Day 282, Monday March 31st
Well we stayed 8 days in Hopetown. Time to move on. We are heading south today to visit the art
gallery at Little Harbour where we spent Christmas with Ross. The winds are out of the north so we should
have a nice sail. Winds have settled
down 15-20 knots which is still pretty strong, but with a following wind it
will be a great ride. We are up at 6:30
so we can catch the weather, drop our garbage off for 8:30, have a coffee at
the Hope Town Coffee shop while posting some blogs and then catch high tide for
our exit from Hope Town.
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| Julie at the helm enjoying the sail |
We get all our errands done by 9:30 and we are heading out
on the tide. As soon as we exit the harbour
we hoist our sails and settle in to what proves to be an excellent sail the 16
miles down to Little Harbour. We won’t
be able to enter Little Harbour as it is to shallow for us without 2/3 high
tide. We arrive at the south end of the
Sea of Abaco around 1 pm and anchor off of Bridges Cay. As soon as we are confident we are hooked we
drop the dinghy and head into Little Harbour.
Dawson has been thinking of purchasing a bronze sculpture
from here since we made the decision to return to the Abacos. We have not yet bought any souvenirs from our
voyage so we decide this would be a good momento of the trip. It is one of the lowest tides of the year
with us even touching bottom in the channel with our dinghy, albeit we were
right on the western edge of the channel.
We land the dinghy just in front of Pete’s Pub and head over to the
gallery. We tour around, settle on a few
sculptures to consider and head over to the Pub to make our decision. While we were in the gallery we had asked
when closing time and were assured they would wait for us.
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| Desmond and Julie |
When we get back to the gallery we find the doors locked but
figure the employee is over at the foundry as he had told us he works there
normally but is just covering for someone at the gallery. So we head over to the foundry and find
Desmond there. This actually works out
well as we wanted a tour of the foundry.
The foundry remains basically the same from when it was first set up by
Russel Johnston in the ’50 after he escaped the Rat Race. Dawson is very interested as one of his
courses at university included a lab where they did sand castings of a frying
pan. Desmond has been at the foundry
for 3 years and is responsible for the detailing on the sculptures once they
are removed from the casting. He
originally came to Little Harbour as a carpenter, and he was involved in
putting a new roof on the foundry and just stayed on.
We have a great tour of the foundry and see all stages of
the sculpting process. The process is
the similar one first used when bronze was invented. There are seven steps. The first step is the sculpting of the object
in clay. This clay model is then used to
create a silicone mold of the object.
This mold is then used to make a wax casting of the object. This wax casting is then grafted on to wax
tree, which acts as a funnel for the bronze during the pouring. The wax casting and tree are then encased in
a silica sand/resin bath a number of times and allowed to dry. Once the silica sand/resin is hard the object
is placed in an oven to melt the wax and leaves the mold into which the bronze
will be poured. The mold is checked for
any cracks and if required repaired with fibreglass. Bronze is then melted in the foundry and
poured into the mold. Once the bonze has
cooled the mold is broken open and the bronze sculpture removed and detailed to
remove any excess bronze from the casting process. The piece is then mounted and displayed for
sale.
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| Step 2 silicon mold from clay model |
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| Step 3 - the wax castings and wax trees |
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| Step 5 heating of molds to remove wax casting |
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| Step 6 the foundry - the furnace is bottom right |
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| Step 7 detailing |
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| Dawson with our purchase |
Once we are done the tour we head back to the gallery and
select a Hawksbill Turtle mounted on drift wood. We have seen a number of Hawksbill’s during
our voyage and decide it will also bring back good memories. We head back to the boat, getting a little
wet as we are now motoring into the waves.
Once on board we decide to move as the boat is rocking in the
ocean
swell. We hoist the dinghy to move over
to Lynard Cay for the night. Wind is to
change to the North East over night and Lynard will provide protection out of
the swell from the ocean cut. After a
brief discussion on where exactly to set the hook we are set for the night.
We have an excellent dinner, a game of Kings Cribbage,
coffee, an attempt to talk to our son Kevin via Skype (very weak signal) and we
are off to bed. We are quite happy to be
out at anchor after 8 days of being on a mooring in Hope Town.
Cheers
Dawson and Julie
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