7 -- 13 June 2009

7 June 2009

Spent the early part of the day getting ready to sail over to Grand Turk, about 25 miles.  Later in the afternoon, went to the High School and used their WiFi to check the weather. 

 

8 June 2009

In the morning, Mark and I went ashore and made one final trip to the grocery store.    Not sure what we will find at Grand Turk, so it is best to stock up now.  Then underway at 10:20 am, headed across the channel to Grand Turk.  Mark and Rachelle sailed to Big Sand Cay and spent the night there.  I arrived at Grand Turk in the dark and anchored close to the freighter dock on the southern part of Grand Turk, near an old U.S. missile tracking station, now simply called South Base.  What once the taxpayers funded as a Cold War installation is now enriching Carnival Cruise lines as a playground for cruise ship tourists.  In the middle of the night, a strong squall came through and it was quite reassuring to have a healthy anchor and chain.  The winds screamed by at about 45 knots and the steeply-sloped bottom makes anchoring tricky.  Some spots just a couple of miles from the western shore of Grand Turk are several thousand feet deep.

 

9 June 2009

I moved from South Base up to the Front Street anchorage just off the main town of Grand Turk.  The entrance through the reefs was tricky.  Probably the only reason I made it was because the tide was high enough to float over most of the coral heads.  Sometimes it is best just to be lucky.  Went ashore and explored the town.  The town is much nicer than most of the towns in the Bahamas.  Found the national museum and bought another Wavey Line chart of the Dominican Republic that shows the southern harbors.  Mark and Rachelle arrived at 2:30 pm, after stopping for brunch at Salt Cay.

 

10 June 2009

Today was the only day during our stay at Grand Turk that there were no cruise ships in port.  So, no crowds of sunburnt tourists snorkeling in the harbor.  Did laundry early in the morning.  There was only very light wind all day, and later in the evening, the mosquitos came out with a vengeance.

 

11 June 2009

No wind today and the water was so calm you could see the anchor clearly in 12 feet of water.  A stingray and several jacks were swimming around the boat.  Mark and I bicycled to the north end of the island and explored the channel to North Creek, the local hurricane hole.  The entrance channel is shallow and tricky and the anchorage inside has many shallow areas, so we decided not to try it.  As seems typical, there was an abandoned dredge that could have turned North Creek into a first-class facility and provided an economic boost.  Someone had big plans, but the project probably died from the thousand cuts these people seem so skilled at inflicting.

 

12 June 2009

Met Dave on an old home-built green trimaran named Faith.  Dave and his wife are sailing missionaries and are proud of the fact that the number one Google search for “sailing missionaries” lists them.  Their website is www.sailingservant.org  They are transporting generators and bibles to Haiti, and stopping along the way to help local churches.  Mark and I bicycled to the airport, where I checked out with Immigration.  The Customs guy was grossly overweight and safely locked inside an air-conditioned room watching a DVD on his computer.  He had no intentions of working, so he told me to go to another Customs officer, somewhere on South Base.  I decided then to ignore the whole checkout procedure from Customs.  Am beginning to think that their conflicting information and inefficiency is simply used to maintain job security.  Their incompetence seems to breed the very problems they should solve.  We walked through the cruise ship development and watched thousands of tourists partying.  One restaurant was full of people surfing the internet.  Were they on vacation, or were they simply working in an exotic location?

 

13 June 2009

Today, we sailed to Salt Cay in preparation for the crossing south to Luperon.  Dave, the missionary from S/V Faith, rowed over just as S/V Markelle was pulling up anchor.  I talked to Dave for awhile and then pulled up the anchor and was underway at 12:30 pm.  In an effort to appease the weather gods, I sacrificed a perfectly-ripe piece of watermelon by throwing it to Dave as I sailed out of the anchorage.  I think preachers like watermelons.  It was a nice, easy sail south to Salt Cay.  Markelle was moored to a dive mooring, so I tied up to their stern for the night.  The shore is so steep-to that anchoring is tricky.  Mark and I went ashore, where we found an old cannon aimed right at our boats, along with some leftover donkeys from the salt-raking days, a few wild cows, and one worn-out minivan.  About 80 people live on the whole island.

6 June 2009 -- South Caicos

Am falling into a relaxed routine while waiting to cross to the Dominican Republic, of listening to a couple of morning weather broadcasts, followed by cooking and eating brunch, then reading, swimming, or boat maintenance.  Hate to leave the nice weather and peaceful anchorage here for the more populated, less peaceful, more foreign harbor of Luperon in the Dominican Republic.  But, waiting can get boring, so we decided to go to town again.  Mark was running low on fresh water and fortune brought us a local fellow in a pickup truck who offered to fetch some water.  Fresh water here is collected from seasonal rains and a government-built condenser system.  As such, there is no city water supply like we know in America, so outsiders have trouble accessing the fresh water supply.  After returning an hour later with the water, the guy told us about a fish fry at the nearby Trench Town Bar.  Like most events so far, it was over billed and at times we were the only patrons in the bar.  The younger men typically wore their hair in unwashed Rastafarian dreadlocks, and wore baggy clothes with pants that seemed to be suspended only by a constant one-hand grip on their crotch.  A belt seems much more pleasant.  In fact the middle-aged men have discovered belts and haircuts, but maybe only because bellies make reaching their crotch difficult.  The food consisted of conch fritters, chicken souse (a local form of soup or stew), and fried bonefish.  The conch fritters were gooey and poorly prepared, while the chicken souse wasn’t even ready yet.  But, the bonefish tasted great.  It was seasoned and cooked just right and the meat itself had an excellent flavor.  However, bonefish is well-named because it contains a tremendous number of fine bones with branches that make removal almost impossible.  A group practice of the Heimlich maneuver should be conducted before eating bonefish.  Back in the bar, the two young Dominican women bartenders watched television and dozed, while many of the patrons wandered in and out, drinking from personal bottles of liquor and smoking marijuana.  Open container laws, drug laws, and food handling regulations seem to be missing, but overall it was a very peaceful gathering for such a dissolute slice of humanity.  The town only seems to come alive after dark.  No wonder most of the people we see during the day are sleeping.  At 8:00 pm we moved to another establishment to watch a Red Wings hockey game.  The two female bartenders there were chatting with a couple of Dominican friends and everyone seemed content to watch a hockey game.  A couple of guys from India came in and kept eyeing the Dominican girls.  The obese Dominican girls presented a definite body mass mismatch to the skinny Indian guys, but the Indians kept hoping.  With the Red Wings winning 5-0, it was time to head out to the boats and get some sleep.

5 June 2009 -- South Caicos

Spent the morning and early afternoon studying emergency navigation.  Practiced taking sun sights with a cheap plastic sextant and then reducing them manually.  Mid-afternoon, we went to town, used the internet WiFi at the High School, and then bought a few groceries

4 June 2009 -- South Caicos

Worked on some minor boat projects.  Re-worked the eyes for the jib halyard, the main halyard, and the topping lift.  Sewed on a leather chafe protector to prevent the line in the eye from chafing against the shackle.  Then whipped the tails of the knots so they would not come untied.  After that, Mark and I snorkeled a nearby shallow-water dive site named The Admiral’s Aquarium, right in the South Caicos harbor.  The reef contained an extensive variety of colorful tropical fish and many different types of coral.  Definitely the most impressive snorkeling so far, and definitely a reminder to buy a good underwater camera as soon as possible. 

3 June 2009 -- South Caicos

Went to town today.  Dumped a bag of trash in the community dumpster by the town dock.  Then trekked out by the Boiling Hole salt pans, now containing a flock of pink flamingoes, to the High School to use the only internet WiFi in town.  The High School still shows the ravages of last year’s devastating Hurricane Ike.  By now the blue disaster tarps are in shreds and the roofs are again open to the weather, with no signs of ongoing repairs.  The most noticeable damage was to the roof of the Industrial Arts classroom.  You would think that the shop class could fix its own roof.  Mark, Rachelle, and I sat outside amongst the ants checking email, until we finally went inside the music classroom and used their chairs.  The first wall outlet I plugged into gave a vicious spark, but the second one was much better behaved.

2 June 2009 -- South Caicos

Mounted the MSR backpacking stove on a board today to make it safer and easier to use.  The Walmart-special Coleman seems to have finally clogged up after using gasoline for the last few weeks.  The MSR is much easier to unclog and repair, and enjoys burning gasoline, which is the most available fuel so far.  Even propane is real hard to find most places.  Late in the afternoon, Mark and I took his dinghy a couple miles south to the end of Long Cay to a likely fishing spot.  Technically, it was in a protected wildlife area, but a quick look showed the lobsters were overpopulated and the herd needed to be thinned.  As the saying goes "they have to catch you to hang you."

1 June 2009 -- South Caicos

First trip into the town of Cockburn Harbor on South Caicos Island and impressions are that the people are closer to the Stone Age than even the Bahamians.  The older streets in town were laid out with British precision.  Other than that, the town presents a terminal aspect of decay.  Some newer cars drove along the streets, past scattered piles of horse manure, but the town was generally littered with dysfunctional cars in various stages of disassembly.  Once a car fails to start, it is slowly dismantled to provide assorted yard ornaments.  Many door less, windowless, blocked-up rusting hulks contained sleeping people.  People with nothing better to do on a beautiful, sunny Monday.  Mark and Rachelle found the only working internet WiFi in town at the high school.  It probably works because nobody seems to use it.  Basketball practice must be much higher in the local school curriculum than computer use.  But then computer use really involves a progressive inventory of learned skills, starting with the concept of an alphabet.  The most noticeable achievement of this school system is shown by the adults’ mastery of a mangled form of English that is marginally more understandable than hand gestures.  After checking in through Customs and Immigration, scouring the town for a nonexistent Laundromat, and shopping at both disappointingly run-down grocery stores, I joined Mark and Rachelle at a local bar, where the bartender was imported from the Dominican Republic.  Much of the work here is performed by economically-disadvantaged immigrants from the Dominican Republic or Haiti.  Maybe they learned that trick from America.  After all, the bar’s several patrons were engrossed in American television programming.  Today’s attraction:  Ice Hockey.