Part 2 Digging Digging

Mon May 26, 2014
After a Sunday of chartering to earn more dough so we can throw it into the property, we were ready to get back at it. First thing we did after getting the men started digging, was to bring Randy back to the boat and meet with him regarding costs, and design of the new abode. He had done some good work on the weekend, going into Coxen Hole and bringing back pricing for all kinds of commodity things like lumber and concrete. Armed with this information, Ed zoomed into Oakridge and met with Clifford, to see what kind of pricing we can get locally. After lunch we had to get Alex & Randy to go and drag away a dead Rotweiler that floated in from someplace. Up he went to the top of the Bight, where there is a nice big hungry croc.

Tues – Thursday
The gang is growing. Now we have 7 guys.
‘The wall’ is coming up – the trench along the edge of the sea is filled with concrete and rock 2’ deep, 160’ long.

Now comes the real concrete construction. 4 ½ meters of sand, along with the big pile of gravel that has been moved from the Landing is waiting Friday for 324 8” concrete blocks. Also to be moved one by one by boat to ‘the site’. Friday is concrete block day.
Seven guys digging for 2 days has made a big difference in excavating back into the hill to make a footprint for the little house. It is unbelievable to us how 7 guys can have such a good time working so hard. They are just so glad to be working – the money is good, but also they have a reason to get up in the morning.

Food is incredibly important. It is considered here that when you hire a guy to do a job, you are expected to feed them. We are kind of spoiling them though. Homemade fresh muffins in the morning, and we make them whatever lunch we can throw together – bologna sandwiches, cole slaw, potato salad and whatever else we can come up with. They are so appreciative .

We bought a panga – an emergency sale from a guy who had to leave the island in a hurry. We had the cash and bought the boat, and a jet-ski that we didn’t really want. Luven bought that from us though, so we weren’t stuck with it.

The Crazy Legs has made a big difference – no more negotiating with these water taxi dory pirates to move our shit. And of course, the rubber dinghy is totally unsuitable for that stuff. Ed moved cement, rebar, and all kinds of stuff. Nice to have our own water transportation.

Friday May 30, 2014
6AM – get up, bake muffins, cook potatoes for Potato Salad. Get payroll written up for the workers, organize money for concrete block guy, lists made for groceries for 2 charters this week, bank books etc ready for banking. Plan is to run down island early and get back early.
7:15AM – Russ & Alex go to in the Landing to wait for the concrete block guy to deliver 335 8” blocks.
7:30AM – No Mansen – he is supposed to be picking up the workers. Mansen can’t seem to maintain a phone, so Alex runs around and does crew pickups.
7:45AM – Still no Mansen. Alex returns to get tools, water to get the crew started. Alex tells us Mansen’s barge has a cracked stern and he’s afraid that the 15hp motor will drop off so he didn’t do pickups. Never mind. We send Alex in the inflatable to go get the men.
8AM – Men are now getting dropped off, tools loaded and getting started ½ hr late.What to do next about a barge to move the blocks?
8:30 – We could round up fiberglass supplies this morning and send Lindy over to fix the barge – but it will take time to harden up… Thinking we’ll have to use the CrazyLegs panga for barge duty. How to do it and not wreck up our pretty little panga? Nope, never mind, it’s ok, they just changed the outboard to Alex’s barge and towing the broken one.
9AM – supervised the unloading of the block, paid the driver. Now running over to pay the men while Ed goes into Oakridge to pick up 5 bags of cement. Then pick me up and go down island to bank and grocery stores.
10AM – finally got away. So much for an early start!
The crew of 7 got all the blocks moved, did a bunch more digging on the hillside, and one row of blocks in place. Russ got on the shit list, though, for working the men through lunch – nobody got any food that day, with us being down island!

A cap of concrete was formed on top to get it above the high water mark. Finally dry land and no more digging in the muck!

Sunday June 1
Took the day ‘off’ from building. We have 2 charters next week – Mon & Wed, total 30+ people. Time to prep and peel and chop! Chena came in to bake, make meatballs and do food prep.
Meanwhile during a lapse of niceness, I had agreed to repair a sail. It was so horrible and dirty. It took almost all day just to rip off the old sacrificial strip of fabric but I finished the job around 4PM and had just enough time to clean up the mess in time for tomorrow’s charter.

Mon June 2
Big wind all week coming up. Today was an all day 16 person private charter with a group of young people from Winfield Kansas. 8 of them had been out with us before, 2 years ago. I didn’t make that one, what with fighting that spider bite infection (that’s a whole ‘nother story). Most of them were badly hungover, having had spent $1000 at a bar in West End the night before. Good thing we took a deposit or half of them would have bailed. We had 4 or 5 pukers, but by mid morning they rallied and the party was on.
Meanwhile work is continuing on the job site with concrete block and rebar.

Tues June 3
We are living on the catamaran and staying at Turtlegrass marina just here in the Bight not far away. It hasn’t rained for a long time and cleaning up the boat from yesterday was done as best we can without much fresh water. We need rain to fill up the cistern here!

Wed June 4
Cruise ship group of 15 – all separate parties. What a co-ordination effort to make sure they met up with each other and nobody got lost or left behind. But amazingly enough, they all showed! Nice group from Royal Carib – they had a blast. Another very windy day but at least the seas were down a bit and nobody puked!

Thurs June 5
To add to the mess and confusion, we decided to give one of our part-time crew, Robert, some work and got him started on revarnishing the cockpit area on the catamaran, starting with the entrance doors. So Robert was varnishing away, and I was working in the galley in the mornings – muffins, salads, hot dogs for the workers lunch. Ed was running all over the Bight co-ordinating the crew, staying ahead of things as far as materials and supplies. A load of lumber arrived late, around 4PM, so had to be unloaded and moved from ‘the Landing’ to ‘the job site’ – we now have a nice big postie for the RECO power hookup, and lumber for forms to make a cap on top of ‘the wall’.
Next week the RECO postie (4 x 6 x 16) will have to be sunk into the ground up the hill at the ridge, and a trench 2’ deep dug all the way down to ‘the site’ to run the main wire.

Fri June 6
Thankfully it was a bit cloudy today and the wind seems to be coming down. The crew arrives like routine now – get the water jug, the MP3 music box, and they get themselves picked up by the dinghy and barge. Today the plan is for Robert to continue on the varnishing at the boat, get a coat of varnish on and then we can lock up the boat for him & Alex to scrape the bottom. And we can maybe get to BJ’s for a beer and a visit with the outside world.
Paying off the work crew for the week, we did manage to get a beer or two at BJ’s. The crew want to work tomorrow to finish the top edge of the wall.
We also received a phone call – a family of 7 wanting to come out for a charter. So, Sunday it is!
The boat is an awful dirty mess. There was an absolute ton of laundry to be done – and trying to conserve water. So we’re just doing the best we can. The charter was an all day. Grandma, parents and 4 bratty kids. But hey, they paid the minimum of $780 so we probably made enough for the payroll this coming week!
After dropping off the family at Oakridge, they had a flat tire on their rental vehicle, so the able crew helped out changing the tire and off they went.

It’s July. It’s so very hot and dry. Now that the sea wall was complete, and backfilled and all stomped down flat, it was time to construct the foundation. This meant digging again. This time trenches. Deep trenches.

Also needed for this phase was re-bar, which they fashioned with wire into pillars to support concrete posts, and plenty of cement and cement blocks to reinforce the trenches.
Water continues to be a problem, so the crew is going across the Bight to the public well and bringing 5 gallon pails back to the job site. The trenches were filled with cement and blocks. In some places, water was seeping through from the ground, so that helped some with the water shortage we were experiencing.

I don’t even really know how many guys are working anymore. We’re busy with chartering and maintaining the catamaran, running down island and endless running around for materials. I have turned personnel management over to Randy. This turned out to be quite a big mistake. We found out later that he was getting the men to dig a section, fill it in, and dig it again. Several times.

Also he had them keep digging into the hill. By the time we noticed, we had quie a larger-than-expected area to fill in with a house. So……we decided that we had learned yet another hard lesson and mitigated the problem by planning on building a bigger house!

The ‘bonus’ space over and above the original footprint would be used as a retaining wall against the hillside, and a space for water tanks. This was a good thing, actually, in the end because this design insulated the ‘basement’ of the house against the moisture of the dirt/retaining wall against the hill and gave us space for those water tanks.

Stretching into august now and still we are working on the foundation. It seems never ending. We did however do some non-building things……we conducted a wedding aboard the catamaran, attended a funeral for a friend in Port Royal, and actually got off this rock to Guanaja in the catamaran, for the annual Conch Festival complete with a pirate boat parade and beach party.
The crew decorated the boat all up with palm fronds and flowers, and the Captain put on his crisp white shirt and captain hat, and read the ceremony. There was even a jump-off into the water by the wedding party after the official “I Do’s”

We attended a ceremony for poor old Keith who died alone in Port Royal apparently from alcohol from the many empty bottles found at the site. The body was brought to BJ’s and pallbearers loaded him into a skiff for transport to Port Royal where he was laid to rest in his favorite place in the world.

We had never been to the famous Conch Festival in Guanaja, and so, seeing as it was low season for chartering, we decided to go for a holiday. Setting sail for Guanaja, we stayed a few days anchored out, enjoying the boat parade, pirate parties every day at some different settlement and just hanging out cruising again.

Walls were going up for the downstairs and it was starting to feel like we might actually be able to put a roof on this thing before the rainy season starts in October..

I was trying not to think about the poor, barren hillside up there which had been badly chopped and abused before we even bought the property. It had nothing but  4 or 5 huge scrub oak trees and a couple of craboos. The rest was bare hard clay devoid of topsoil and steep as shit so almost impossible to climb.

This back retaining wall was becoming a major operation. Because it was so high, there would be a lot of weight on it during rainy season if water built up behind it. Russ was quite the concrete guy and I’m sure overbuilt it due to the fact that we were paying by the day and not by the job (mistake!). Big rebar cement columns, and deep holes for rebar-reinforced buttresses. It was very slow going.
Every few days there was materials coming – block, cement, water, rebar…..on and on. It really felt like it would never end.

But then one day the sweetest little cutie pie showed up. She had followed the men over the hill on their way here to work. You could see every bone in her spine. Since we weren’t living on shore yet, we really couldn’t take her to the boat, so I bought some kibble and every day I would bring a pocketful to her.

When she saw me she would dance and spin circles and wolf down every little particle of that food. I named her Flaca. That’s Spanish for ‘skinny’. She was our brave, feisty girl until the day she died 10 years later.


So this is where we were by the end of September. Rainy season is approaching and we’re nowhere close to putting on a roof.