Day 156, Year 4 The Race is On
Date: Friday, March 27, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day!
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
We are now finished painting except for the bottom and that can be done in the rain. But, of course, now that we are finished with the major painting, the weather is absolutely beautiful. The important thing is that the mast and boom look great, so as of noon tomorrow we can start the reassembly. Luck was able to come up with a way to remove the bolts that were too long and scratching our hatch cover, so that problem is fixed. The new dinghy motor lift was about an inch off, but Mark found ways to shorten things so that now works. I spent my day still working on the bronze ports and Mark readied the binnacle in the cockpit to be assembled tomorrow once the paint on the binnacle has had time to cure. Unfortunately, in the process of getting this ready, Mark put the first ugly scratch in the new paint-on the binnacle. I’m sure Luck will be able to rub this out, and we know there will be more scratches as we work to reassemble, but that first scratch is painful. Undisputedly, we are finally moving forward. A huge trawler was placed beside us today so I think someone is telling us it is time for us to go. So we will work as hard and fast as we can to make this happen.
We had dinner tonight with Dave and Di who just returned from Satun where they helped Linda of Mr Bean regroup her life after the murder of her husband. When they first arrived there, they were faced with dealing with Linda’s emotions, the officials trying to recreate the crime, and the media. The officials brought the young men onboard the boat for Linda to identify. It wasn’t hard as she had given them her husband’s t-shirts to wear. The perpetrators were aged fifteen to nineteen years old. Only the youngest had been kind to Linda and kept telling her ‘sorry’-his only English word. Linda’s four children from the UK were arriving and the most important thing for her was to get the blood cleaned out of the boat. Di said there was at least a half inch of blood on the floor that had to be cleaned out. And the young men had totally defaced the whole boat, scratching their initials in the teak, smashing mirrors, ripping apart anything and everything. So Dave and Di worked to clean things up the best they could before the children boarded. We all know that this kind of thing could happen anywhere in the world, on land or sea, but it is a very scary prospect. Evidently these young men were illegal immigrant from Burma working on a Thai fishing boat. They say they had been mistreated and they jumped ship and swam to an island. Unfortunately for them, that island in the Butang Group was not inhabited and they had no food. After two days there, they saw Mr Bean return to a mooring just off the shore and they planned their attack. So even though this is an isolated incident, I think we can all learn from this that it is safer to travel in numbers. When we leave here headed for Langkawi, we had hoped to make a few stops, but if we don’t have someone going in the same direction, we will just do an overnight to get there and take no chances.
