I guess there may be a named storm coming, the second of the year. Speed run of moving to the Caribbean where we get to collect all the goals of living during a severe drought, early hurricane season, record high Atlantic Ocean temperatures and your dog becoming obsessed with eating Jack Spaniard wasps. For the record, if they hurt as much when they sting you in the arm as the do in your mouth I cannot recommend them as a main course.

What have we been doing?

We've got nearly all of our road cleared to the eastern most edge of our property. The western edge runs to an adjacent lot we don't want to mess with yet, and it's not important for building our house so we're going to leave it as is while we tackle bigger project.

We've got a nice solar rack set up (though, squaring the garbage lumber that Home Depot sells as kiln dry treated is impossible without concrete footers so it's a bit wonky). We have 250+330+330 gallons of water storage set up with rainwater collection off of the solar rack. If it ever rains we'll be able to see if what we did collects anything. It's a bit rough, though, since you collect about 6 gallons per square foot with a 1" rain event and we've only got about 270 possible square feet to collect from. Also, we like our rain events as nice little showers where all the little happy lizards get a nice drink and nothing devastating happens.

The container was delivered by the awesome team at Atlantic Trucking. Roger helped us when it first arrived, and did an amazing job getting it in place up this crazy road.

We've been able to plant a lime tree, orange tree, avocado tree, guava, comfrey, hot pepper (and they do mean hot), some ground cover, a potted aloe, and the most amazing basil we've ever grown. Next up if we can get more consistent rains or more storage is to start a garden with greens, herbs, watermelon and veggies.

We did find a beautiful mango tree along the road, it's probably about 40 feet tall at the crown. It dropped a few fruit which were smaller, about baseball sized, and we dried out the seed and are now trying to soak it to life. There are a surprising number of mango trees along the road, so obviously someone 30 years ago took the advice about the best time to plant a tree. We bought a papaya and dried the seeds, just waiting on some rain and collecting/storing it before we really get a grove going.

What else is going on?

I knew about the hydraulic cooling fan on the Kubota BX25D we brought here, since I had to rip the whole tractor apart (thanks Dad!) when I broke the wheel interlock a while ago. The fan is a silly plastic blade that you wonder if it does anything at all, but it turns out that when you drive over small trees/shrubs and they pop up in unexpected places they can take those fan blades right off. I'm installing a DC bilge blower in its place, since replacing that fan involves a significant amount of work for a $25 part.

We changed the brakes on the truck. Uneventful but crawling in the dust reminded me of doing maintenance in Iraq. It's not fun. At least we have a nice shower. Creature comforts continue to improve and as we get a better understanding of our solar and weather we have developed a good rhythm with charging the batteries while running the most inefficient air conditioner possible. The new A/C mini-split (12k BTU which is a bit oversized for this RV but should be great for a bedroom in the future) should have arrived in port today, but we have to clear customs and pay taxes for it and with Juneteenth being a holiday it's not likely to get done until later this week (pending any storm issues). A/C at night would be very nice, it's still pleasant but we haven't had quite the nice breeze and it's staying a bit warmer than it had been.

Shed Construction

We shipped about 3,000 poly bags here (think a 20" x 14" x 5" woven plastic sand bag) which is probably not enough for all we want to do but enough for now. Since we haven't cleared a driveway yet (thanks DPNR) and we want to try to survive storms, we started on an earth bag shed. It's basically 3 walls surrounding the camper (keeping it under the building code 120sqft requirement of course). Then we'll construct some temp walls to meet up with the trailer, and probably make a similar shed on the other side. We are trying to sandwich the trailer in earth bags so it stays nice and on the ground. Anyway, we aren't going full height on the earth bag walls since we are using road base and that costs us about $250 per load. I estimate we will need 4-5 loads, so it's not cheap but it's heavy. Adding a shovel of cement every 9 of road base was suggested by the engineer when I had a house designed in Bailey, CO and that's what we stuck with on this. It should provide sturdy walls once the cement sets up.

We scavenged some old power line that has been down for "quite some time" (a phrase I learned dealing with various offices here) which should have a breaking strength of a few thousand pounds. We embedded this in to the lower layers of the wall to wrap around the frame of the trailer in a effort to provide more weight and a lower center of gravity.

We will build the earth walls about 4 or 5 feet tall and then a traditional wood frame on top to finish out. Finished with a hip roof covered in steel, it should be a pretty solid structure capable of repelling a coconut attack.