by Judy Handley | Feb 9, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 110, Year 4: Catching Up
Date: Monday, February 9, 2009
Weather: A Little Cooler with a Breeze
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Currently our “front yard” is the marina. When we walk down the three flights of stairs from our apartment we arrive at the boardwalk right on the edge of the lagoon where you find all the in-the-water boats. If you look out the back of our apartment from our balcony, you see the hard-stand area where the out-of-the-water boats are kept. That area is a HUGE concrete pad and it causes the air temperature to rise about ten degrees on that side. Usually there is no breeze, but today there was a nice breeze so the air temperature moderated slightly. But unfortunately, we still have to run the air-conditioning. Being a lagoon, there are just too many mosquitoes here and no screens. Plus the fact that we have no fans in the apartment, so remain plugged in to the AC. I mention all of this to explain the “little cooler” description of the weather here. Being land-locked, we have no idea what it is like out on the water, but we have heard the anchorages on the west side of Phuket and over on the east side of the Phang Nga Bay are a bit rough right now. Robert and Tina on Shirena left this morning headed for the west coast of Phuket, so I hope whatever is causing the rough seas dies down quickly.
The Buddhist holiday today was not universally observed in Phuket today. There are many more Muslims here than in the other parts of the country, so some places were open today and some were closed. Oh’s crew arrived bright and early and continued the long-board hand sanding on Windbird’s hull. Mark talked to Oh this afternoon and he said that the crazing in the gel coat went down all the way to the fiberglass in some places and that is requiring a long, tedious sanding process and will also require a special epoxy/fairing compound layer over those areas where the fiberglass is exposed. That will take all of this week, so the first layer of fairing compound on the entire hull will not happen until next week. So the work on Windbird is going slowly but surely.
Mark and I started our day with Skype call to Justin and Jo. They played a couple of music gigs this weekend and Jo sold one of her paintings. Jo looks and feels great, so life is good in Santa Fe. Mark and I then worked on boat projects here in the apartment until about 11 am when the young man who cleans the apartment on Monday mornings arrived. Mark and I left and went for a little shopping trip. We found a bookstore and bought the last couple of issues of Newsweek and Time. We are going
to do a little reading to “catch up” on what’s happening in the world. We also visited a hardware store to start pricing some of the items we are going to have to purchase, and then we went to the Phuket International Hospital. Mark has had an ongoing urinary infection for the past month. He is on his third round of antibiotics, but it is time to check in with a doctor. He will return to the hospital tomorrow morning for an “executive” physical. For less than $300 US and in less than three hours,
seventeen different “investigations” are performed. These include an ultrasound of the whole abdomen, and electrocardiogram and exercise stress test, a complete blood count and blood group, a diabetes test, a kidney function test, a lipid (cholesterol) profile, a liver function test, cancer marker screening, and on and on. And hopefully the doctor will be able to prescribe the best antibiotic for the urinary infection. I love the concept of this “one stop shop” health check.
Tomorrow I will continue the process of washing and soaking all of the lines (ropes) from Windbird and hanging them on our balcony to dry. This will take days but I made great progress today. Tonight we are reading all of those news magazines. We have a lot of catching up to do!
by Judy Handley | Feb 8, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
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.
by Judy Handley | Feb 7, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 108, Year 4: Settling into Life on Land
Date: Saturday, February 7, 2009
Weather: Still Hot and Beautiful
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
We arrived here in the Boat Lagoon ten days ago but it has only been since yesterday that we have really had to separate ourselves from Windbird. We can visit her for short periods, but basically we are living in a one-room studio apartment and learning to deal with our time differently. It is not a bad thing, just different. One obvious difference is that our pace is not so frenetic. This cruising year we have not stopped moving since May 4 when we left Bundaberg. We have seen and done sooooo
much, but it has been go, go, go. All of a sudden, we are having time to make lists of what needs to be done and then we proceed to do the things slowly but surely. There is plenty to do, but the time line is not so tight. So today we mixed work with play. We started the day by making a video Skype call to my brother Dickel and his wife Conda. We were online early this morning and got a Skype chat message from my nephew Tommy’s wife, Marilou. She said my bro was at their house and wanted to
see us. So we had a great time connecting with Dickel and Conda, Tommy, Marilou, and their kids. Having reliable internet right here in our room is allowing us to make all sorts of contacts. It’s great.
After the Skype call, Mark went to Windbird to remove the TV antenna from our mast (I have no idea why we have a TV antenna), to punch out the rivets that were left from removing hardware on the mast, and to try and remove two stubborn screws that are holding one last wench on the mast. He was successful on the first two counts, but not on the last. He got one screw out, but there is one lone remaining screw holding the very last piece of hardware on the mast. That will have to be drilled out.
I stayed back in the apartment to begin the organizing process of all the boat parts we have brought here. Later in the morning, we picked up Tina of Shirena and thought we were headed to the Tesco Lotus Shopping Center. But Robert hitched a ride in the back of our truck to go to the chandlery, and that prompted Mark to check to see when Precision Shipwright would be sending a man to loosen four seized turnbuckles on our running backstays and on our port and starboard topstays, to cut the Staylock
fittings off our four lower stays so that they can be removed from the mast, and while he was at it, he loosened a seized bronze fuel-fill cap and a bronze access cap to our emergency tiller. We don’t know what he did, but he was successful. While he did this, we did finally go on our shopping trip. Tina and Robert are leaving Monday morning for the Andaman Islands that are part of India. They will spend a month there and then return to Langkawi in Malaysia. So Tina was doing some major provisioning.
Mark and I were looking mostly for cleaning and houseware items. We filled the bed of our little jeep and returned to the Boat Lagoon. After dropping Tina off on her dock, we headed to our apartment. We had to pass Scorpido on the way and saw Jay and Jodi of Makani Kai there. So we had to stop to say hello. This is a young couple from Australia that we first met at Lizard Island in Australia and it was fun to hear of their adventures since we last saw them in Singapore. They have spent the
past month up near the Myanmir (Burma) border in the Surin Islands and had a fabulous time.
While I packed the things away that we had bought, Mark went to Canvas Creations to make an appointment to talk with Muzza about doing our cockpit enclosure and he went down to E Dock to talk to Les on Surrender. Les and Ann are a couple from Lakeside, Ohio that we met when we first arrived here. We know that Les has been looking for hardware to hang his solar panels and we are going to have such a system available since we are having an arch made to hold our panels. We wanted to work a deal with
Les to help us find and install a transformer in return for the stainless steel arms we have to hold the solar panels. Les and Ann have been cruising for thirteen years and Les has set himself up as a jack of all trades, specializing in electronics. We will meet with Muzza on Tuesday morning and Les is going to start looking for a transformer for us as soon as we get the technical information to him.
We spent our late afternoon traveling over to the Royal Phuket Marina and visiting with Tim and Rose on Rendezvous Cay. We saw them last in Singapore, so it was great to catch up. They invited us over for Happy Hour on Rendezvous Cay tomorrow evening with Scorpido and Freebird. We cooked dinner here in our little apartment and watched the BBC news. We have been so totally divorced from world news, so I guess this will be our chance to catch up. We also just finished looking at the photos on
the New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) website of the move into the new facility. Mark’s last four years at NHPR were spent initiating the Capitol Campaign to raise the money for purchasing the new facility. The need for this was created by an increasing demand for local news and the advent of digital broadcasting which was making the old studios completely outdated. It was just fantastic to see the photos of the new facility. Betsy Gardella, Mark’s successor as President of NHPR has evidently
done a fantastic job of completing the project. We were made aware of the photos on the website by NHPR supporters in the Concord Yacht Club when we talked to them on Friday morning. We have also been kept in the loop by Scott McPherson at NHPR. I guess we’ll need to make a pledge when we go home!
by Judy Handley | Feb 6, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 107, Year 4: Skype Contact with the Concord Yacht Club
Date: Friday, February 6, 2009
Weather: Still Hot and Beautiful
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
How much fun it was to see everyone at the monthly Concord Yacht Club gathering this morning! The dinner this month was at the home of our good friends, Helaine and Alan Kanegsberg. Alan set up his computer with an LCD projector so everyone could see us and Alan’s little web cam did an amazing job of capturing the group of thirty. We took some web cam pictures (that we will post tomorrow) and enjoyed the conversation. The internet is truly amazing. Bob and Beth Lux, who circumnavigated in the
pre-internet days, were at the meeting. I’m sure they were thinking about how different things when they went around. Thanks, Alan, for making the connection possible. And Helaine, we sure wish we had been there in person to taste the Hungarian chicken dish you prepared.
The rest of the day was less eventful than the beginning. After our Skype connection, Mark walked over to Windbird. Sanding of the hull was in full swing, so he couldn’t go inside the boat to get his tools. He came back and we walked over to the bank to get the money to pay the down payment on the stainless work we are having done. We also stopped by to pick up the quote on making a new cockpit enclosure. As with the boat painting, the quote was cheaper than the one we had gotten in Langkawi, so we will probably go ahead and have Muzza here at Canvas Creations do the work. The shop is just one flight of stairs down from our apartment, so it will certainly be easy enough to check on the progress. On our way to the bank, we stopped by to see the progress Robyn and Eric are making on Scorpido. They have spent the week putting their newly painted mast back together and it looks great. They will put the stays on this afternoon and the mast will be ready to go back on the boat. They had their boat Awl-gripped (painted) ten years ago and the crew here has made repairs, lightly sanded the whole hull, and waxed her to a bright shine. Scorpido looks great. We can only hope our paint job will look as good in ten years.
When Oh’s crew broke for lunch, Mark and I went to Windbird to take some things off the aft pulpit that should have come off before the sanding started and to get a few things out of the boat. We knew we would only have an hour, so we had made a list and worked fast. Everything on the deck was covered in a fine blue dust, including us when we finished. But I went inside the boat before I got too covered in dust and cleaned out the freezer and refrigerator. It was time to shut those off to reduce power consumption. We have the charger we bought in Singapore, but the controls on it blew the first time we plugged it in. So we have to be in the boat to watch the voltage and shut it off when the charge gets too high. Since we can’t always get into the boat, we decided to put what could from the refrig and freezer in our little apartment refrig and give the rest away. That way there is almost nothing using power, so that won’t be an issue. We grabbed all the bags of hardware that have been taken off Windbird and took those with us so we can clean and polish everything. That way the parts will be ready to put back on as soon as the painting is completed. At 1:30 we went to see Mr. Nop to pay him his deposit and we were amazed that his workers were already cutting pieces of stainless for our new arch and they needed the solar panels immediately so they could fit them on the top of the arch. The solar panels were back at the boat covered in blue dust so I hurried back to clean them. But Nop was faster and sent his crew to get them assuring “Madame” that they will take care of the cleaning. In every case, we have been so impressed with the workmanship here and the speed and care with which things are done.
We then hopped in the truck to go to the shopping center. Just as we started to turn left to go out the drive, I said to Mark that we should turn right and go see if Tina and Robert on Shirena needed anything. One thing led to another and the decision was made to spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying each other’s company, as well as a few other cruisers we haven’t seen since Indonesia, and go to the store in the morning. Tina does need things, so she will go with us then. By the time we headed back to Windbird it was 5:30 so we stopped by Windbird to check on the day’s progress. The sanding with the compressor-powered orbital sanders was completed and Windbird had been washed down. We saw the foreman getting the long boards ready yesterday, so we think they will do the long board manual sanding tomorrow. It won’t be long until Windbird is ready for the first fairing coat of epoxy.
Ken and Jean of Renaissance 2000 are now back at Ao Po but they were at the Boat Lagoon today and suggested that they return in the evening so we could all go to dinner at the Dibuk Restaurant in Old Town Phuket. It is a Thai-French restaurant and the food and the company were both excellent. We did more socializing then work today, but we have been working pretty hard so it was a nice change of pace.
by Judy Handley | Feb 5, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 106, Year 4: Trip to Yacht Haven
Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009
Weather: Hot in the Boat Lagoon; Breezy at Yacht Haven
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Work on Windbird is still going really well. Oh’s crew finished taking every last bit of hardware off the cabin top today. They were able to remove things that Mark and I had given up on, so that was good. They then cut thick plastic pieces to just fill every opening. They secured them in place with a black silicone caulk to keep dust and water out of the boat but this will allow them to sand and paint right up to the very edge of every opening. They moved so quickly and while I was down in the boat vacuuming debris that had fallen in during the hatch removal process, even the companionway got saran wrapped over and the sanding of the hull began. The only problem was that I was below with no way out. I started banging on the companionway cover, but no one could hear me with all the machines going. I could see one of the crew in the cockpit, but he couldn’t see me through the dark glass. So I just started sliding the companionway hatch, slowly moving the saran wrap cover. The young man saw this and took the tape off the saran wrap covering so I could get out. But it is obviously not going to be easy to get in and out of the boat from now on. In fact, the crew foreman really doesn’t like it when we are inside the tent. He gestures that the sanding dust is not good for us and shoos us out. So I am having a bit of Windbird withdrawal, but as we watch the progress, I’m sure we will settle into a pattern where we can visit Windbird in the early morning or late evening just to check on her. In the meantime, we will continue to work outside the tent on getting all the hardware off the mast.
Mid-afternoon, we stopped our work on the mast and drove north to Yacht Haven Marina. We were to meet Mr. Nop there. He is the gentleman who is trying to persuade us to go with him to get our stainless work done. He speaks English, instantly draws plans for what you want, and promises quality work. Everyone we talk to about him says he is more expensive but he produces really top quality work. He wanted us to come to Yacht Haven to see arches he has built on other boats in one and half-inch stainless. We were insisting on two-inch and that was causing the quote to be just too high. He showed us boat after boat with one and a half-inch and they did all look substantial. So he has won our favor and we will go with him to have an arch built to hold our solar panels and wind generator with dinghy davits for raising the dinghy out of the water from behind the boat. He will also replace our aft life lines with stainless rails. So more money that we don’t have is being spent!
While at Yacht Haven, we visited with Donna and Gerri on Scot Free II. We haven’t seen them since Singapore, so it was great to get together again. We had a great meal at their favorite waterside restaurant and then headed back to the Boat Lagoon. Phuket is a yachting center in Southeast Asia but it really has a hodge-podge of marinas. Yacht Haven is all the way on the north tip of the island and it has no haul-out services. Boat Lagoon where we are has the haul-out services and all of the other boat repair services. It is a marina, but it has no facilities for yachties-no bathrooms, no showers, etc. You can use the facilities at the hotel and at one of the restaurants, but they are far from the boat yard. Royal Phuket is next to Boat Lagoon and has haul-out services but little else. And it costs a fortune to stay there in the water. Then there is Ao Po where we have spent a fair bit of time. It is brand new and has no boat haul-out and no boat services, but the staff is friendly and
the area is beautiful. So no one marina in Phuket has it all.
Tomorrow morning we have arranged to do a Skype call with the Concord Yacht Club that gathers on the first Thursday evening of each month. We will call them at 8 am tomorrow morning which is 8 pm on Thursday Eastern Standard time. That should be a great start to our day. Then it will be back to boat work. The mast should be done tomorrow and then we start going through everything that has been removed to clean the stainless pieces and access which things need to be replaced. We are hoping to do this work over the next two weeks while we also spend time working on naming and posting photos from this season of cruising that have never made it to the website. Then there are the explorations of parts of Phuket that we have yet to see. So we have plenty to keep us busy while Windbird is getting her “facelift.”
by Judy Handley | Feb 4, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 105, Year 4: Another Day of Progress
Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Weather: Partly Cloudy and Very Warm
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Our day started off with a great Skype conversation with my friend Linda back in Concord, New Hampshire. At 7:30 this morning when Mark turned on our computer here, back in Concord at 7:30 in the evening, Linda could see that we were online, so she called us. Linda, her husband Michael, and their teen-aged son Garrett visited us in the South Pacific our first year out. At that time Garrett was struggling with a debilitating disease called Dystonia. Since the surgery, he has recovered almost fully
and is actually going to do some competitive rock climbing this spring. It is just unbelievable how well he is doing since his surgery last March. So it was great to talk to Linda, Garrett, and Mike and to catch up on news from back home.
It was another day of great progress on Windbird. The scraping of the hull is virtually done. So Oh’s crew has made fantastic progress. Mark was successful in removing the binnacle and in removing all the hardware from the boom. I sanded the handrails on deck and am now in a quandary as to what to do with them. When we left Boston, I had fifteen coats of varnish on the handrails. That quickly deteriorated and not until today have I actually been successful in removing all those coats of varnish.
Now my quandary is whether to not to varnish the rails again or to just let them silver like the teak on the deck. I’ll have to make the decision tomorrow but right now I am actually leaning toward letting them silver. Trying to keep up with the varnish on those rails is almost impossible.
Our friend Mr. Nop revisited us this morning trying to convince us to go with him for the stainless work. He had some suggestions on how to cut the price by using smaller diameter stainless on some parts. This brought the estimate down to a very good price, but before we make the decision, we are going to go up north to Yacht Haven Marina with him tomorrow afternoon and see some the work he has done. Muzza from Canvas Creations also came to see us this morning to measure for a quote on redoing
the cockpit enclosure. We’ll get that quote on Friday and make a decision on that.
So lots of work is happening on Windbird. We are super pleased with the progress at this point and just hope that things continue like this. We took time in the late afternoon to visit with Robert and Tina of Shirena at the pool and we actually ended up being invited to Shirena for dinner. Robert and Tina will leave here on Monday so we will probably get together a couple times more before they leave.
Life is busy and good here and we are ever grateful for this little air-conditioned studio apartment. We like being close enough to Windbird to oversee the work but being able to retreat to a dust-free, cool apartment.
