27 September 2014

Buoy oh buoy

This thing is big and heavy and at one time floated around in the Caribbean.  
Made entirely of metal, it’s like a huge beach ball with an open shaft running right through its center. At one time, a wooden pole or spike sat in the shaft and held some sort of light. When I googled 'old metal buoy' I came up with a picture that looks very much like what we're finding in the woods, labeled as an anti-submarine buoy. 
Somehow these things washed ashore...and pretty far ashore, like hundreds of yards into the forest. How the hell that happened I don't know, but now that people are once more doing things along this section of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, these old buoys are being rescued.




20 September 2014

ENEL 12

In an earlier post i mentioned that different crews did different jobs in this huge ENEL undertaking of running power lines up and down a remote section of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast - like the crew that chopped the right of way didn’t deliver the poles to the sites where they’d be put in the ground. And in keeping with this separation of duties, the crew that traveled up the beach in the truck from El Bluff was going to climb the poles and attach all the stuff that would make the poles ready to carry wire.  
All the usual complement of crew members plus a load of supplies was disgorged in our front yard where the supplies were set under the very clump of sea grapes where I used to live in a tent...shady and close to the house. The supplies would be left there and used as needed. The process of installing all this stuff on the poles would take several days.



     The truck does not have a front tire in a hole...it's parked on level ground.....



     The equipment brought consisted of the wooden four-by-four cross pieces that go near the top of all electric poles throughout the world; and the hardware, both metal and porcelain, that keep the cross pieces in place and carry the wire.  And yes, even with a full load of stuff, a crew of about twenty-five men were in and on the truck...all the men and all the equipment in these pictures.



     The first day the truck showed up all that happened was that the equipment was unloaded in our front yard under the same clump of sea grapes where I lived in a tent before the house was built. The spot was shady and close to the house; and would stay there for several days and used as needed.



     The crew chief took an inventory and some of the men immediately began to put together the pieces that could be put together ahead of time. Each pole would get two men plus supplies.




     (And in case you're wondering, these guys are dressed as we might for a day in autumn...but it was in the mid-80's when these pictures were taken.)


13 September 2014

Papaya


We have two kinds of papaya producing at False Bluff: the big kind and the little kind; or the oblong kind and the round kind.

Whatever! They’re both delicious.




The papayas are ready to pick when the skin turns golden:



06 September 2014

False Bluff, Facebook, friend......

The False Bluff blog is almost totally devoted to just telling the story of what we’re doing out here. Granted, some early posts carried information about Bluefields, but when we started a False Bluff facebook page we put anything and everything that didn’t deal directly with False Bluff onto the facebook page.
Most of the information on the facebook page relates in some way to Bluefields or to RAAS or to things happening in Nicaragua along the Caribbean coast….not all posts, though. 
So, when you become a False Bluff facebook friend you get a wider catch of information about the area...not just stuff specific to False Bluff...information or links about Nicaragua's canal project, birds of Nicaragua, bamboo farms (and bamboo houses and bamboo beer), and projects by local university students, and more.…

https://www.facebook.com/pages/False-Bluff/142899219245180