Time Out

We've just returned to the island  after two months of camping in the Rocky Mountains.  We had Dooley the Demented with us and it was quite the experience.  He's still talking about it, in fact. Now we're back and finding out that trying to pick up where one left off can be tricky in a place like this.   Things change quickly here without constant attention.  All four disc brake rotors on the car rusted themselves silly and immobile while parked inside the garage, for example. Rainy season erosion has run unchecked and the driveway looks like a quarter scale version of Palo Duro. The house electricity was turned off for ten days before we returned home.   I've thought of several phrases to try to describe the very organic experience of cleaning out a freezer full of rotting meat after a week and a half without refrigeration.  In the tropics. I think the kindest thing for me to do here is just to leave it at that and not to even mention the similarities to falling face down in bovine road kill.

One thing that quickly caught our attention was how much further south the sun is appearing and disappearing over the horizon, almost ten weeks after we last saw it.

The islands have almost made it to the end of another hurricane season.  And the lucky streak continues. There were  several credible threats, some winds and a lot of rain, but the strongest storms to blow through the islands this year stayed just shy of hurricane status.  And Tropical Storms are quite enough on their own, thanks.   Ten inches of rain doing fifty miles an hour may not be a hurricane, but it's enough to make you scrunch your eyes up  into little slits the thickness of paper when you're trying to walk face first into it. We were delayed two days on our flight out due to the presence of Tropical Storm Cristobal. It made quite the ugly annoyance out of itself.  The evening before our scheduled flight out we stopped by Bob's Bar one last time before our trip. It was all closed up against the raging storm, but we managed to all huddle into the lee for drinks and hor d'oeuvres.  I wish I had taken a photo of that.   I did manage to snap a photo of Nevarde and La Gringa inside the closed up bar area.   The party was on the other side of that wall behind them.  We opened that up once the immediate squall went looking for us downwind.

We continued to work on our old sailboat right up into the end of August. We experienced  Tropical Storms Arthur, Bertha, and then Cristobal, with some admittedly diminishing enthusiasm.  We  finally packed up and left while Cristobal was still blowing, in fact.  That's a story in itself.  I think I'll save that one for the paperback.

 We toyed with the idea of leaving the boat in the water and continuing to work on her unless a major storm threatened. We go through plenty of years here without major storms scoring a direct hit, although they whoosh by to the sides of us all season long. We've gone through three hurricanes of note since we moved here, but all three of those occurred in a two year window. The other seven years we've been living here we had no hurricanes at all. So we were considering taking the chance and hoping that if we needed to haul the boat that the good folks over at Caicos Marina and Shipyard would have room for us on short notice.  And of course that's a gamble in itself. A few weeks of this stuff takes a lot of the fun out of tropical living.   Here's a still image from one of the videos we took during a tropical storm.

Well, the season drug on. All the cruisers with any sense were long gone to someplace safe. Bob  had asked us several times what our plans for the boat were. We looked down the dock, and felt a bit strange to be the last cruiser still in the marina. Kind of like being the last to leave the party.

We'd already begun winding down our flow of supplies and equipment ordered from the US. We got to the point where the Fed Ex truck only stopped by the house three or four times a week. Yeah, we're on a first name basis with the Fed Ex delivery man.

In July we anxiously watched as what later became Hurricane Arthur approached. In early August we closed up and hunkered down while what became Bertha came lumbering across the Atlantic at us. Then in late August we had Cristobal shut us down for several days. And each time we worried about the boat. Should we haul it, or can we control our anxiety long enough to chance another storm? It's not much fun watching these things come right at you while trying to appear normal on a diet of caffeine, fingernails and cheek lining.  Besides, it was getting kind of lonely there at the marina with only a single ferry cat for the perpetually re-stalled West Caicos development, and a few local fishing boats for company.

We were still enjoying our evenings watching the sunset at Bob's Bar, but storm clouds were gathering, again. It is that season, after all.

We finally decided we'd had enough hurricane and uninsured boat anxiety for one season and we took the boat out of the water for a couple of months. We showed up early one late summer morning in August to untie the lines from South Side Marina for the last time in this '13-'14 yachting season. The little diesels awoke with their usual puff of white smoke drifting across the smooth morning water. The smoke is really just steam that fades as they warm up with a rattly little diesel rumble that smooths out about the same time the smoke disappears. The vibrations of the still cool engines shake the hulls like drum heads and cause ripples in the water next to them. You can see them here, in the water just under the blue fender. Bob, we need to talk about that last tie-up cleat.

 

La Gringa had things ashore to do, so I took the boat around to the boatyard without a crew. At least I think that's what she was referring to by calling me crewless. Or maybe it just sounded like crewless, my hearing isn't all that great. I know this is really a small catamaran as these things go, but it's still a strange feeling to be alone on it when I'm accustomed to someone else on board to help with lines and fenders and watching the water.   It just doesn't feel right not to have someone else to shout at and blame things on.   But we had delayed what we knew we should have already taken care of. We have absolutely no incentive to take chances with this boat, and the best place for it during hurricane season is strapped down to the dirt a few steps away from the ocean. I backed the boat out of the slip and turned her to the open water. Pretty easy in an empty marina.

 

 

It's also pretty easy backing out when both engines work. This twin engine capability has been a rarity in our history with this boat. 

The fishermen on board the other boats waved as I slowly motored past. They've watched us working on this boat for the past ten months. It's a pretty small community here. And our friend Stanley (aka Burleigh) lives on the last boat on the left as we leave the marina.

 

 

I've already bumped a hull off one shallow rock out here that surprised me, so I take it very slow and easy until I'm out in deeper water. Here's one of the outer buoys marking the entrance to South Side Marina. After I clear this one I turn hard to the left and head east for several miles through coral heads and rocks. You know, the usual.

 

 

I hadn't really thought my way through the logistics of taking the boat east early in the day. The sun was low and the reflection on the water essentially blinded me to what was directly ahead of the boat. I should know better. Especially without another pair of eyes to help me spot the coral heads. I was having a real hard time trying to discern what was under that glare.   And the way these things work, the glare was  continuously and directly hovering exactly where I was heading next.  Can you spot all the coral heads between me and that distant point of land?    No.  Me either.   And that's the problem.   

The next time I need to make this trip I hope I remember to schedule it for early afternoon, to give the sun time to rise higher before I leave the marina.

After about an hour of white knuckled squinting  I passed the mysterious rock figures on the little hill overlooking the entrance to Caicos Marina and Shipyard. Finally, I was able to turn so that I wasn't being blinded. I could stop munching on the top of my heart every time a dark mass of rocks slid by seemingly just millimeters from the hull. Finally, I could turn into the entrance to the boatyard. I had a 10:00 appointment to haul the boat. I was there at 09:58.

 

 

La Gringa was watching my hopefully unexciting progress from the house. I think she knew that I was being optimistic about my appointment at the shipyard. I also think that she was also a little hesitant to haul the boat out and stop our forward progress.  There's just something counter intuitive about putting your summer toys away in August. Especially in a place where a totally acceptable version of summer pretty much runs year round.

 

The boat did not get hauled as planned. Despite my three weeks on the calendar appointment, they slipped two other boats in front off me. Here's a photo of Twisted Sheets tied up over at the Shipyard, still waiting to be hauled in the late afternoon. Silly old me had made an appointment to have the boat hauled at 10:00 in the morning, and had actually been there waiting at 10:00. And I was still waiting six hours later, when they shut down for the evening. We had to leave the boat overnight, and go through it again the next day. Someone who didn't know me might have mistaken me for irate. It was actually worse than that. 

 

But hey, it's island life, mon. You get over these things. Eventually.  Even on something like this, the third time it's happened.

 

We were back at the yard the next morning, and this time we managed to get the boat hauled out. They have workers  on hand to haul the boat into the slip. We back it in because it fits in the travel lift better. The forestays rub against it if we go in forward. These guys have a lot of experience pulling boats around by their lines.

 

 

Finally the boat is centered in the slings under the travel lift.

 

I've already posted plenty of photos of Twisted Sheets being transported around the Caicos Marina & Shipyard, so won't' repeat that here.   Finally, about 26 hours after my appointment to have the boat hauled and blocked, she was hauled and blocked.  This should be a pretty good spot to ride out all but the roughest of seas over the next few months.

That was basically some of the last things we did before leaving for over two months.   We had a lot of things to do at the house, of course.  Almost as much trouble as the boat.   And they're both more trouble than a simple camping trailer. Lately I've noticed that most of our lifestyle choices seem to incorporate some difficulty in keeping a full set of appliances running.

We are about to put the boat back in the water, and we have a lot of plans for some totally new areas to explore over the next few months.  So the blog should be improving again shortly.

We haven't been back long enough to accumulate some good new sunset photos, so I'll have to make do with one taken right before we left.    Unless, of course, you want to see photos of northern Colorado instead of tropical sunsets.  

Nah, I didn't think so.

Last half of The Latest South Side Marina Post

Now we're back to continue our story about updated aerial photos of the South Side Marina on the pleasant and continuously oxiding little island of Providenciales. The blog post just prior to this one is a bunch of photos we took while walking around the marina with a camera hanging underneath a kite. We tend to do a lot of that kind of stuff by the way. In case you are just joining us for the first time. The last part of the previous post was this photo, with a little point of land circled as our destination for the next post. Which is now THIS post.

We walked from that point of land in the circle back along the coast around the little hill there on the left. We wanted to get some aerial photos of the entrance to this marina and canal system. And we did.

We packed up our kite, string, camera, drinks, and one small obnoxious dog and trekked on out to that distant spur and this is what that very exact point of land looks like from just a short distance above it.

 

Well that's not entirely accurate. It normally doesn't have two people and a small dog on it. I'm the one at the end of the kite string. That's easy. But can you find La Gringa and Dooley the Demented? They're both there.

 

Reading the water here can be pretty tricky coming in on a boat. From sea level the water around this point looks deceptively safe on calm days. It's a sandy bottom, nice and smooth for the most part. The few rocks are easy to spot when the sun's up. And almost nobody boats around here at night. The issues with the areas around the approach to South Side is that it's all extremely shallow. You can see that shallow water there in the light colored parts. The next darker band is about a meter deep, with slightly deeper blue at 2 meters and the darkest stuff out on the horizon is 3 to 4 meters deep for the most part. We've bumped a rock that came up out of two meters of water to within three feet of the surface not far from on of Bob's buoys-Bob is the owner of South Side Marina, if you're just joining us-and there are thousands of unsurveyed coral heads out there just waiting for another boat to snag. They have endless patience.

 

This next photo is one of the reasons we thought it would be worth the trek out to this point to get an aerial image of the marina and canal entrance. The water in the foreground of this photo is about waist deep or less. The darker water is two to three meters deep. But you can see that getting from the banks into that safe channel could be nerve wracking if the captain wasn't familiar with this area. He will be heading straight at a rocky shore until the last moment, when he has to swing almost 90 degrees to the left. Fun entrance. We like to sit up at Bob's Bar and watch people coming in for the first time. Most of the people who run aground here hit the inside of the turn. This is good. That side is soft sand. The outside of the turn is made of much sterner stuff. Rock, in fact. With a thin veneer of sand that serves more as a disguise than it does as a cushion.

Bob maintains a number of buoys to help boaters identify the safe path into the marina. The two distant ones that I've marked are both red. Boaters should know that this means to keep those buoys on their starboard, or right side as they're heading into port ( "Red Right Return" is one way to remember it). So in a typical scenario with any boat that draws more than about two or three feet, the procedure is to swing around those two distant bouys, and then head straight between the near ones. Then turn hard left immediately after the boat passes the third red marker. Then exhale, and relax. There will be someone there to help you tie up the boat, and call Customs and Immigration for you, and the bar opens at 5:00.

 

The two near buoys marking the beginning of the deeper water are red and green. Here's a view of those from ground level. If a captain doesn't pay attention here, it's easy to get all the way across this little channel before one knows one is about to scratch one's paint job. The tide is also a factor for slow moving single screw sailboats. The bad news is that there's not much room for error and boats are aground quickly. The good news is that this is not a particularly scary example of a punishing bottom. Plenty of boats have waited out a low tide agrond right near that green buoy with nothing worse than scuffed paint damage.

 

The nice clear water between the channel and the shore is indeed just about belly deep to a small dog. I think he was standing on his tiptoes, though. He's funny like that.

 

 

Of course the dog was going to get into the photos sooner or later. It's gotten increasingly difficult to get an image that doesn't include him. He was a pain in the patoot before, but since he's been on Facebook he's become insufferable. As soon as one of us starts showing any interest in something we think might make a good photo, Dooley the Destroyer boogies over and plants himself in the middle of it all. I'm not kidding.

 

For example, La Gringa was trying to take a photo of another piece of discarded Haitian sloop wreckage. And ta-daaaaaa......Dooley Drops In.

 

 

Did you notice that the bow section he's standing on is just a log with a groove hand cut into it to hold the boards? This is how the Haitian boats are built. Designed for a one way trip of 150 miles. Expendable boats. One shots. And nobody knows how many of them never make it, disappearing at sea with about a hundred souls on board. I think the number would be pretty depressing, if we knew what it was. But nobody does.

 

I know I probably mention the Haitian situation here way too often to be entertaining. Probably because we see some of the results of the ongoing plight of that island on an ongoing basis. Here's a recent photo of a boat built just like the one Dooley is standing on. These guys are lucky. It's a US Coast Guard photo.

 

What's not apparent in that photo is that the cracks between the boards in the hull are caulked with strips of torn sheets driven in with a hammer, relying upon the wood swelling up when wet. There are no life jackets. No radio. No first aid kit. No food. No bathroom. No shelter. And there are an equal number of people jammed below decks, with no windows. We find pieces of these boats all around the south and western ends of the country. If a boat like this leaves Haiti and never arrives at another island, in most cases nothing can be done. And they do disappear. By the boatload.
 

Here's another example of Dooley the Photo Hog. When La Gringa tried to get close to get some photos inside a small cave out on the point, Dooley scooted up and ran inside. Can you see his legs there on the left, up inside the cave?

Yep, Little Mister You-Know-Who springs right smack dab into the middle of the action yet again:

Or let her call out "Hey, come take a look at all this bright yellow polypro embedded in a big hunk of concrete" and before I can get there, that last unobstructed view has already been claimed and soaked up by our furry little busybody. And he always gets this "who, me?" look thing going.

We were pretty much at the end of our rope at that point. Yuk yuk. We'd run out of ideas and were running out of daylight too. We thought this view of the submerged rocks off the point was of some interest. We think the patterns are caused by the overhanging edges of the shoreline breaking off over the centuries. But what do we know. Maybe they're a secret code for aliens.

While we were walking back down the road from the bluff to return to the marina, we noticed how lonely the S/V Twisted Sheets looks sitting in her slip with no other masts nearby. We're planning to have her hauled out of the water at the next threatened storm. We never know which one will be THE one, and two little ones have come by here already. Quiet time is a good time to get some hull work done, too.

We were back at the marina the next day, and noticed that another boat had pulled in since we took these photos. We still had the kite and camera in the car with us, so we flew it up over the lower parking lot for a slightly different perspective from directly overhead. Nothing new, other than we were curious as to who would be this far from home during storm season. They only stayed for a day or so, and then took off. I think they were headed south.

 

 

I'm starting to get the hang of writing and editing on an iPad. And it's a real pain for an old PC head like me. The main positive thing about it so far is the portability of the iPad. As far as being useful for creating anything more complex than basic mental finger painting, iPad is not so good. I think it's more of a tool for looking at what other people have done, and staying in touch. But since portability is what I'm interested in, I shall attempt to persevere. I'm also a cheap SOB and don't particularly want to spend another kilobuck on yet another laptop computer to feed to the elements here. sacrifice to Poseidon's breath here in the gentle yet insistent little nibbling teeth of the Trade Winds. Two computers dead so far this year. It's true what they say about electrons and salt. I've had two laptop computers fail so far this year. It's getting expensive.
 

That's pretty much it for this post. Things are wound down a bit in the islands for the next month or so. It's a good time to visit if you like calm clear water and don't like crowds. It's definitely the best time for diving and the resorts are typically offering some incentive deals. Sure, there's always a chance of a storm this time of year but they tend to blow through pretty quickly and the weather afterwards is usually perfect. Makes for good beachcombing, and great stories. I'm not sure who said it first, but I'd agree with the concept that sometimes the only difference between an ordeal and an adventure is one's attitude about it all.

 

I don't have a good recent sunset to end this with, but how about a summer sunrise over a calm and tranquil ocean. Sunsets are a lot about the day that's ended, with the hope of another one to come. A good sunrise says we've been granted another day here.

 

 

And we each get to decide what we're going to do with it.

Earliest Part of the Latest South Side Marina Post

I don't think that most people consider hurricane season to be a 'quiet time'. And hurricanes are indeed very noisy things while they're happening. It's difficult to sleep through one, for example. And we've tried. But the storms don't happen continuously and there are long stretches of calm weather between their exciting little visits. Most of the cruising crowd have been hunkered down wherever they planned to spend storm season. Daily life takes on a different pace here in Hurricane Alley for the next few months. For many of the small marinas throughout the Caribbean this is a type of temporary quiet time. Boat hulls are being repainted. Docks are being rebuilt. And we all keep a weather eye to the east.

 

 

Quiet Time sounds so much mellower than Storm or Hurricane Season, doesn't it? Maybe we could coin a new phrase, and call it Caribbean Quiet Time, or CQT. That could make a nifty t-shirt. CQT pronounced "Sea Cutie". I'm confident that somewhere in the world, and probably in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a sportfishing boat with that name already on the transom. I have the same faith that every conceivable combination of English using the word "Reel" in a logical sequence has also been painted or glued on fiberglass somewhere.

 

We've been spending a lot of quality time at South Side Marina this season. That's pretty logical since we keep our boat there. And it's especially logical since Bob opened his Bar. Come to think of it, we'd probably be spending a lot of time there even if we didn't keep a boat at the marina. We've got a bar three miles from the house on the same dead end dirt road that we live on. How fortuitous is that? We were walking around recently, taking photos and looking for a blog post subject that did not include sailboat DIY stuff, when we noticed that Bob had a new roof installed. I guess this must have happened while we were focused on the boat. Further investigations revealed that there have been, in fact, numerous improvements and changes since our South Side Marina post over a year ago. We've decided to do another post about our local hangout.

 

Bob's marked the entrance to the parking lot with a new sign and it's fairly easy to spot. It's the only surfboard in the entire neighborhood sunk upright in a white concrete dinghy by the side of the road. I think Bob should paint those rocks blue, right under the concrete dinghy. With some white wave froth trim.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

It also has a sign on it that says "Bob's Bar" and states that the hours are from 5 until 9. We'd agree that the bar doesn't open until 5, normally. But that 9:00 closing time is completely arbitrary. It all depends upon who's at the party, Bob's mood and who's asking.

 

You can see that there are new lights delineating the parking area. And there are wooden railings between the lights in addition to the new stone and paving work that Dooley is suspiciously examining for his own purposes in the above photo. I'm sure you know that dogs have their own species specific cultural christening rituals, which are apparently independent of human opinions and convention. I think Dooley accepts a level of responsibility in maintaining the integrity of his cultural heritage. We don't have fire hydrants here, and well, a new post is a new post. He's going to have to learn to pace himself, and ration his water.

 

 

Speaking of water, Bob's been working on ideas for collecting some of the fresh water that runs off of this parking lot during rain storms. And we do get rain this time of year. Tropical Storm Cristobal recently dumped 17 inches of rain on Providenciales in 36 hours. Bob's already calculated how many thousands of gallons of rain water will be running down his new driveways. He's designed in some of the plumbing for collecting it already. The dark slash across the concrete is a steel grate over a PVC gutter.

 

The next step is to decide the best place for a large cistern to store all of that water instead of letting it all just run back into the sea. That's the tidal salt water of Juba Salina in the background of this photo, and of course once all that lovely fresh rain water reaches the ocean, the game's over and it's pretty much useless for irrigation. Unless one is growing seaweed, I suppose. I don't think Bob's interested in seaweed. In fact I don't know why he wants to collect and store hundreds of thousands of gallons of rainwater. Knowing Bob, he has a reason.  I'll ask him.

 

 

We found ourselves traipsing all around snapping photos in the mid day sun, and I think it was about at this point that we realized that it was a perfect day to put up a kite for some aerial photos. The kite was already on the boat here at the marina. And it's hard to beat weather like this. Mostly clear skies, light winds, and very quiet these days at South Side Marina. CQT.

 

 

 

 

It didn't take long to grab the kite and Go Pro camera. Another benefit of this kite aerial photography simplicity is quick mobilization. I had one battery to worry about in the camera, but the kite, string, and wind are still independent of AA or LiPO cells. I've been looking for an excuse to go fly a kite again, and Bob's new roof sounded good enough. Yes, you know things are pretty slow when a new roof is sufficient justification for a photo safari. CQT.

 

We started in the parking lot, and obviously the osprey eye view photos do a much better job of describing the improvements than I was doing verbally. I guess that's one of the reasons we like these low level aerial photos. We managed to get the sign, driveway, drain, lights and railings all in one. I'll mutilate a well known phrase and say something about a picture being worth a thousand keystrokes, backspaces, reformats and corrections.

 

Can you spot Dooley the Delinquent in this photo? No, he's not driving.

 

 

It's easy to see that the marina itself is sparsely populated as compared to mid-winter's busy time. There are normally four to six masts sticking up in the air here, instead of the single little short one on Twisted Sheets and the two on Bob's boat Valhalla. The dive boat operators are still working, with the summer bringing some of the best diving of the year. That's why they're not in these photos. They were out diving at this particular time on this particular afternoon on this not particularly particular little island. This is a pretty good shot of South Side Marina from the western edge, too. I think we managed to get the whole kit and kaboodle on that one.

 

 

Here's just one of many views we got of Bob's New Roof. I thought I should post at least one photo of it, since it served as our excuse for flying the kite in the first place. It's a nice roof, too. He went from asphalt shingles to a standing ridge aluminum design. He says the house was immediately several degrees cooler inside.

 

 

These images were taken with a GoPro Hero + Black Edition. It's supposed to have better resolution than the previous versions. I notice that I can make out the individual Bocce balls at the near end of the court. That's pretty good. We're still waiting on delivery of our Pocket Drone, by the way. Soon, we hope.

 

We strolled around the marina for a while tied to the kite and letting the camera snap a few hundred photos. We decided to see if we could get a better photo of the entrance to the marina and canal system. That point of land I circled in this next photo was our destination. It was a nice day for a little hike. Just La Gringa, Dooley, me and an armful of kite, string and camera.

 

 

And on that note, I think I will end this post and get it published. I know it's been a long time since our last one and I'm trying something new. I'm using Blogsy to write on an iPad tablet instead of a PC. I lost two computers this year and I'm looking for alternatives. I love the portability of the iPad, and the availability of waterproof housings for it. As we start spending more and more time on the boat this coming winter I think the ability to grab a few photos and jot off a blog update will be nice. Yeah, I know. How many times have I said that already? But I have hopes for that approach now. I just have to make the changeover from PC to iPad. Then, hopefully, this blog will morph into something a little more fluid.

 

I'll end this one with a sunset photo, and a promise to get busy on the second half of this post any minute now. The next part will have pretty water photos in it. And I'll get right on it. Well, any day now. I promise.

 

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.