connoisseur series500

Here I move to the edge of the rusted claws and take a side shot.

The remains of the dock reach out like something from the grave. It was an emotional moment for me seeing the ruins. Time passes for me and for the place.

The dock is in terrible shape. As a boy, the dock was full of equipment and there would always be industrial vehicles parked on it--active during the day, and parked at night. It was great fishing from the dock, as the water had been dredged to allow a barge to enter. You could look from the dock into some "deep" ocean, so you could see species of fish you normally couldn't view from land. Now the dock is rusted and falling apart. There are trees now growing in the middle of the dock! I present dock photos in the next few posts. Here you see a hole and the water rushes in. The elevation of the dock has dropped as evidenced by the ship tie (don't know the correct word.) at the center. The gravel has dropped or been washed away.

Now here's the school today. It was shocking. Strange to see a part of your childhood in ruins.

Here's an old pic of my class at school. There were only a total of six students in my class! I was the guy at the top right.

O-I built a dock on each of the islands where they had logging operations. They owned a tug which would bring in the barge which would be loaded with logs. The barge would sail to a terminus in North Florida and unload. They built their dock on an island which was connected to Abaco by a causeway (built by the company.) They also built houses there and a school. I went to the school as a kid, and lived in one of the houses for a year before moving to Casuarina Pt. My return to Snake Cay was a shocker. I was told that it was devastated by a hurricane in 2004, but time had wrought its share of damage as well. The houses were in neglect and fell easy prey to the hurricane. The dock still exists but is in bad shape. I'll include some pictures in another post. I found Snake Cay to be entirely derelict. Only one house remains standing (and it was ours!) A squatter(?) now lives there and there is no power. In the heat of the day, he leaves the front door open. He was away when I first visited, and the place was empty aside from a gravid dog, which you can see to the side of the picture. On a subsequent visit, I saw him sitting in a chair to the side of the house. He shot me an expression you would likely get from one of the characters in the movie, "Deliverance." He lives alone on the island and obviously wants to keep it that way. What's a man doing driving a rental car down the unkempt road at Snake Cay? When I took the pic, I wasn't 100% sure that it was our old house. I mean, how could ours have been the only one left standing? What were the chances? But the croton plant in the front came from another generation that was planted by my mother, and there were a few telltale palm trees situated in the right places. My mother confirmed it was our house when I showed her the pic in Florida. The house was stationed on a hill next to a cliff. I think the cliff must have sheltered it from the hurricane. The occupant has a butane tank but there is no power on Snake Cay. Rough living in the heat....

This is an interesting phenomenon typical of the Casuarina Point beach: the shore land is uneven so when the tide goes out there is an uneven elevation in the sea floor. Sandbars appear at low tide, but they are often surrounded by water, which can reach near 10 feet deep. But you can walk out to them from shore. When the tide rushes in, the sandbars are the last to be deluged and if you are out on one farting around (like I did as a kid,) you could often find yourself "stranded" out there. You'd have to swim back in some deep water to get back to shore. As the tide completely comes in, all sandbars go underwater. I once got trapped out on one as I was having fun and wasn't paying enough attention to my surroundings. There was a large moving shadow in a channel separating me from shore. It was a shark--likely a harmless nurse shark. I waited for it to pass then dove into the deep to swim to the next sandbar. Here's a pic taken from shore. You can see a sandbar in the distance with two people on it. This is close to the spot where I got stranded, but I think the topography has changed somewhat over the past 36 years.

Wasn't born there (as mentioned in the first post.) Only lived there as a kid from 1969-71. I was between the age of 9-11.

Casuarina Point, where supervisory families lived in company-owned homes. These are all new buildings. I couldn't identify any of the original homes. The beach looks the same. I swam there just about every day. It appears empty today because people were likely at work. We had the beach to ourselves on this last visit.

Here's the old office building. Time and hurricanes and neglect have done its damage. So that is basically all that is left of the $11 million operation. The company had also built roads, schools, houses and a dock. Many of the roads had been used for logging, but they also built new roads for the sugar factory. They built houses for employees on two main areas: 1. Snake Cay and 2. Casuarina Point. We lived on Snake Cay for one year (1969), whose houses had been used for the families of the loggers and we moved to Casuarina Pt which was a newer settlement built for the sugar people. Here's a pic of Casuarina Point today. The beach is still nice, and it's got a bunch of new homes. Pic is on next post.

In July, my father, my son, and I made a short three-day trip to Abaco island in the Bahamas. The trip was a personal one in that we had lived on the island (well, my son hadn't been born at the time) between 1969-1971. I wanted to revisit some of the old places we had lived at and also some of the places we used to visit. The island arguably hasn't grown in population since our years there, but I don't know for sure. There are no industries on the island and the economy is said to subsist on second homes owned by Americans. The homes are built (employing Bahamians and Haitian immigrants,) then they hire a landscaper to clear the brush, and inevitably a caretaker is needed to look after the place when the owners are back in the States. This along with tourism keeps most people employed on the island. Abaco is a narrow island but it is 107 miles long. It is surrounded by little cays. There is revenue from tourism and such infrastructure exists on some of the cays (i.e. little islands) off Abaco, such as Elbow Cay and Man O War cay. Walker Cay (of ESPN fishing fame) is on the Northern edge of Abaco. The Southern part of the island is virtually undeveloped. My trip story has nothing to do with tourism. We didn't go to any of those sites. First, I have to give a little personal history, for we didn't come from the islands. This involves a little recent history of Abaco island. My father was a sugar cane engineer working in a factory in Jamaica, where I was born. He discovered that an American company by the name of Owens-Illinois was looking for sugar cane experts for a new project to be built on Abaco island in the Bahamas. Owens Illinois through its forest products division had been cutting down trees on several Bahamian islands to be used for pulp. The Bahamian government, which at that time was still a British colony, had agreed to lease land on Grand Bahama island, Andros island, and Abaco island to this large American company. In exchange, the company would hire Bahamians and it would build roads and docks on these undeveloped lands. By the end of the 1960s, the islands had been pretty much denuded of its trees; but the loggers were careful to leave one tree standing at specified distances so the forests could regenerate every 20 years. Here's a quote from the history of Owens-Illinois: The company involved itself in such far-removed fields as sugar cane farming in the Bahamas and phosphate rock mining in Florida. Basically, the company decided to grow sugar cane on Abaco island, since they had already built roads, docks, schools, and houses for their supervisory staff and employees. The idea was destined to fail and it eventually did. The limestone rock was not conducive to any high yielding crop of sugar cane. Here's a quote from the Abaconian newspaper regarding O-I's infrastructural contributions: The inhabitants of Abaco continued to live barely at subsistence levels until after the Second World War, when the Owens-Illinois Corporation revived the lumber business, built roads and introduced cars. An airport was built at Marsh Harbour and banks arrived. When the pulpwood operation ended in the 1960s sugar replaced it but was short lived. This large American company even managed to lobby a 10,000-ton per year sugar quota for the Bahamas from the US Congress. Their goal was to produce 50,000 tons of sugar from the operation. A state-of-the-art factory was built and experts in the field were hired from Louisiana and Florida. My father came over as one of three shift engineers to run the plant. They dropped tons of fertilizers in the fields and managed to produce 10,000 tons their first year in 1969. The following year in 1970, they increased production to 19,000 tons, but the operation was already losing vast amounts of money. (Source: History of the Bahamas by Michael Craton.) The company decided to shut it all down and the third year's crop went unharvested. One retired O-I employee told me that the overall loss came to $42 million (Dad's figures say $34 million.) The 200 or so employees would all have to find new jobs, and my father was put in charge of mothballing the equipment. They were hoping to be able to sell this modern factory and its equipment as a going concern, but were unable to find any serious buyers. If a large company couldn't make it work, then who could? The Bahamas obtained independence from Britain the following year and they agreed to buy back the land formerly owned by this large American corporation. An island historian told me that the new and fledgling government accepted O-I's asking price without any counteroffer. They didn't know how to deal with a large foreign business entity and preferred to expedite their departure from the island. No one bought the sugar mill. My father went back in 1974 to show it to some Canadian investors but there wasn't enough interest. The new Bahamian government took it over. Eventually, they sold off some of the machinery to a Columbian company, who according to island rumors sailed off with the machinery only to dump it in the ocean and return for another load. These rumor mongers believed the Columbians were just using it as a front from a major drug operation. I don't know if I believe that story. Nothing is left at the old factory site except for some rusted cane cars (which could have been sold for some decent $) and the remains of the old office building. Here are pics of the cane cars and another one of the old office building. The road to the site was unmarked, but Dad showed me how to get there in our rented vehicle. I can only show one pic at a time, so next post...

12 biggies and 11 Selects. No singles (yet)

Nevermind, I just looked it up.

I would be if I had seen one. When are these on?

The lady at the end was a real hoot!

If I were offering cds directly to boardmembers, I don't think I would appreciate being bumped for ebay advertisements. We've all got our ebay search engines to look up your stuff and others on ebay. No need, in my opinion. to warn us of your auctions. No special advantage to us. Again that's my opinion only. You don't need to follow it. -_-

RIP. One of the NFL's greatest coaches. Never realized he was sick.

The Kenny Dorham is really nice. Somebody should take advantage of this low price for a wonderful cd.

A visit to the Patriots' training camp?

Insurance does not provide a full refund. You get a partial refund after filing an intimidating claim form. You also have to provide evidence of the loss. Bottom line is that insurance is a pain in the rear and I feel it is only worthwhile for big purchases.

The difference is that the "thing" that makes Bonds a bad guy is same thing that's causing him to be able to break the record. If he was busted for a DUI, or was a gambler, or a racist even, he still wouldn't be a likable character, but he'd probably be more acceptable as a record holder. Is Aggie getting aggie-vated over Bonds?

We've got to face the facts that sometimes "bad" guys break records: witness Pete Rose.

Happy Birthday Darko 20/20!

Cut it out, guys. There's right and wrong on both sides. GS is correct in that you fellahs seem fixated on Bonds. The others are correct in saying that Bonds might have done something to enhance his performance. You know who suffers the most: Barry does. He could climb Mt. Everest on a scooter right now and no one would recognize the achievement. This is the greatest punishment which could be inflicted on a human being: to belittle his career achievement. Barry can't do anything right.

It doesn't seem like that big of a drop. Guy plus it has gone up an awful lot recently. All the same, such volatility is not a good sign. We need a correction. the swings have seemed much more volatile during the last 5 or 6 weeks. yes, I was referring to that although it wasn't necessarily evident in my post.