30 June 2015

Bug Power - Termites


     Seems like in the jungle there is a termite nest every hundred steps.  With vegetation growing all year long these colonies have the important task of keeping the cycle of life up to speed by devouring dead wood.  They will also eat up any untreated wooden construction that stays in contact with the ground so plan accordingly.  Termites and their nests have all sorts of uses, including fishing (previous post).








23 June 2015

Old Boats


     There are two ways to get to Bluefields, by plane or by boat.  There aren't many planes but there are a lot of boats.  As the old saying goes, the two best days when you own a boat is the day you buy it and the day you sell it.  Luckily getting back and forth from BLU to False Bluff doesn't require a huge boat or the problems that come with them.






     The below boat used to be a catamaran.  Seems that Cayman Rocca isn't the only sea mount along the bluff.


16 June 2015

The South End


     It's quite nice to walk out your front door and have miles of empty beach.  But how long of a beach stroll would it take to reach civilization from False Bluff?  Heading north would be quite a hike, 18 miles to reach the entrance to Pearl Lagoon.  Heading south is a bit easier with an 8 mile walk to the town of El Bluff at the head of Bluefields Bay.

     At the very end you reach the reason why El Bluff got its name.  A huge chunk of beautiful red clay sitting on black volcanic rock.  Could even be called a cliff, but who would name a town El Cliff?









07 June 2015

Tree Decorations


     Nature abounds in tropical climates and some trees develop more decoration than just fruit and flowers.   

     Wiki says, "The Bromeliaceae (the bromeliads) are a family of monocot flowering plants of around 3,170 species native mainly to the tropical Americas, with a few species found in the American subtropics and one in tropical west Africa."  Also good to know, Pineapples are blomeliads.

     This tree has several types of bromeliads growing on it.  Bromeliads grow in a special way to capture and store rain.  Not sure what variety they all are but the large ones are shrub sized and provide lots of water to the creatures living in the tree.





01 June 2015

A gate or two

     In a previous post I wrote how, since we had dug and opened our canal, lots of people had begun to use it.  Most of the people who travel our canal are people who own property along the beach or people who visit people who own property.  
     But we do get the occasional 'visitor' who ends up hunting on land they don't own or stealing coconuts or whatever.
     So we built a gate...actually we built two.  The one pictured here goes across the main canal (the other one just closes off access to the 'house' dock).  The folks pictured here had come from Bluefields to visit our neighbor Allen over a long weekend.  Their boat, left at our dock when they arrived, was tucked safely away on the house side of the gate, which we usually keep down and locked from sundown to sunup.


     After loading the boat to head back to Bluefields, everybody got a chance to see just how the gate works....which is pretty well!



     Before we added the extension to the bottom of the pole a small boat came right under the pole when the tide was out and water in the canal was low....and they arrived at night!  The dogs notified us and when we informed these 'visitors' that when the gate's down they can't come in.  They got quite upset; and said that well, if we were going to be that way, they weren't ever going to come out to False Bluff again!  And sure enough, they haven't come out to False Bluff again.  
     We dismantled the gate and took it to Bluefields that day to have the extension added to the bottom.