Day 109, Year 4: Long Holiday Weekend
Date: Sunday, February 8, 2009
Weather: Still Hot and Beautiful
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
In Thailand, tomorrow is the Buddhist holiday known here as Makha Bucha Day. It is known as Sangha Day in other parts of Asia and is celebrated about a month later. During Buddha’s life, special events happened on the day of the full moon of the third lunar month, so this event is still celebrated by monks who use the day to increase their learning and study. So this is a three-day weekend here.
As always on Sunday, we had Windbird to ourselves. And we think we will have her again tomorrow, but we’re not sure about that. We saw Oh on Friday but didn’t know at that time that Monday is a holiday, so we didn’t ask if they would be working. I guess we’ll find that out in the morning. But today we took advantage of our time with Windbird to use an acid compound to clean all the stays and wind them up to be stored until time to put them back up. For those of you who not sailors, the stays
are the wire ropes that connect the mast to the deck. I didn’t realize until today that we have thirteen of these, some of them almost sixty feet long. So the cleaning process took all morning. I then spent my afternoon scrubbing the deck of our little one-room apartment. I don’t think it has been cleaned for a very long time. Since we are planning to wash and hang to dry all of the lines from the boat, I wanted to make sure they will be hanging from clean railings.
We went for a late afternoon swim with Tina and Robert. Since they are leaving for the Andaman Islands tomorrow, we opted to spend the time with them instead of going with the original plan to have Happy Hour on Rendezvous Cay with Scorpido and Freebird. We’ll have to catch up with the gang a bit later. Instead we had a relaxing swim, Happy Hour on Shirena, and dinner at La Taverna. Tomorrow we will head to Windbird at 8:30 to see if the work crew arrives, and if not, we’ll launch into another
day of boat work.
