Composting toilets in paradise

When I was poking around the Cat Island Boathouse last weekend, I was surprised and happy to find that it uses a composting toilet in its bathroom. Ordinarily, someone in such a remote location would use a septic system and be done with it. However, The Cat Island Boathouse sits a few feet away from a pristine mangrove wetland and salt creek. No matter what anybody says, siting a septic tank anywhere near a wetland like that will have an adverse impact on both the wetland and the well that's the source for potable water at The Boathouse.

So the folks behind The Boathouse made a smart and efficient choice by installing a composting toilet. The model at The Boathouse is a Centrex 1000, made by Sun-Mar. Sun-Mar's Centrex 1000 system uses a one pint per flush flushing mechanism that's operated by a foot pedal. That it's a flush toilet makes it seem less strange to users. Compare that single pint of water with the 1.6 gallons flushed away by a supposedly efficient, standard flush toilet and do the math. Products like the Centrex 1000 are the future folks.

The Centrex 1000 is a model specifically designed to deal with the waste generated by a vacation home, but as you go through Sun-Mar's website, you'll see that they have a model for nearly any situation.

So hats off to The Cat Island Boathouse and three cheers for Sun-Mar.

All hail Google

Chrome rocks folks. Download it and start using it. This is the dawn of a new era --Microsoft is going down man!

More Bahamamania

On 21 August, I wrote a post called Bahamamania and in it I talked about a gorgeous rental house I'd been alerted to recently, The Cat Island Boathouse. Well, I was there last Saturday and I was impressed mightily. Utterly missing from what I knew about the place beforehand was an awareness of just how isolated it is. There is a group of other beach houses to the north and south, but their presence was completely unfelt as I stood in front of The Boathouse. The house sits by itself at the end of a dirt road that winds through a marsh.

To stand on the wraparound porch and look to the north, to the east and to the south is to feel what it is to be alone in the wilds. Amazing, really.

The Cat Island Boathouse is beautifully appointed and at $1350 a week is a real bargain. If you're up for some serious R&R in the blissful quiet of the Bahamian Out Islands, do yourself a favor and contact The Cat Island Boathouse.

Pepsico, clean up your act

I retrieved this from an otherwise pristine Bahamian coral reef last Saturday afternoon. Otherwise pristine, I said. The reefs of the Bahamian Out Islands are a treasure and the real wealth of that country sits just offshore --in a timeless realm that's very much uncharted, unseen and to the naked eye at least; untouched by disrespectful hands. Or so it seemed until I found this not-too-flattering advertisement for Pepsico's ugly spawn bobbing against a head of brain coral that had to be hundreds of years old.

A case could be made that some careless slob dropped this bottle of unneeded and and unwelcome consumerist flotsam overboard and failed to retrieve it. So, the fault lies with the user. And to an extent it does, but it goes deeper than that.

Bottled water is a joke, especially in The Bahamas. The well water in that country is some of the most sweet and pure available anywhere in the world. Companies like Pepsico, Coca Cola and Nestle have been working overtime for the last couple of years to convince the tourists who visit that country that there's something wrong with the water there. Worse still, those same companies spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince Bahamians that their water supplies are bad and that they can be more like people in the developed world by drinking overpriced, filtered American tap water out of an undegradeable and unsustainable plastic bottle.

The Bahamian people don't need to be told that there is something wrong with either their resources or their culture. That country and former colonies the world over have been crapped on by the west for four-hundred plus years and the assault of bottled water is a continuation of the same nonsense.

Bottled water is a bogus product sold to fulfill an entirely manufactured need. It degrades the public trust in public resources and clutters the landscape with detritus. Stop drinking it, stop buying it and Pepsico, take a look at the mess wrought by your hands. Unless of course, you're looking for a reeturn to this page in company history:

I will never complain about palmetto bugs again

From Saturday:

This my friends, is what tries to sneak through the sceen doors in the middle of the night. Sheesh!