Part 4 Wood Arrives

2015

After the Christmas festivities, and visitors were gone, it was back to work. The basics of how to collect and store water had to be figured out. Here, there is a rainy season, and a dry season. Sometimes it doesn’t rain for months, and other times it rains non stop for months. Our well is not fresh – at first it was and we were happy – but gradually as we used that water, it turned brackish. Not surprising I guess, since it is indeed below sea level. It produces about 300 gallons a day though, plenty for flushing toilets.

The plan is to run two or three sets of pipes – one for rainwater (showers, dishes, watering plants), one for well water (toilets) and possibly one for drinking water so we don’t have to cart around 5-gallon tambours of water into our ancient old age.

Luckily, because we have this accidental area dug into the hillside, the floor of which is hugely reinforced, there is lots of room for water storage tanks. We will start out with these two. Ed rigs up pipes and eaves troughs to collect rain from our new roof. When it rained, what a great sound of all that nice new water going into the tanks!

This back area also makes a great place to store construction ‘stuff’ and it isn’t too long before it gets all junky full.

Now that we have all this ‘stuff’ we need to protect it from prevalent thievery that goes on around here. The theory is if we protected our stuff sufficiently, the thief should go someplace easier. Right?

There is a guy on the Island who teaches by day and welds by night. We contacted him, gave measurements and a deposit, and waited. And waited. And waited. He ran out of money. So we gave him some more. And waited.
Finally at long last, the beautiful security bars arrived, and the teacher/welder guy came too, with his helper and welded them up into place.
Security!

Now all the ‘stuff’ could be moved in. Boy somehow we have a lot of stuff, not sure where it all came from.

Two deep freezers for the catamaran business and a fridge takes up one end of the storage bodega. This is an interesting exercise in logistics. The freezers are big and heavy, so we put them one at a time on the barge, get a team of guys and muscle them into place.

Ed had a table saw given to him from our neighbour Mark, who was selling his house and getting rid of things. So he and Alex got to work right away building shelving. Timing between rain showers is critical, because currently the workshop is open-air with no roof.
What a lot of stuff. It just keeps coming.

The day finally has come to move in. That is, move the catamaran, which we are still living on, to its new dock.
The power is run to the dock, and we even have fresh water!

Here is our new home. Well our new storage area, we are still living on the boat. But everyone is happy not to be coming back and forth to the job site, especially Flaca who is now a boat/land dog.

This is the busy season for catamaran charters. We are out almost every day, large crowds of happy cruise ship guests are keeping us and the crew making money but so busy keeping the boat maintained, food supplied, so lots of down-island trip, and food preparation days.

There is nothing like having a land-based toilet and sink. 

The poor miserable steep weedy hillside keeps looking at me. It’s hard to know where to start.
Job #1 becomes obvious once I go up the hill to chase some cows away. These are the big white cows with huge horns. They come over the ridge and start stomping all over the place even munching the tiny little precious plants that I had already put in! I try chasing them off with the broom, but man! Once you get up close to them they are huge! And just look at you.
So up go some posts and a couple of lines of barb wire.
Some friends in Port Royal had a plant that had babies. Here it is called a Spanish Bayonet. It’s a ‘security plant’ – a succulent/cactus type with evil serrated leaves tipped with vicious barbs. Once in a blue moon the mother plant puts up a stalk about 20 feet tall and a million babies grow off the end, when ‘ripe’ they fall off and fly all over the place. It was such fun picking them up, like an Easter Egg hunt! I plant every one of them in little cups for them to take root. These will go all along the ridge to keep those huge cows out.
Ed built Flaca a beautiful dog house. Unfortunately, she just didn’t like it, so Ed finally gave it to our mechanic Luven, for his yard guard dog.
Some finishing touches are done to the inside to make chartering life easier. Here’s the indoor sink.
And doors for the shelving. And stormdoors.
In May, we always book the month off from chartering, this is the slowest season for tourism. And during that time we refit the catamaran. Here is Alex revarnishing the cockpit floor boards. It’s nice to have a big outdoor workshop to spread out in.
This year we needed to haul out the boat to paint the bottom, and to work on the propellor shafts. Usually we have to go over to the mainland, to La Ceiba, where the commercial haulout yard is. The problem with the catamaran is that it is so wide (24 feet) that it won’t fit into the dock slip over there unless it is an unusually high tide. Luckily, there is now a haulout yard for big boats here on roatan. It’s super expensive though, charging a fortune by the day. So we had to make sure all materials, and manpower is here and committed to getting the job done as fast as possible.
Into French Harbour we go, and into the dock slip where the huge travel lift, capable of lifting quite large ships, comes to get us, and thankfully puts us over to theside away from the welding and scraping and grinding of the rusty old ships.
Thank god we didn’t have to live aboard, like all the other times we had to during our boating life. We had a home to go to…..a shower after a hot dirty day!
Luven came with his crew, cleaned, sanded and painted the bottom. And dug holes so the rudders could be dropped to allow them to pull out the propellor shafts. Some welding and re-alignment, and good as new.

Wood Delivery
In getting ready to put up the main house, Ed calculates what lumber is required. No architect, just some sketches and a lot of figuring out. The amount of wood required is large. And it’s way more expensive to buy on the Island than it is on the mainland. And, when you buy lumber here, it is pressure treated (sort of), but wet, so you have to get it months in advance of when you expect to use it so it can dry some.

Ed placed the order (saving $5000) and got a cargo boat from Oakridge to go over and get it. When the day came for the delivery we went all around the Bight and put out the word that any able bodied guy could earn 500 Lemps ($20us) if he showed up and off loaded lumber.
Here comes the boat full of lumber, and all the guys waiting to unload it.
It just kept coming and coming, and they were stacking it absolutely everywhere!

It took a few days but some of the critical wood that we didn’t need right away, was stacked up in a tee-pee style arrangement, so that it could dry.