The most expensive campground ever!

About a month after closing on the property we decided to go down and camp on the land for a week or two.  The thinking here was that it would give us some insight on what we wanted to build and exactly where.  We already knew a couple of things.  We were never going to rent the property out, we were going to make it small, and the main goal was to maximize the incredible viewscape we had.

Why not rent?  First of all we had owned two small sailboats over the last fifteen years that were in bareboat charter service.  It was wonderful in that we could use the boats ourselves for a month or so a year, but it came with a couple of downsides.  People tended to treat the boats like anything that gets rented, i.e. abuse them.  Also, the stuff on the boats would regularly vanish or be broken.  That was bad enough for us, but renting the house would also force us to make compromises in design we didn’t want to make.  Water is one.  The only water in most USVI houses is collected off the roof and directed into a cistern.  The wife and I can be very frugal water wise when necessary, but of course someone on vacation is less inclined to care so much.  As a result, if we did rent the house out the cistern would have to be bigger than necessary, and with that the collection area (roof) and house would also have to be bigger.  With a fairly accurate estimate of $500/sq ft building cost, the extra expense would add up fairly quickly.  And if the renters did run us out of water it is at least $800 for 5000 gallons of water to be delivered on Water Island.  Goodbye profit! Another problem was electricity.  Our plan from the start was to have off the grid power.  With electricity approximately 5 times Texas rates and at least once a day power failures by the USVI power company WAPA this made a lot of sense.  One limitation is battery capacity.  What might be plenty of juice for us wouldn’t be enough for renters and batteries can be quickly ruined by being too deeply discharged repeatedly.  Also, vacationers a lot of times want at least air conditioning in the bedrooms.  An off the grid power system would have to be very large to support this load. Lastly, we just didn’t want anybody else to mess with our stuff.  We’re old enough now that we can afford it.

Why small?  In my job I travel approximately half the month.  Pretty used to hotel room living by now.  Also, the living on Water Island is outside, not inside.  Another contributing factor was that as residents of Homestead, Florida until about 6 months prior to Hurricane Andrew wiped the place off the map we decided never to have all of our stuff in a place that gets bad hurricanes.  So the function of this place was to be the beach shack, not the main home base.  Besides, I really like driving my tractor on our Texas farm, just not when it’s too hot or too cold (6 months of the year!). As I will reveal later it’s a good thing we decided to go small as a big place would be virtually impossible to build on our land.

The view!  We had an idea of what it would be but until we cleared more brush around the campsite it became apparent that we had hit the jackpot.  This led to the decision to make a very large wrap around deck around the small house we were going to build.

Back to Survival School

When I was younger I really liked camping, as long as it was not too hot or cold, and we had plenty of food.  The USAF quickly beat that love out of me in three survival schools and a two year gig as a Forward Air Controller with the Army sealed the deal.  However, I got really good at camping as a result.  Princess had camped as a kid, but nothing really hardcore.  So the first task was to find a tent.  Remember, this place has 20 MPH of wind everyday, so a normal tent more than likely wouldn’t hold up.  And it had to be small enough to go on an airplane as a checked bag.  Fortunately the Plains Indians had invented the solution long ago so a quick hit on Amazon and we had the perfect solution.  You can get your very own here: http://amzn.to/2sJIo37

Next was shelter from the sun so we got this as well

And last was some way to get clean.  Buttercup doesn’t like showing off her ample bosoms, so I brought some old plastic pipe out and with some paracord made this:

A word about paracord.  In any survival situation it comes right after having a way to make a fire.  Well that and a knife to cut it, unless you have beaver teeth.  So far I’ve bought about 5 spools on Amazon from this company: http://amzn.to/2EYnXEm .  Great stuff, a little heavier than normal and works well.  The guy even throws in some cool extra stuff every now and again.

So shelter and cleanliness was taken care of. Fortunately David our neighbor felt sorry for us and let us borrow enough water to make it happen.  For that first trip food was taken care of by Dinghy’s Beach Bar, and a golf cart by Rachel’s golf cart rental.  Once on the ground we also made the half day trek to the local Home Depot and returned with this to put all our new stuff in.  I couldn’t have guessed at the time that every trip to the Island for the next few years would involve four 49 lb checked bags or that our box collection would greatly increase.

Other than the tent blowing down on us in a thunderstorm due to a tent strap failure, life was good!