Re-entry Wrap Up

We've been back on-island for three weeks now. And we've been visiting friends, taking care of business, and just generally trying to get back in pace and up to speed on life as we thought we'd left it. There are real contrasts and trade offs involved in living here and spending a lot of time in the mountains reset our frames of reference a bit. But after a few nights the constant breezes,  ever moving ocean and starry nights start to feel familiar again. The sound of waves on the rocks during calm weather has become like a familiar lullaby of white noise. We're appreciating the tropical sunrises once again.

Up to speed is probably the wrong phrase to use here, now that I think about it. In addition to being another of those threadbare clichés that I should try harder to avoid. It's not as though any paces go faster when they get here. It might be more accurate to say that we're still trying to match up re-entry speeds with the lives we left somewhere on a mooring in a parallel universe.

I like watching sunrises like this, when the light climbs up behind low cloud banks. Anyone who was watching might think it silly of a grown man to be standing there watching the horizon like a kid trying to guess where the sun is going to pop through like a cosmic Jack-In-The-Box. I try to pick the exact spot, and it's tougher if you don't keep up with the changes. Hey, I still build sand castles, too, when no adults are around.

While I was off topping up my coffee I committed the sunrise observing sin of stopping just to check my email. These sunrise things happen fast here. So do sunsets. We're down near the part of the ball that travels the fastest while we spin through space. So of course I missed the best part of this one. By the time I walked back outside it had completely changed. And that was okay, too. I realized that I liked being back, and standing out in the quiet dawn barefooted and shirtless and watching the day approach us. I even took another photo. Things got way too bright to look at just a few seconds after this one.

 

We spent most of the first week we were back repairing and sorting things that needed sorting and repairing after nine weeks of negligence and inattention. It was enough that we had to make a written list, if that gives you an idea. I've already mentioned several of these in the previous blog post. There were a number of issues with electricity, appliances, and hardware at the house. Our lesson from this, once again, is that things designed to move really do need to keep moving here. That keeps the moving surfaces like bearings shiny and lubricated. If they stop, they immediately start to corrode, and if it goes on long enough, getting them started again can get complicated. Remember that old parable For the Want of a Nail? It's apparently been around since the 14th century but the short version I found on Wikipedia is;

 

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

-Unknown

I'm willing to bet that the troublesome little nail that started it all was made of iron. As is the main motor shaft of a ceiling fan, for example. I wonder if  Unknown lived on a tropical island because I can imagine what would happen to an iron horse shoe nail here. Tropical horses must go barefoot a lot. I know we do. I'll tell you about what happens with leather, latex, and elastic things here some day. Realizing that some may be more interested in those things than others.

We've slowly been making the rounds since we got back, checking up on friends to make sure everyone is still in place after another storm season. And we found some changes. We learned that a significant number of people here have been infected with the Chikungunya virus while we were away. It's really spread throughout the population. It's a mosquito borne virus, and so there are certainly precautions that can be taken. But people here are not typically worried much about mosquitos. They tend not to be a problem here for most of the time. These islands are just too arid and windy for the most part. But we've just gone through storm season, with several storms like Cristobal dropping torrents of rain.

 

This is visibility lowered to several hundred meters while Tropical Storm Cristobal dropped ten inches of rain.

 

Preacher is a wealth of information about the "bush medicine" here. He's handed us some strange looking berries, stalks, and fruits to try over the years, and we've eaten every one no matter what our initial impression was. And they've all been good. So far. Preacher told us that everyone in his part of town had come down with the Chikungunya virus, including him. He also told me that when we get it (note, he didn't say "if" we get it) we should drink tea made from the neem tree. He says that he drank this tea for three days, and his Chikungunya symptoms were gone. He also told me that many of his friends and neighbors who went to the clinic for approved medicine were still suffering effects weeks later. Preacher is in his mid 60's. He's been living here using bush medicine for all of his life, so yeah, we decided we just might go take a look at one of these neem trees. I had never heard of a neem tree in my life. Neither had La Gringa, but we looked it up. And by golly, it's looking to me like the old dude might know what he's talking about. Again.

 

Preacher told us that these trees are all over the place. Not hard to find at all if you know what to look for. He pointed one out to us, and we pulled a couple hand fulls of leaves off of a neem tree.

 

 

You can see why this area might have a chikungunya exposure issue. The water there in the background is essentially a fresh water pond when it's high like this. A big influx of rain water dilutes the normally brackish water and activates all the larvae and bugs that cycle with these seasons. With all of the rain this island has received recently, the mosquito population is quite healthy. And that's the problem.

 

And those things standing in the water back behind the momentarily sidelined panga are not big pink mosquitos, despite my dire description of infested waterways. Nope. Just a flock of wild flamingos. I know they normally eat shrimp, and obviously they find something they like here. I wonder if we could teach them to eat mosquitos.

 

One of the things that kept us tied up for a while upon our return was renewing our automobile permits. The way the system here works, driver's licenses and automobile registrations expire on one's birthday. Renewing them is not always a simple and straightforward process. I've made seven trips in pursuit of a renewed driver's license so far this year, for example. And I don't have it yet.  Nor the registration decal after two trips. So after several days of driving back and forth into town to deal with what I will always remember as November's Latest Mandatory Surprise Happy Birthday Registration and Torture Regulations we thought we'd treat ourselves to a nice conch lunch on our birthday. We hadn't been to da Conch Shack in a long time, and we missed it. So despite the effects of a rainy weekday, we drove over for a couple of plates of our favorite fried food. The water had a strange, tranquil quality to it compared to the usual gnarly reef view from the Conch Shack porch.

 

 

It's still a bit early in the season for them to be crowded on rainy weekdays. This will change over the next few weeks but for now we really enjoyed the quiet, unhurried pace. The guys who clean up and sell the conch shell souvenirs have their wares arranged in colorful rows, awaiting a customer. I thought it a bit interesting that they were covering up their display with plastic to protect it from the rain. I think that, personally, I'd be a bit wary of any seashell that couldn't handle a little water. But I'm old school curmudgeon. RetroGrouch. Don't pay any attention to me.

 

 

How's this for having the place to ourselves?  The man standing in the rain down the beach runs the other conch shell business.  The guy reading the paper inside the dry  restaurant would seem to have the better location.

 

I want to go ahead and get this little bit posted to prove we're still kicking.  We actually have quite a bit more to talk about but I've been having a devil of a time getting this put together.  I've had a Lenovo high end laptop fail, an Asus mid level laptop fail, and an iPad blogging app suddenly stop  working.  La Gringa loaned me her computer to get this post together.  So I'm going to spare you the long winded DIY stuff about all the little things we've been working on.  And the way things are going we'll have fresh things to talk about shortly.  We did launch the boat already.  We got delayed a bit.  After looking at the paint job condition, we decided to have the bottom cleaned and painted.  Here's how she looked sitting in the yard when we got back to the island.

 

I'll talk more about that later.   And we'll try to find out the  story about this propeller, too.

 

 

 

Or at least as much of the story as we can tell you in print.  Wow.  That's enough zinc to do our whole boat. 

 

And we're happy to see the sun setting in the ocean again.  We'll find some spots for photos that don't include Providenciales, or the neighbors house for a change.

 

 

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.