Day 113, Year 4: Windbird Progress Report
Date: Thursday, February 12, 2009
Weather: Sunny Weather; West Winds Blowing
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island

We got an email from Shirena today telling us that strong winds are blowing in from the west. That’s not good news for them as they are headed up the west coast of Phuket Island tomorrow, but hopefully the anchorages won’t be too rough. We started our day with another trip to the hospital where Mark got his third and last antibiotic IV. He is now back on five days of antibiotic pills and then he will go back for another check-up. While he was at the hospital, I went back to the Market Place supermarket
and wrote down what is available there with the price. I will use this when preparing for the Indian Ocean crossing next year. Prices will be slightly different, but I can use the information now to compare one store against another. We returned to the Boat Lagoon and had lunch in our apartment and then headed over to check on Windbird’s progress.

The exciting news is that the first coat of fairing compound will be applied to the entire hull and the cabin top on Saturday. Luck, the young man in charge, told us that we could come to Windbird tomorrow to go inside and check on things and get some items we need, but that after the first coat on Saturday, we are not to go into the boat again until Monday when the crew arrives to check things out. That’s perfect timing for us as the list of things we need has been growing dialy. But we are just
so excited that the first coat of whatever is going on so soon. We were also excited that the crew has started sanding the mast. The sooner that is done, the better. It will take us about a week to put it back together based on what we saw Eric and Robyn of Scorpido do, so it will be wonderful if the mast is finished before the boat and we can work on that while Oh’s crew puts the finishing coats on Windbird. After visiting Windbird, we walked up the steps to the building housing a long row of
yacht services. Just up from Windbird is a small chandlery run by a young woman named Toi. Another young woman that works for Toi, Noo, has spent a couple of afternoons sanding Windbird with Oh’s crew. I had just taken a picture of the crew on break at Windbird, so I showed the photo to Noo and she and Toi were able to name the different crew members for us. That is how we learned that the young man who works as site supervisor is Luck. Oh sometimes calls him “L” and now we know why.

We spent the latter part of the afternoon starting to work on getting photos from the past months organized. We have barely made a dent, but we have started. I continue working on getting all of the lines from Windbird washed and hung to dry and I should complete that job by Saturday. So we are moving along.

We are thinking of Heather (our daughter) tonight. For the first time, she is hosting the Cape and Islands public radio station talk show. It is a special program honoring the 200th birthday of Darwin, so the station asked her, as science reporter, to do the program. Hosting a program is very different from filing science news reports that can be edited. The talk show is live, so we are sending our most positive thoughts your way, Heather. We’ll try to listen to the live broadcast on the internet,
but if the bandwidth is too slow to give us a good signal we will listen later to the podcast. Again, isn’t the internet just amazing?!