Salinas Windmills on Salt Cay and other ramblings...

Remnants of Salt Cay's industry (the harvesting of salt) - the windmills - became home to osprey until Hurricane Ike brought them down. Mike is working with Keyroy, Candy and a couple of other guys to put up new homes for the osprey today (I'll be sure to post a picture of the new poles/homes once they're up.) This salt pond windmill was located down the road from our house, there was another one located directly in from of our house that actually worked when we first arrived on island 15+ years ago. This picture was taken in 2007.

With luck one day there will be funds available to restore at least one of the windmills as a historic site. We've got a number of pictures of how they worked and were built that Mike could refer to... But right now it's hard to get any building materials to the island and there are so many houses that need repair after the hurricane that the rebuilding of the windmills are the least of our concern!

Most of the houses have roofs on them now - there are still a few houses that Haitian workers live in that are covered with tarps and unfortunately the owners of those houses don't seem very interested in repairing them. I have no idea what will happen when the rains start in September and October. The funds that have been collected for hurricane repairs are slowly being used to fix the homes of the senior citizens on island. Volunteers and paid members of the community will be working together to be sure that the roofs don't leak and the inside of the homes are repaired (many ceilings fell in). Unfortunately those homes with rotten or termite infested beams will not be able to have those beams fixed... there just isn't enough money for that. Keep your fingers crossed that the new roofs don't blow off because they're attached to bad wood if another hurricane comes along!

Yesterday was a community clean-up day and there is still a lot of debris from the hurricanes laying about. But bags and bags were collected yesterday and the island is looking better every week! Yesterday was also a banner day for whale watching! Doug and Angela spotted six different whales while enjoying their morning tea on the beach by Coral Reef (Debbie's restaurant at the harbor) and later in the morning I was standing at Mike & Marilyn's and two different whales were sighted. Yesterday afternoon I was walking out to the beach deck and watched two whales right off the "Wall"... the whale watching was fantastic! I'll post a couple of pictures of the humpback whales tomorrow.