Judy and Meridel and Turks and Caicos - Part II

We spent five nights and four days in Southside Marina, the "land" part of our time in T&C.

Three of the days were with Meridel and Judy, who flew out the last day. They took a room in a hotel at the larger and more commercial but equally tricky-to-navigate-through-the-reefs-to-enter Turtle Cove Marina on the north side of Provo. Below: three beauties, and you can see part of their marina reflected on the window to the right.

 They wined and dined us with dinners in elegant restaurants on the beach such as this one.

And, oh yes, they let us shower in their hotel room under hot water, lots of hot water. (Most non-classy restaurants have only cold water in their sinks and the marina’s shower is of that flavor as well.)

I can’t quite get over how developed and hence different this island is from most, especially from other islands of this nation, like Grand Turk. The others have a tourism industry but it is small and low key. We should have been tipped off about Provo by the volume of the passenger jets we saw taking off from the airport while we were sailing there from French Cay. Most of the tourists are from the US and Canada. We even heard a rumor that the Canadians, being a British nation (well except for Quebec) put out a bid to buy the whole nation a few years ago. The rumor may even be true! The north shore is a huge long beach, protected by a reef, with hotels, clubs, condos and private residences cheek by jowl almost its entire length. This is mostly luxury type housing with lots of private security guards, because it only takes one violent incident to kill the goose that feeds the entire tourism-based economy of the island. The difference between this and Florida is scale and that here there are no buildings higher than seven stories and most do not top four.

Meridel and Judy took us to the supermarket where we suffered sticker shock; yes they have Jarlsberg cheese, but it is $19 per pound! Everything is imported and expensive. They make and grow nothing on this rather arid island (except that they make reverse osmosis water). Tourism and services is the island’s only industry. The girls took Lene to a pedicure one afternoon while they shopped for souvenirs. We tried to snorkel one afternoon but the places along the beach we selected were not the best and wind and the surf were up, so we simply swam a bit. 

On our last day together, we all took a snorkel boat tour with about 20 other people. The captain knew the best place on the outside of the reef to stop and drift and from which, in water that varied from 10 to 20 feet in depth, we saw large schools of large tropical fish. At the next spot the water was only about five feet deep and many of us picked up conch from the bottom. The boat's mate cleaned these, took the meat, polished the shells for souvenirs, and diced the meat with diced peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and lime juice, while we explored a low island where large iguanas fought with each other. I forgot to ask how the iguanas survive hurricanes which wash across this island. Upon our return from exploring, the crew served up a most delicious cerviche salad of conch.  Their beer was OK too, but the rum punch tasted like coolaid with a few drops of rum in it. It was good for Judy to finally get an opportunity to don the snorkel gear they had schlepped all the way here from Portland OR.  One negative side effect of our guests being good photographers is that I took fewer photos. If Meridel and Judy send me some of their photos, I will try to add them to this posting.
I mentioned shirts and hats in the prior post:

WARNING: The rest of this post is likely to have little appeal to those who are not interested in sailing.

We also did some things for ILENE while in the marina. I had fortuitously found the sheared off head of an Allen bolt (a bolt with a hexagonal pit in its head) lying on the deck; it should have bounced off into the sea, unnoticed. But finding it, I  poked around and discovered that it had come off one of the two bolts that holds the cage of the furling line drum to the bottom of the forestay. Here is a picture of the drum. When we pull on the aft corner of the sail to unfurl it, we loosen the white line with green markings shown in the lower left, which gets wrapped around the drum. When we want to put the sail to bed, by pulling on the same white cord with green markings, the sail wraps up on itself on the forestay, of which you see only the bottom inch.The lower photo shows the bottom of the drum, with the Allen bolt in the center. I had thought that as long as the bolt’s shaft was screwed in place, the cage would hang together but I showed the problem to our rigger. He showed me that the threads at the head end of the bolt had been properly intentionally ground off and hence that the remaining lower threaded shaft of the bolt, without its head, was holding nothing. So he took the broken shaft out and put a new bolt in place.
The  rigger had been called primarily to fix our boom vang. He replaced the rivets which had failed with stainless steel machine bolts for which he tapped threads and applied a strong adhesive, Dow’s 5200, as a barrier to prevent corrosion of the aluminum against the steel. He pointed out that the winch mounted on the starboard side of the mast is attached with Stainless steel screws, which persuaded me that stainless steel could work with aluminum. He also freed a frozen pivot point which he said may have been the cause of the vang’s failure. Four of the bolts are shown to the left of the blue line at the right of the photo, with four more holding it on the port side. The formerly frozen up-and-down pivot point is show with a wire circlip hanging from it in the center of the photo.

We polished some stainless, took on some water and some diesel, attached the big horizontal fins at the base of the outboard,  and finally got the piece of madras cotton we had obtained in Guadeloupe hemmed. This last was done by Sharon, who with her husband Larry, are sailing a 44 foot Pearson ketch, “Avatrice”

out of Freeport Maine, where we had visited on ILENE in 2008. Freeport is the home of L.L. Bean. Sharon teaches women how to sail aboard Avatrice in the summers and has a sewing machine aboard. They have GPS but not a chart plotter, preferring to navigate a bit more like the old fashioned way.  They are going our way and we hope to meet up with them along the way. And I got a haircut and a beard trim so I don’t look as shaggy as Darwin any longer.
                 A bit of high excitement happened one afternoon while we were away snorkeling. A 31 foot Freedom sloop, while looking for a mooring in a bay near our marina, took instruction from a passing boat. Either the advice was erroneous or it was heard incorrectly, but after turning, a coral head caught the boat, and punched a hole in it. The boat is considered “totaled” for insurance purposes. Our marina staff, hearing the mayday calls, organized a rescue and no lives were lost. The only injury was to the mate, who, while in their dinghy, got bruised by the anchor line which had been set out to try to prevent further damage. It snapped taught against her arm. Next day, the couple went out to try to salvage a few personal effects. All any of us sailors can say is:  “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Posted from Georgetown, Great Exuma, Bahamas.