travel – Page 46

Home Again

May 13, 2014 | Leave a Comment

It is spring in the Connecticut River Valley, and the lush greeness of everything is such a startling contrast to the desert islands of the Exuma chain in the Bahamas. I love all this green!….not to mention daffodils, tulips, hellebore, and bleeding hearts. In just the five days I’ve been home the trees have leafed out so much that the canopy of leaves must be at least three times greener. I love it!

Like last year, I made it home in time for the Essex Village May Market, an event that the local garden club hosts. If you arrive early enough, and I did (!), you can buy some of the garden club members’ choice plants from their personal gardens. I got a bleeding heart, some English bluebells, a forget me not, a pink fall anemone, and a helianthus. The plants from the members’ own gardens are HUGE, and cost far less than smaller plants at the local nuseries. It’s the biggest attraction of the event, and I did well to arrive as early as I did! I was not too far from the front of the line.

It was also Mother’s Day weekend, and our younger son came out to visit from New York. He also invited a group of his undergraduate friends and a couple of their significant others to visit. It was a very festive Mother’s Day, even if only one of these young people was actually related to me! They made a lovely dinner for all of us, and they did all the shopping, the prep, and cleaning up! Wish I’d thought to take a photo of them!

I am about to go down to my studio and begin a rather involved stash search for a project I need to get started on soon. My local area guild is doing an exchange where each of us makes fabric for a drawstring lunchbag and napkin that will coordinate with a coffee mug that belongs to another guild member. We all got a photo of someone else’s mug and began designing a fabric to go with it. Here’s the mug I got, a lovely handmade ceramic design by the owner’s daugher!

Hopefully in the next day or so I will have my yarn picked for the fabric. While I was away this winter I used my Fiberworks program to design a huck structure to mimic the flowers on this mug:

Hmmm…unless you are familiar with looking at huck weave drafts you probably cannot see the flower motif. Huck ‘blossoms’ when it is cut from the loom because the warp and weft floats can relax into curves. Wet finishing gives show this fabric off even further!

Here is a photo of linen napkins I wove in basically the same structure, although the huck pattern is just along the edge in my napkins and the linen is far finer than the current fabric will be. The fabric I’m designing now will have the huck ‘flower’ all across the width and in stripes of varying colors with a small black stripe between the color changes and woven with a black weft.

Also, I have had some quiet moments to sort through my bobbin lace project. It involved more going backward than I expected! Backward….forward …. further backward….a number of times. In the end I went all the back to the corner, but luckily no further! And now I am happily going forward. It is very calming and therapeutic to do bobbin lace, especially going forward!

Bob is almost home….so close, and yet so far! He is only about 50 miles away, which is only about a 7 or 8 hour sail from here. BUT, the winds have turned against him so that even motoring would be difficult. The winds are a bit strong and right on the nose. I hope he will have his big homecoming tomorrow evening.

So Much Water over the Bridge!

April 25, 2014 | 1 Comment

Weeks have passed since my last post….a combination of rough weather and lots of sailing has prevented me from keeping up here. I cannot use my computer when I am seasick, and I’ve been seasick a lot!

But that is not to say that I haven’t had some wonderful times during the past couple of weeks. We have had some great times on shore!

Today we are back in Staniel Cay in order to meet our son Rob and his girlfriend Kandice when they fly here tomorrow afternoon. The weather is finally settled and promises to be springlike for the next few days! …Although at this very moment the dark skies to the southwest are rapidly approaching, and I think we will get quite a violent squall any minute now! During squalls like these we have sometimes seen water spouts….I hope we won’t experience one!

We have lots of plans for things to do with Rob and Kandice, starting with seeing the pigs on Big Major’s Spot and snorkeling in the local grotto, named after the old James Bond movie “Thunderball” where the filming took place. We have not seen Rob and Kandice since early January, so we are really excited for their arrival!

Yesterday we sailed about 50 miles from Rock Sound, Eleuthera, to Pipe Cay in the Exumas. (Perhaps I should mention that just a week earlier I also endured a 70 mile ocean run from Thompson Bay, Long Island, to Rock Sound Eleuthera….go me!) While we were getting under way, Bob heard on the Cruiseheimers net (on sideband radio) that someone caught a big tuna, so he could not resist the temptation to try catching something himself. He put out a line and within an hour or so he had a mahi mahi giving him a good fight. As he got it closer to the boat we could see it was a whopper!

That fish yielded us over 8 lbs of filets! We had our friends Maureen and Bill (from Kalunamoo) over for dinner last night, and we have at least four more meals waiting in the freezer. We will definitely have it for dinner one night while Rob and Kandice are here.

And what a wonderful time we had on Eleuthera! This was our first visit there. Easter weekend was lovely in Rock Sound. We decided to visit the Methodist Church for Easter service, while Bill and Maureen went to the Catholic church….there were numerous other choices as well. As luck would have it, just before the service started Nancy and George from Trumpeter (Nancy taught me to make Bahamian coiled baskets last winter) came and sat next to us. They have attended this church every Easter for several years. The service was very festive, with lots of music, a liturgical dancer and plenty of enthusiasm in the congregation. We estimated that there were over 100 people in the congregation, about 40% white and 60% black. This Methodist Church is one of the oldest churches on the island, and has already celebrated its bicentennial. The sanctuary is deceptively modern, with an elaborate sound system and a power point projector. It was a hoot!

On Easter afternoon we met Bill and Maureen at the local blue hole, right in the center of the town park in Rock Sound, for our Easter dinner picnic. Maureen had baked some of their own frozen mahi mahi for us, along with freshly baked beer bread! This blue hole is quite impressive since it is only a few feet shallower than Dean’s Blue Hole on Long Island, which is the deepest blue hole in the world. And Rock Sound’s blue hole sits in the middle of a lovely park where we could have our picnic right at the edge of the water, in the shade of a big tree. It was a perfect afternoon!

We also rented a car for two days and toured the rest of Eleuthera with Maureen and Bill. We visited the Glass Window on a mild day and were very impressed with the force of the ocean even in calm conditions. Our photo does not show how much force the calm waters have when they hit the tiny isthmus here. It was dramatic! I can only imagine what that surging bit of the Atlantic must have looked like the day it moved the bridge about 12 feet. Yikes!

We drove north to a spot called Preacher’s Cave, a place where some English settlers found refuge after their ship was wrecked on the Devil’s Backbone (back in the late 1600s) at the northeastern side of Eleuthera near what is now Harbour Island. The cave is impressively big, so it’s easy to understand that it provided a wonderful refuge for those weary and distraught settlers.

Along the way on our 90-mile drive north we also stopped at the Queen’s Baths, another spot where the mighty Atlantic surges against the coast into a cave creating lots of foam and bubbles. Can you see Maureen and me picking our way across the far side of the Queen’s Baths?

Walking along these craggy shores is a lot harder than it looks in this photo. Here’s a close up to give an idea of how rough going it is! The rocks are some kind of very sharp limestone….lots of small (and sometimes large!) craters have formed in these rocks so getting a flat purchase for walking is virtually impossible!

The shopping and restaurant options on Eleuthera were quite a bit more civilized than we’ve experienced in the Exumas! We had a lovely lunch two days in a row. The first day we visited Rainbow Inn and sat on their upper deck overlooking Exuma Sound, and the second day we stopped at Tippi’s and sat in an open air dining room that overlooked the pink sand beach and the Atlantic.

And here is a shot of the pink sand beach at Tippi’s.

Eleuthera was so much more civilized than the Exumas that they even have a ‘camauflaged” cell tower. All through the islands we recognize the distinctive red and white towers of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (Batelco) and anchor nearby these towers whenever we can so that we can have cellular internet, such as now! But Eleuthera has a cell tower camauflaged as palm tree!

So now I am in the final stages of my winter away. I’m not certain now much more work I’ll get done on my various projects. Perhaps my tapestry will not be finished when I leave….sigh… but I do have two pairs of socks finished (one of them being those fun ‘skewed’ socks!), a fair isle sweater knitted up to the armholes waiting for inspiration on how to proceed for the upper body shaping, several small table embroideries from decades back now finished!….and the last project: Boo Knits “Sweet Dreams” shawl that I just started yesterday. Shawl knitting is quite addictive… I often find that I knit the whole thing in one go. I’m into the final lace area already, so I guess I would say this project is hard to put down. I’m using Verdant Gryphon “Mithral” in the colorway “Bathsheba,” which has lovely woodland shades of bronze/evergreen/burgundy that reminds me of fairies! Queen Mab would love this shawl!

We’ll spend the next 10 days with our kids traveling north through the Exumas. We hope to take the kids to Compass Cay to swim with the sharks and see the beautiful beach there, then to Warderick Wells for more swimming and snorkeling in the Exuma Land and Sea Park. Bob has stumbled into a wonderful connection with the manager of Over Yonder Cay, where we may get a private tour ….if it works out I will definitely give details!

By the end of the first weekend in May we must be back in Nassau for the kids and I to meet our flight back to the US. I will stop in Baltimore with Rob and Kandice for a visit at their house and some time with my favorite dog, Bosun! Bob’s crew will arrive the day I fly out with the kids, so he will begin his journey back to the US the slow way.

I am so excited to be headed home for a beautiful spring on the Connecticut River! I hope some of my bulbs will still be blooming, and I hope I have some Danish flag poppies in bloom from the seeds I planted last fall! On my first day home (if I can get one of the cars started!) I will be heading out to my local weaving guild meeting! Lots to look forward to!

30 Words for Wind

April 9, 2014 | 1 Comment

….and some artistic views of it… let’s start with Winslow Homer.

He captures just how I feel at anchor today. Luckily no sharks circling the boat just now, but otherwise these are pretty much the conditions here today.

We are stuck in another cold front with strong westerly winds, a direction that makes it hard to find good protection in this part of the world. We are in Elizabeth Harbor on Great Exuma, but since it is a huge bay there is far too much room for wind and waves to build. We are yanking so hard on our anchor that it’s hard to imagine either the anchor or the bow of the boat surviving this without damage.

I have made references to words for wind almost every time I have talked about sailing. As I’ve said many times, ‘zephyr’ is my favorite wind word, and I’d really rather not sail in anything but a zephyr. We haven’t seen a single one this winter.

One of the first things I learned about words when I began studying them, is that if there is not a word for something, like oak tree, in a language, that’s a sure sign that no oak trees grow where that language is spoken. Duh! And of course the opposite is true! If there are 30 words for wind in a language, you can bet they have a lot of wind. Like the Inuit and words for snow.

I have no idea which language has the most words of wind. I remember hearing that ancient Greek has 30 words for it… maybe that was just a catchy phrase in Greek courses in the 70…but it has stayed with me for four decades.

I am utterly tired of the wind this winter. It’s been spring for three weeks now, but we are still having these winter cold fronts down here with strong winds. Bob just heard from his weather router this morning that there are at least two more weeks of this clocking wind headed our way.

Here is Sarah Swett’s marvelous “The Hut on the Rock, the Sea.”…. look at those calm waters!…..look at that lovely coracle!…..it’s hard for me to imagine a more idyllic time on the water than this. I haven’t experienced a moment like this in so long I cannot remember.

And here is Barbara Heller’s “All the Diamonds.” She’s done a beautiful job rendering the brilliant points of light on water …..again not something I’ve seen in a while since it’s always blowing a gale here.

Best of all, this tapestry by Sarah Swett depicts my idea of a perfect day: my feet firmly planted on dear Mother Earth, admiring the lovely water view….while knitting! What could be better?

It’s inspiring to see what a couple of wonderful artists can do translating lovely moments on the water. I just have to cling to the belief that there might times like this ahead for me.

Into the Final Month

April 4, 2014 | Leave a Comment

We’ve spent the last three days or so sailing, and sailing hard. It’s not much fun when the wind is ahead of the beam, which means we are sailing into it. Pandora goes like a bat out of hell, but heeling a lot, and that means sailing hard on her side. Since this is also our home, it’s not much fun to have all our stuff bashed about hard to one side. We batten things down, and put away as much as we can, but I can still hear all the stuff in the cabinets tumbling around. There is precious little glass onboard, as you can imagine!

The sights are lovely, as you can see, but the wind continues to be challenging. We have spent the past three days with some wonderful friends on board a very comfortable catamaran called Nati. And we’ve just said goodbye to other dear friends on Ariel. That’s life onboard. Unlike living on land, when your house location changes all the time, your friends change too. Luckily, we bump into friends now and then all along the way.

A day spent on Joe’s Sound with our friends from Nati. We walked some beautiful white beaches, dinghied into mangrove flats, and had a lovely dinner of perch from a lake in the Adirondacks that Anne and Dick cooked up for us. How amazing is that? They had a friend visit who brought them frozen perch, and venison that he had killed himself while hunting and fishing in the Adirondacks. What luck for us to get to have some perch!

We are back in Thompson Bay, planning to go ashore shortly for a walk and ending with happy hour and hamburgers at the Long Island Breeze. Tomorrow we have reserved a car and will do a little touring of the southern part of the island, ending the day with dinner at Chez Pierre, a bit north of here, where we had a lovely dinner watching the sun set last year. I have high hopes for an equally great dinner and sunset there tomorrow evening!

As usual, when when the winds are calm I try to weave…. slow, but steady progress on my ‘toyland.’

It is 31 days until I fly home. I wonder what this last month on board will bring…..hopefully some long awaited fair weather and calm seas!

Hardly Spring

March 28, 2014 | 1 Comment

We are into the first week of spring, but it still feels like winter. We finally made it south to Georgetown on Great Exuma, a great jumping off spot for going further south, but the weather has us pinned here. Georgetown is the largest settlement in the Exumas by some factor of 10 or so! It’s where everyone gets last provisions before heading into the remote regions beyond.

So we are wiping through our newly acquired provisions just sitting here in a very bumpy anchorage. I am surely getting tougher at bumpy conditions, as I attempt to continue work on my little tapestry.

One day, we were visited by this turtle numerous times. Considering how shy turtles are, how quickly they disappear whenever we reach for our camera, we were amazed that this guy kept diving down and returning to look at us yet again. He hung out with us for quite a while. It’s our first successful photo of turtle after years of attempts! We think this is a green turtle, but what fascinates me about them is how beautifully golden they are. They seem to have their own light as they glow right below the surface of the beautiful waters here. I wish we could have captured that in the photo. You cannot imagine how this guy glowed like golden sunlight as he floated near us. Stunning!

Yesterday we spent a little time onshore Stocking Island (across from Great Exuma) and had lunch at St. Francis resort and then a walk on the ocean side beach, where the waves were truly impressive. Seeing the force of the Atlantic made me quite thankful for our sheltered anchorage, even if it is considerably less ideal that I would prefer!

Here is the view of the anchorage off Stocking Island from St. Francis’s outdoor dining deck.