   The latest step in a long process that started one morning in New Jersey when we looked at each other and said "let's move to someplace tropical, get a sailboat, and explore."  This all doesn't happen overnight, apparently. No.  It takes days and days of work, weeks and months even.  And thousands of dollars.  Who knew?

I've been talking about this old boat of ours for quite a while now.  That should change more to me talking about where we're going with it, but we're still a few short panics and small projects shy of that point.   Putting a few hours in on the boat has become a big part of our day.  I've almost completely removed the interior vinyl and foam now.  We're down to bare fiberglass and plywood in most places.   Here's one of the last little areas to be stripped near the inside helm.

And it's not all tearing down any more.  We've started building back up.  For example, there was this big open space in the galley where I'd removed a small refrigerator when we got here.   We don't even know exactly what was in that refrigerator.  La Gringa had opened the door of it slightly to see what was in it, and that was the last time she touched it.   I ended up taping it shut, unopened, before tearing it out.  I heard rustling noises coming from it long after any sloshing inside should have settled down.  It sounded like the half life of someone's illegal science experiment.  There were things in that fridge.  Bad things.

So we gave it to a local Haitian guy with no olfactory glands and a sense of adventure. He seemed glad to get it. We were glad to let it go.

This abscessed refrigerator extraction left a  large hole in the cabinetry and I decided to install an ice maker in its place.  I wanted to do it in such a way as to have minimal impact on the original boat, and I also wanted to be able to easily remove it if we decided to put something else here some day.   So first I measured the space and drew the pieces  on Google's   CAD program, SketchUp.  That looks like this:

That white box at the top of the drawing is the bottom of the little portable ice maker.  I also decided to try using Starboard plastic for the low friction runners I wanted to install.   I built the parts in my little garage shop before taking them down to the boat.  Here's the pile of stuff from the drawing, come to life:

This is the home of the former refrigerator and its suspicious biological cargo.  We cleaned it out and painted it. I've installed the two slide/runners on the sides. Just a few screws to hold them in, and easily removed.  Correction, I should have said stainless screws. We've been replacing a lot of rusted fasteners on this boat.

After installing the sides, I had only to place the sliding platform on the runners and push it all the way back until the little latches on the bottom engaged.  Those are to keep this from falling out when we pull it forward into the boat to open the top of the ice maker.

I had already measured the ice machine and found that it needs to be extended about 8 inches out in order to open the top.  This is the little platform slid 8 and a half inches out.  That mahogany plank across the front of it is from  a weatherbeaten old hunk of driftwood we picked up over on the beach at West Caicos.

I like the thought that we "recycled" part of another boat that could have broken up decades ago.  We have no way of knowing how long that piece of mahogany floated, nor how many years it sat in the rocks at the edge of the sea before we found it. I haven't yet figured out what to do with the space under the new ice maker, but it's about the right size for storing frying pans and cooking utensils.  I'm sure something will come to mind after we've spent a few weeks on board.

We've continued to have problems related to the 12 volt electrical systems on the boat.  You may recall that most of them were pretty thoroughly fried by a lightning bolt when we were just north of Chub Cay up in the Berry Islands.  I know we'll never forget it.

The latest fallout of that is that the "house bank" batteries started to cook away. We returned to the boat after being away a few days to find that one of the four big Group 31 batteries was too hot to touch and almost totally dry.  I got rid of that one, and a few days later the next one went.  We are thinking that they were shaken pretty hard by the lightning strike, and they had been run down completely dead several times, and were also four years old.  So to head off future issue, we junked them and replaced them with four six volt golf cart batteries.   Here's the new batteries on their way to the boat. With yours truly being the mule that decided that this was a good time to take a break and take a photo.  That's about 250 lbs of batteries.  And for some stupid reason I was carrying them two at a time. Felt more balanced. And macho. And I think my arms are a little longer afterward.

I rested up for a few minutes, made all the excuses I could think of to put this off until later, realized that I had to get it done today.... and carried on.  Some parts of my life would go so much easier if I could just cut out the whining part in the middle section right between when I realize what I need to do, and when I actually do it. Next stop, getting the batteries onto the boat and down into the engine compartments.  Those are the old batteries on the left, compared to the new ones on the right.

The new batteries are taller than the old ones, and I had to modify the battery area of the boat to accommodate that.   The golf cart batteries are about ten pounds heavier than the old 12 volt batteries, even though the old batteries are larger.  From what I've been told, this is because they have a lot more lead in them.

While I was redoing the charging circuits I decided to add some 20 amp lighted toggle switches between the solar panels and the solar controllers, and between the controllers and the batteries.  I couldn't find any electrical boxes or brackets for toggle switches on the island, and they're hardly worth importing, so I made some on the 3D printer.  These are closed boxes on the top, open on the bottom.  That's to keep splashes off the switch wiring from above, and allow access and ventilation from below.  If you want the files to print some of these up, just ask.  I'm developing quite a library of 3D printed boat parts.

I haven't yet finished securing all the wire runs, but wanted to show you how the lights instantly tell me what's on and off in that area.   The blue lights mean the solar panels are connected to the controllers.  The red lights mean that the controllers are supplying 12 volts to the batteries.  Pretty, eh wot?

Back up above when I was whining about the batteries, I mentioned that they were taller than the old ones they replaced.  I had to move all the battery wiring up about three inches.  The easiest way I could think of to do this was to cut a piece of plywood the correct size and mount all the wiring to it.  Then I mounted the board up high enough to clear the batteries. I think this is a much better approach than drilling a few dozen new holes in the boat. I used existing holes to attach the plywood.  I think I'll be using this approach more often. Lets me make sweeping changes with minimal impact to the boat itself.  Plywood is cheap.

I had plenty of supervision while working on the wiring.  La Gringa took this photo of Dooley while he kept his eyes on my every move down in the engine compartment.  You can probably see why I wanted to put some splash covers over the switches.  It's all right under this hatch. I think Dooley is fascinated by areas accessible only by ladder.  I told him rats can climb ladders.

This is what an interested dog looks like from the other side of the ladder while he's contemplating how a rat would look climbing it.

We're still refining some of the things we've made for the boat.  I'm still looking for the best way to secure these heavy hatches when I'm working down around the engines, batteries, or in one of the lazarettes.  Latest version is just a hook, a piece of shock cord, and a shock cord gripper.  From the Gringos' 3D printer, again.  Prototype #2 is two pieces of plastic and a cord.  Getting simpler.

This is working pretty well, but I have one more mod to make.  I think it will be easy to eliminate the yellow piece by putting two holes in the white one.   I'll draw it up and print it before the next blog post.  I keep re-learning how good simplicity is on a boat.  One moving part is almost as good as no moving parts except that in this case the entire boat is a moving part.

We also had one more solar panel to install.  We brought this down with us from Florida on the boat two years ago.  And are just now getting around to installing it.  The truth is that we just haven't needed it.  I had a little bit of a hassle getting it installed and wanted to show you what I came up with.   Not because I think it's mind shattering clever, but because it worked pretty well and you might be able to use it.  The problem was that I couldn't reach the top of these bolts to hold them while I tightened the nuts from below.  La Gringa was busy with something else or she could have climbed up on the top of the boat  and played wench with a wrench.  But she wasn't around and my arms were just not long enough to reach both sides of the fastener.

We called upon the trusty rusty Dremel tool with a cutting disk to cut a groove in the end of the stainless bolts that I needed  to be still while I tightened up the locking nut underneath.   The black rubber on the bolt is a piece of fuel line tubing I am using as a shock mount for the solar panel.

The slot I cut with the Dremel allowed me to hold the bolt from turning with a flat bladed screwdriver while I tightened the nut with a wrench.  And it worked beautifully.

I know that it must seem like I am writing down every little boat detail as we go through this process.  I want to assure you that I am sparing you pages of DIY nightmares, experiences, and learning curves.  I could write several pages on the interior setup of a Simpson-Lawrence electric windlass, for example.  I could ramble on about my email exchanges with the Scotsman who apparently owns the remaining store of spare parts for these windlasses.  But I won't.  Risk of defamation suits, you see.
Well, maybe one photo.  Of the newly cleaned up and lubricated gear train.  Fun, huh?

We still haven't replaced all of the oft-lamented but still fried electronics.  Some of the stuff on the boat was pretty ancient, and won't be replaced.  We are still thinking through the whole electronic chart plotter morass before making a purchasing decision.  These days the trend is to integrate all the boat sensors in a central location and display them on overlays on one monitor.   I'm not totally sure yet, but I think I'm leery of this approach.  I must still be old school retro grouch, but I don't like the idea of everything depending upon one box of electronics to work.  So we're trying different approaches.  Redundancy.  Stand alone systems where possible.

One thing that's working pretty well so far is using an iPad with GPS to do the navigation chart plotting.  This probably won't end up being our final chart plotter, but it's stand alone and a good backup plan.  The problem is mainly reading the display from the outside helm.  We started out trying to read it through the window, which worked to some extent.  You can see the edge of the window at the bottom of the photo:

After listening to me complain and grumble for a while La Gringa came up with the excellent idea of wedging the iPad into the window track.  Ahhhh.... That's much better!!   Easy to see from outside now, although one does have to tilt one's head 90 degrees to the side kinda like a robin eyeing a short term earthworm, but it works. Thanks, dear.

I'm fairly certain that I can draw up and print some clips to secure an iPad where we want it to be, once we determine where we want it to be. We've been doing a lot of that lately. One of the best things about using a 3D printer is that it makes it easy to customize parts to exactly what we want for a given spot. For example, see those two little screw holes there to the right under the sliding window frame?   Those are from a flimsy folding drink holder that is, sadly, no longer with us.   As I am typing this, the printer is next to me making up a more rugged replacement for that drink holder.  It should be shaped something like this:

It will use the same holes as the former one. I don't like drilling new holes in the boat at every installation change.   SOME previous owners should not be allowed access to drill bits.  Nor silicon, but that's another story.  We've got a lot of holes to fill.

We finally got the boat back offshore recently.  We took her out just to sail, no other reason.   We wanted to make sure all the rigging was correct, since we hadn't been under sail for two years.  One of the first things I discovered when we tried to unfurl the Genoa was that I had wrapped the furling line when the sail was furled.  This is wrong.   As wrong as it could be, in fact.  I had to unwrap it all while we were underway. That'll teach me to pay attention next time.  Hopefully. Although it hasn't, yet. This is a roller furler.  That starts with "R" which I think is shorthand for "Arghhhhh!!"

While I was up on the bow messing around with my previous mistakes La Gringa was sailing the boat on the main sail alone.  That small island disappearing behind us is Providenciales.  We wanted to sail out far enough that we could see nothing but ocean in every direction.  And we did.

She didn't get to have all the fun, naturally.  I had my turn at the wheel.  Ah, now this is relaxing.  See our little iPad navigation system?  Very convenient, and I think I have an idea for a better mounting setup.  It's likely to involve a 3D printer.  I bet you knew that already.

And if you would like further confirmation of how relaxing this little sail was, please feel free to check with my back up engineer.  He thought it was pretty mellow out, his own self:

We left what's starting to feel like home at South Side Marina and just headed south. That block of clouds up ahead is over Molasses Reef which is the site of the oldest European shipwreck found so far in the New World.  This is on the southern edge of the Caicos Bank.  Aiming the boat at clouds is as good a destination decision as any when all we want to do is go sailing.

It's been way too long since we could get photos of Twisted Sheets under sail.    For people like us, this was a pretty good day.   Spectacular, actually. There's not much we would rather be doing.

One last peek at the island of Providenciales disappearing to the north as we sail directly toward the equator. I didn't bother taking photos after we were out of the sight of land.  I mean, it just looks amazingly like this, anyway, but with the land gone.  I'm sure you can imagine that.  As well as you can imagine the restraint I am showing by not lecturing you again about using clouds to navigate.  I won't, I won't, I won't.

You probably noticed that the sails were on the starboard side of the boat when we were heading south.  We had about ten knots of wind from the east.  

So after we turned the boat around and headed back toward where we hoped the island would be, the same easterly winds pushed the sails to the other side of the boat when we were heading north again. And that's about as technical as I'm going to get about that, but in the future you can probably look at the sails of any boat in this country and tell what direction its going.   The wind is almost always from the east.

Here's a video of what sailing this boat is like on a relaxed beam reach.  We were only averaging around 4 knots in 10-12 knots of wind.  That probably doesn't sound like much, unless you consider that we're moving an entire three bedroom, two bath apartment smoothly along at  a brisk walk.  Try that one at home.

No land in sight at this point.  And the water color changes with the angle of the light.  And the angle of the light changes with the boat direction and time of day.  We're trying to learn all this while we think about taking photos. And navigating. Good light is essential for navigating safely around here.  The GPS tells us where we and the islands are, but there is very little data on where the submerged coral heads and rocks and sand bars and shoals are located.  It's important to read the water.  This is all essentially unsurveyed outside the established routes.

Sometimes, the angle of the light is diffused by atmospheric conditions.  This is a photo taken from the house during a particularly dense little rain shower one afternoon recently.  We were feeling sorry for the crews of these two boats trying too get to the shipyard while visibility was quickly dropping.  We haven't seen one bit of fog in the nine years we've been here, bu lowered visibility in rain is pretty close.

I was looking at that photo and came up with another one of my silly band names.  How about  Saturated Atmosphere?  It has a kind of a rhythm to it, don't you think?

While you're thinking, what do you think this is?  Some one's idea of a civic beautification project?   A budet reforestation freak?

Nope.  It's a road hazard sign.   There is a hole in the dirt road and someone stuck a tree limb in it to warn motorists.  Not that uncommon, here.   We just never before bothered to take a photo of one of these literal "bush road signs".  

We have taken the Hobie out ONCE so far this year.  There's something sad bout that.  We love the little boat, and we love sailing it.  But the truth is that we're putting all our spare energy into the big sailboat and the Hobie is playing second fiddle.   It still sails as good as it always did, but we've moved on to bigger things.  I think we'll be putting this and the skiff both up for sale shortly. We plan to keep the dog, but would entertain offers..... Just kidding.  About the dog I mean.  I'm serious about selling the boats, though.

I see that this post has grown to sufficient length to qualify as finished. I never know just when to stop uploading the photos.  We take so many that it's sometimes difficult to pick and choose.  Especially when the post doesn't really have much of a theme to it, like this one doesn't.  It's more about what we've been up to lately, I guess.  I know we discard hundreds of photos to never be seen by anyone again.  Often when I'm looking at them I have a hard time remembering why I took them in the first place.

I may as well fit in another boat project here, as I know some of our readers are also cruisers.  This is the type of thing that's been taking up a lot of time lately.  In this case, La Gringa remarked that the anchor line was starting to worry her as it was getting frayed where the rope meets the chain.  Uh, yeah, that does look a bit shaky.

Someone used a simple backsplice through a chain link, and then tried to lash it with fishing line to take up the slack where the link will chafe the rope.   And a cable tie to keep the ends from coming unraveled.  Is that the correct splice for an anchor rode?  A frayed knot!  (Did you catch that one?)

Here's a better photo with something for scale.  Me.  And take a look at the rope just a short distance from the splice.  This was not good.  It had been snagging in the windlass gypsy when this oversized splice wouldn't feed into the anchor locker.

When I saw the splice that's been causing the anchoring jam issues, it reminded me of the lyrics in a Charlie Daniels fiddle tune I've been working on..."sit down in that chair right there and let me show you how it's done",

This is  what it's supposed to look like, in one version. There is another splice that distributes the line down several links into the chain, too.  I like this one better in this case.

It gave me an excuse to use my little folding fid, too.   Not much call for a fid these days. I guess I should explain why this is a better splice.  It's because it actually grips the chain link tighter when it's under load.  This means it doesn't chafe through as quickly as the previous splice here was doing.  This also feeds through the windlass gypsy and into the anchor locker a lot smoother. There.  Ain't you glad you learned that? Now go sailing.  Seriously. You should.  It's good for your soul.

While this post was sitting on my computer unfinished I further refined the old plastic hatch holder design.  And yes, it's further simplified.  Now it's down to one piece of shock cord and a hook.  We've also discovered that this hook will fit into the window channels, which gives us an easy way now to hang the iPad navigation screen anywhere we like in that opening.  Or to watch a movie in bed.   Gotta love these printers.

I just spent what felt like two brain minutes (probably ten milliseconds) trying to figure out WHY I took a photo of a loaf of bread.

Then I remembered why.  We had just returned from a trip to the grocery store and I was blown away by how much it cost us at the register.  I took this photo to show you that we pay $6.85 for a loaf of bread.   I bet that makes you feel better about your own grocery prices.   Does a loaf of bread equal a gallon of gasoline where you live?

After that discussion we determined that after adding in the cost of the gasoline to go to the store at $6.30 a gallon, and the cost of the electricity to cook, at $.50/ kilowatt hour, it would probably be cheaper to just go out for breakfast.

So we did.   We called up our friend Preacher and all met for brunch at the beach.  Nice spread.

Well, that's going to be it for this post, boys and girls.  We've actually got a nice time lapse video for a change.   It's a sunrise instead of a sunset.  C'est la vie, y'all, and welcome to the Land of MakeDo.

  Until next time...