travel – Page 46

A Month Aboard

March 3, 2014 | Leave a Comment

As I write this Bob is ashore doing our laundry…..yes, it’s almost unbelievable, but I promise….it’s true. How lucky is that? We are in Black Point Settlement on Great Guana, where you can get a haircut and do your laundry and have conch fritters, all at the same place that overlooks the little bay where all the boats are anchored. I am suffering from a cold, the last person onboard to get it….just when I thought I had missed the nasty little germ. So I get to stay aboard and take a nap. Oh well.

This is where you sit to get your haircut while your laundry is going inside

After Chris left last week we had big plans to sail up to Compass Cay and spend a day or two shelling. On the morning we wanted to depart our anchor would not come up. While we were wondering what was wrong a large power boat arrived and anchored right next to us…..very close, which worried me because I had a bad feeling we’d get tangled with them undoing our anchor problems. The short version is that after trying to get the anchor up from different angles, Bob put on his shortie suit and free dived down about 25 feet to take a look. I have to add that he was in the throes of his own cold then so I know this was not his first choice of how to remedy our situation. He discovered that the anchor was caught on a limestone ledge. A second dive allowed him to tie a rope around the anchor (he was intending to pull it out by tying the rope to the dinghy and driving forward), but then, while he was down there, he thought he might as well see if he could just free it by lifting it with his hands. That worked….so when he hit the surface he let me know that the anchor was free.

In the fast moving currents, it didn’t take long for us to start skimming our way over to that big powerboat. So there you go! I was onboard alone at the wheel, Bob was in the water quickly getting left behind as he struggled into the dinghy and got the dinghy anchor up. I’m headed toward a 70-foot luxurious powerboat, and I’m dragging along a 65 lb. Bruce anchor as I go. Well, it was a lot of excitement, and I’m happy to report that there was no loss of life, or any other irreparable damage. Whew!

But all the yanking on the Bruce anchor before Bob went down to look a look, did cause some damage…. that long shank on the anchor used to be straight!

So instead of heading out, we motored a short distance to some nearby moorings and picked up one. Then Bob spent a couple of hours undoing our damaged Bruce and replacing it with a gargantuan Fortress that we keep onboard as a spare. By the end of that, with his cold raging, he was too tired to think of going anywhere….and that was fine with me too. I can only handle so much excitement in one day.

So, when we did finally tear ourselves away from Staniel Cay, we headed south to an idyllic spot that doesn’t seem to attract many visitors. Lucky us! We were the only boat at Bitter Guana, and it is quite a spot. I hope it continues to be unpopular! We were alone with a stunning white beach, a large limestone outcropping, and about 16 wild iguanas. The winds have been pretty calm, after a week or so of too much!

Speaking of wind: I have a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, a good breeze is just what you need when the temps get in the upper 80s F…. but far too often it just blows too hard down here. At anchor the boats roll from side to side and buck up and down (at the same time) and it’s about as challenging as being underway in rough conditions. It’s no fun. And the sound…. There comes a point when I’d give anything to turn down the volume. I just want some quiet. So wind is often the thing that is most challenging. Anyway…..just had to whine a bit about wind.

We’ve done a little shell collecting and illegal iguana feeding, and I’ve been suffering through my cold. Last night’s sunset gave us another green flash! That makes four so far! Last year we only saw it once!

Here’s what you miss when you sleep in due to being in a Nyquil-induced fog. It turns out there are lots of tropical long tails nesting on Bitter Guana along with the iguanas! They fly out in formation first thing in the morning and return at dusk. Sorry I slept in….

And about my projects: things are not as good as I’d first thought. In fact, I’m wondering if I am going to end up starting every single one of them over. I guess that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I do have the one Oktoberfest sock. And I have these two newly finished embroidery projects. They hardly count though, because each one only needed a few areas of work to be finished. I think both these little cross stitch projects have been languishing in a bag for about a decade …. And now they are finished!

I am on the fence about the tapestry. It has too much black space, meaning the space between the spools. That might work out for being at the top of the piece, but it seems to me that the spools on the bottom of a shelf are the ones that are the most crowded and perhaps even squashed into less round shapes. They are bearing the weight of all the other spools. I realize I could turn the piece upside down when it’s finished, but I’m also not happy with my first two spool colors, which are in the lower left so they would be upper right if I turned it upside down. I love to blend colors on the bobbin, but now that I’ve done a bit of work on this piece, I think what’s called for is unabashedly blazen, full saturation color. It’s a very graphic piece, lots of circles and circles within circles, and I think the shapes are quite happy shapes….so it needs happy colors. I’m not crestfallen about undoing the weaving….I’m just sad that there is so little time when the waters are calm enough to work. It’s a shame to spend a perfect, calm day un-weaving rather than weaving. Oh well.

When all else fails, I bake!

Under Way

February 27, 2014 | Leave a Comment

Our winter in the Bahamas is well under way, and even our first guest, our younger son, Chris, has come and gone already. Bob and I were thrilled to see him right on the heels of his trip to Thailand. He showed us wonderful photos and videos and told us so many great tales. He met people from all over the world, mostly young people who are taking off even more time than he is.

We used our week together to show Chris some of our favorite cays in the Exumas, which naturally included Allen Cay with the wild iguanas, the Land and Sea Park at Warderick Wells, and Big Major’s Spot where the wild pigs swim out to you to beg as you dinghy in to shore. This year there are baby pigs, and they are adorable! The big pink Mama pig swam out to us and three little piglets waded into the water and cried for her to return!

The lovely beach at Hawk’s Bill Cay

Pandora at anchor in Warderick Wells….

We visited one new spot with Chris called Hawk’s Bill Cay. It is a less visited place with beautiful white beaches. We ended the week at Staniel Cay where Chris could get a flight back to Nassau. Chris and Bob snorkeled into Thunderball Grotto together, and then we had a farewell dinner at Staniel Cay Yacht Club. It was a lovely time, all in all.

We walked to the little airstrip on Staniel last year, but this was the first time we actually saw the flight procedure! The gate is an outdoor gazebo, and there is a woman who shows up about a half hour before take off to check people in for the flight on her clip board. That is the extent of security. The plane lands and she puts the passengers on board according to weight (using her judgment! No one had to ‘fess up!), while the pilot stores everyone’s baggage in the nose of the plane. Then all the onlookers are shooed off the rough limestone airstrip and the plane departs. We miss Chris terribly now. Hope we can get enough bandwidth at some point to skype with both Rob and Chris.

We’ve had quite a bit of excitement on this trip. We’ve seen big sharks at every cay we’ve visited. Last year we didn’t see sharks until we got south of Georgetown. Chris got some great footage of a big nurse shark right at Pandora’s stern. While nurse sharks are harmless, we have also seen some large lemon sharks this year. It makes us take stock pretty carefully before going for a swim!

Somehow a little gecko got on board with us for several days. He was living in the main head (nauticalese for bathroom). I’m certain we each took showers for days without knowing he was there, but once we did come face to face, he was traumatized by us, and I was terrified of him! Bob and Chris were tempted to let him stay. Bob seemed to think he could live off fruit flies! Luckily for me, he is now ashore in the Land and Sea Park, and I hope he is happier there!

Yesterday a US Coast Guard rescue helicopter showed up right in our little anchorage off of Staniel Cay. It did some fancy maneuvers for almost an hour around dusk. It was amazing to watch! We imagined the pilot to be about 24 years old, and he could hover that big beast in a tight spot right off our port. He lowered the helicopter until it was right over the water, throwing up a wide circle of spray. I’d love to know what they were doing and why they came to Staniel Cay.

There have been other excitements as well. A Canadian couple we met last year got into some trouble in Cuban waters last week. They ran aground on a reef off the northern coast of Cuba and were stuck pounding on this reef for over 24 hours before Cuban authorities came to help them. Luckily they were in contact with other boats and the US Coast Guard (who could not help them at that location). All ended well, but it must have been such a traumatic experience. This morning we heard that the Bahamian Coast Guard (BASRA) has discovered there are foreign boats that have not properly checked in to the Bahamas, so they are now conducting ‘board and search’ missions on random boats in harbors. We have all the proper documentation, but I sure hope we don’t get boarded!

It’s been a good couple of weeks for getting some other things under way as well. I will write about that shortly. I am paricularly happy to have had a couple of calm days to get my tapestry loom warped and even start weaving! I’m having a lot of fun with those circles! I thought I could do some weaving today, but we have strong westerly winds that are kicking up quite a rukus in this harbor. I think we will head out shortly for a short sail to Cambridge Cay and a calmer anchorage. Farewell Staniel!

One More Thing…

February 11, 2014 | 1 Comment

This is the sun that set on my father’s remains on his first evening traveling the Gulf Stream.

May all the dolphins, turtles, and sailfish, and all the creatures of the warm Gulf Stream sing you home….

Living Small in Big Way

February 1, 2014 | Leave a Comment

What a luxury being at a marina in for a few days in Ft. Pierce. We are staying at the Harbortown Marina, and there are several boats here that we remember from the Bahamas last winter. It’s a small world!

I always go through a bit of mourning when I come onboard. Everything is so small. Once again I’ve got too much stuff with me. This time around I think I will mail some clothing home. I can’t fit it all into my three small drawers! But this time around I have a 3rd set of bedsheets for when there is no laundry for weeks and weeks on end! This year I know that sheets are non-negotiable!

Last night we met some of our new/old friends at the little open air bar at the end of our dock. It was a slightly chilly evening so we sat at a large fire pit that had gas flames flickering up through a large bowl of colored glass fragments. Very hedonistic! Just off from our dock are a few large mangrove bushes, and as sunset passed a huge flock of ibises began landing in the mangroves for the night. They looked like large puffy white blossoms on the bushes. Intermingled with them were a few blue herons and pelicans, but it was mostly an amazing vision of fluffy white ‘blossoms’ on the deep green mangroves. I hope to get photo this evening!

To ease into boat life I had planned a very simple dinner with virutally no cooking. I made a large salad of greens and vegetables with goat cheese for a bit of protein. My mistake was that I’d recently had a delicious salad dressing at the Old City House Inn restaurant in St. Augustine, and I had just had to see if I could re-create it. It was a roasted shallot vinaigrette, so naturally I had to roast some shallots! And since I was doing that I figure why not roast a head of garlic as well which will surely get used in the near future. Well, imagine a slightly oily baking pan from the roasting, a messy miniature food processor from pureeing those shallots, a salad bowl, all the raiments from cutting the vegetables….in other words, I managed to make a HUGE mess in my tiny galley on an evening when I was just going to do something simple with no fuss. Ugh!

Today promises to be picture perfect! Blue skies, a gentle breeze, soft temperatures.

I have started my first “Tsock” pattern from the “Tsarina.” It is called “Octoberfest,” and I love the bright golden colorway, including a light frothy ‘head’ for the top of the sock. I enjoyed trying out her toe beginning. For my other toe-up sock, the “Skew” sock from Knitty, I started by wrapping and casting on to two needles held parallel. For Octoberfest you cast on half the number of stitches and work back and forth in short rows to create the toe. It was easy and somewhat mythical watching the toe emerge from this simple technique! Today, if there is time after the endless chores, I will knit the straight stockinette bit of the foot toward the heel.

On the Road Again….

January 29, 2014 | Leave a Comment

We have slipped our land moorings and are on the road to our vagabond life on Pandora. I will miss my looms over the next few months, but I’ve brought some fun projects to keep me company….knitting (of course!), and this time some embroidery and a small tapestry loom. I’m intrigued with this image, and hope to play with it a bit. It will give me lots of practice with circles, won’t it? Circles are considered the hardest shape to weave…..I’ll deliberate on that while I weave a few dozen of them!

As you can imagine I’ve brought just about every color imaginable….small loom, big bin of yarn. I really wanted to design something with minimal colors, but my time was spent elsewhere over the past few months….and I’ve always been a sucker for color! It has been such a hectic fall and winter, and I have struggled to find a balance between weaving and designing while also enjoying the holidays and spending precious time with my husband’s parents during our last wonderful month’s with Bob’s dad. It was a tremendously moving time for both Bob and me. One week ago we moved Bob’s mother to her new assisted living facility, into a one bedroom apartment with magificent views of Long Island Sound. It was one of those days with gale force winter winds, and the views of the Sound were quite dramatic. She likes it! Her belongings look very pretty in her new place, and it already has a nice sense of home. On Saturday she told Bob that he has taken wonderful care of her since his father died, that she loves her new place, and that she felt he should take a well deserved, long vacation. So, although we hated to leave her so soon after such big changes in her life, we have hit the road for Florida where our boat Pandora has been waiting for us since November. Honestly, I was in no big hurry to return. I have grown quite complacent to be home in our quiet little town on the Connecticut River, even with the single digit temperatures and the snow. I got a fair amount of work done over the summer, and this most recent project is finished pretty much to my liking. Surprisingly, the first painted warp is the one I prefer. I could not have known this until I did the second one. I have made two braids that the piece will hang from, and I am happy with them as well.

Here is a detail of the braid….a fiddly process of making a tiny braid in the middle of the strands of silk, and then closing the braid into a loop and adding in more silk to continue with a bigger braid.

We have rushed down the East Coast in order to stay ahead of the ice and snow that has shut down Georgia and the Carolinas. We spent a wonderful night with Rob and Kandice in Baltimore before we hightailed it for Florida. We are in St. Augustine now, and although it is a nippy 40 degrees F with wind and drizzle, we don’t dare complain!

We are staying in this pretty little inn right in the historic district. Our balcony overlooks the Lightner Museum. We managed to sit out and enjoy the view for a few minutes before the chill drove us back inside. Here is a shot of our room with the railing outside of the large window and the little balcony for sitting just off to the right of it.

I am looking forward to dinner in the cozy, intimate dining room later today. Yesterday we enjoyed a glass of wine in the bar. A cocktail in the evening and a full breakfast in the mornings comes with the room.

Stocking up on a few luxuries for our time onboard, like blood orange infused olive oil and some good books from the used book shop!

Later we will visit the Lightner Museum and tomorrow we will do a little more touring before heading down to Ft. Pierce where Pandora awaits.