by Judy Handley | Mar 13, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 142, Year 4: Fantastic Friday the 13th
Date: Friday, March 13, 2009
Weather: Another Beautiful Day; No Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Friday the 13th was absolutely crazy aboard Windbird. Down below, Luck and crew were preparing to do the epoxy and primer coats on the mast, boom, and various other pieces. On top, Nop’s welder and his assistant were busy doing the final welds and polishing on the arch while Nop’s engineer was busy designing the bow protector on the front of the boat. In the afternoon, the mast and boom were painted with epoxy and primer. Meanwhile, Mark and I were inside the boat putting in the new walls in the aft cabin and reinstalling the ceiling panels in the main cabin. Some of these panels will need to come out again for the installation of things that are not yet ready to put on deck, but we just really needed to get the pieces up and out of the way. So it was a very busy day, but a good one. We are getting closer and closer to a finished product and it is very exciting.
Tomorrow Ame Marine comes to install a step-down transformer and our new stainless port frames are delivered. We are not sure what is happening with the mast and boom tomorrow but we assume there will be sanding and preparation for the final top coat of paint early in the week. Mark and I will continue our inside and deck top projects. It is just amazing how quickly things are coming back together. We are still waiting for Canvas Creations to come and start making the new cockpit enclosure, but that should be happening soon. So there are many, many projects happening in, on, and under Windbird. Stay tuned for progress.
by Judy Handley | Mar 12, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 141, Year 4: Exhausted Yet Exhilarated
Date: Thursday, March 12, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day; No Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Unlike yesterday when we took a mid-day break to go shopping, we worked on the boat from 8:30 to 5:30 today and we are exhausted. We didn’t work that hard, it is just the heat. I am so grateful that we have the tent over us. Otherwise I think working on the boat all day would just do us in. But at the same time that we are exhausted we are also exhilarated. Windbird is looking just great. Our crew worked on the mast and boom all day again today and it looks like they are very close to painting.
They will do the epoxy primer first, then the normal primer in the same time frame. The next day they will apply the final AwlGrip coats. At least I think that is what they will do. Oh came by today and brought the AwlGrip Bright Aluminum paint that they will use to paint the hatches. He also brought an AwlGrip Clear and said that the hatches will need the clear coat to protect the surface. So tomorrow or Saturday could be an exciting day.
I have been working so hard that I haven’t taken as many photos as usual, but I will be posting update photos with tomorrow’s log. So many things are happening at once. In addition to Oh’s crew working on the mast and boom, we have Nop’s crew that come and go. They have started but not finished the arch and stainless handrails on the aft part of the boat. But progress is being made. Mark is a little worried that the structure is not as stable from side to side as he would like, but we are not
sure what to do about that. We had Richard from Sea Bunny come over and give us his opinion and he thinks we should just leave things as they are. If there is a problem we can come back next year and have something added to stabilize it if needed. We took wallboard from our aft cabin up to Pro’s Carpentering today. They cut new pieces for us as the old board had been damaged by a salt water leak at some point. We also took an aluminum track that runs across our foredeck up to Nop’s shop this
morning to have it polished. It looked just awful and nothing I could do made it look any better. But by day’s end it is installed on Windbird and looks fabulous. It probably won’t stay that way long, but it sure looks great now. I spent a great deal of my day sanding the handrails on the cabin top and sanding all the varnished wood around the companionway. I didn’t do any varnishing today, but will probably do that at the end of the work day tomorrow. There is just too much dust in the air
in the hardstand area to even think about doing varnish work in the middle of the day.
If you are reading this you are probably totally confused by all the work that is happening. And if you are not, you are better than we are. We can hardly keep up with it ourselves but we are having fun trying.
by Judy Handley | Mar 11, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 140, Year 4: Making Good Progress
Date: Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day; No Rain; Late Evening Lightening
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Slowly but surely we are making progress. Mark thinks we will have everything back on deck by Saturday which is much faster than we had anticipated. Still I feel like we are moving at a snail’s pace, but the heat simply prohibits moving any faster. Since Mark’s back is still a bit tender, I took on the job of replacing the ceiling panels by myself today. Usually I hold up the pieces and Mark puts in the screws, but reaching over his head is just not a good idea right now. My solo efforts went
slowly, but I have finished the aft cabin and have now moved to the main cabin. Progress is being made. But it is SO very hot down inside the boat that I actually feel cool when I go topsides for a breather. When you feel cool at 90+ degrees, I hate to even think what the temperature is down below. While we are doing this, the crew is down below grinding and sanding away at the mast and boom. They appear to be almost done with that job, so I am just not sure when the three-step painting job
will begin. Because the mast is aluminum, they will first put on an etching primer, then the regular primer, and finally the AwlGrip final coat. We met with Oh this morning to talk about painting the aluminum hatches (something we have added to the job) and about a few details of the boat paint job that we are not totally comfortable with. The overall paint job is fantastic, but there are some rough areas under the varnished cap rail that surrounds the cockpit and on the inside of the cockpit
at the line that joins the cap rail to the painted surface that I am not totally happy with. In their efforts to preserve my varnish job on the caprail, some of the border areas were not sanded down as smoothly as I would have liked. We are still discussing what to do about this. We feel like we are being really picky, but we do want Windbird to be perfect!
Mid-day we took a break and hopped in Ley and Neil’s rental car to do some boat and food shopping. It is a gift to have a free car, so we wanted to make the best use of it.
Mark is working on his computer while I write this log on my computer and he just let me know that last night’s log was post number 1,000 on the website. That’s a lot of logs, but I just can’t imagine not writing a daily record of our voyage. We are going to be back in the US for almost eight months when we fly home in April and I’m thinking about writing a weekly missive while home just to keep myself in the groove. But the real sailing logs will end on April 16 and not begin again until the
1st of December. Then we’ll begin the really long Year 4-5 journey across the Indian Ocean. We have been getting emails from Eric and Robyn on Scorpido who left Langkawi last week headed for the southern Maldives. Their emails are very funny and today’s was the best. They have had almost no wind so they are floating about on a fairy tale “lake” with a full moon guiding them. It is about 1800 miles from here to the Maldives and there are no fuel stops on the way unless you elect to go north to
Sri Lanka and then back south to the Maldives. Most boats can only motor about 1000 miles, so therefore if there is no wind you simply float and hope for wind.
by Judy Handley | Mar 10, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 139, Year 4: Still in Low Gear
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day; No Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
We’re still in low gear. Work on the boat is happening but certainly not at the speed we had anticipated. Nop’s guys did show up this morning to start installing the arch and stainless hand rails on the aft portion of the boat. That work took a lot of Mark’s attention as he had to watch and give direction. I stayed in the “shop”-my new name for our apartment. Mark would come back to the “shop” periodically with more things that needed to be cleaned, so I was kept busy all morning. Mark talked to Oh this morning on the phone and then Oh called Luck and Luck was put on the job of preparing our hatches for painting. We had hoped that Oh might have other crew to do this so Luck could keep working on the mast, but we’ll take what we can get.
We walked down to the bottom floor of our apartment building to have lunch at a little French restaurant called The Winch. Mark didn’t feel like he had the time to walk to food alley for lunch and I am sick of ham sandwiches made in the apartment, so the lunch break was fun and the food was great. We installed a couple of items on the cabin top in the afternoon and then went to Ley and Neil’s home for a visit before taking them to the airport for their trip to Singapore. We drove back from the airport in their rental car that we don’t have to return until Thursday, so we can do some shopping tomorrow. We picked up Linda and Pieter of Dutch Touch and drove over to the Royal Phuket Marina for dinner at Limoncello. We traveled across the Pacific at the same time as Linda and Pieter, but we have never really had a chance to get to know them. So we had a great time tonight learning how they met as engineers for Proctor and Gamble. Linda was a design engineer and Pieter had risen to the management level. Their story is fascinating and we are so glad that we got to spend time getting to know them a little better.
Since part of tomorrow will be spent shopping, I have a feeling we will not get up to speed until Thursday. But we will get there eventually. The reassembly process is even more tedious than we anticipated. It is really hard to start punching holes in that beautiful cabin top, but it must be done. Mark did install the little hatch over our galley this morning and he said he felt he had crossed a threshold. We’re not in fourth gear yet, but at least we are not in reverse!
by Judy Handley | Mar 9, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 138, Year 4: Bit of a Slow Start
Date: Monday, March 9, 2009
Weather: Torrential Rain Midnight; Sunny Day; Late Day Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
For a month now, we have been preparing for today-the first day we could really be back on Windbird putting her back together. But it didn’t go as we had planned. The first problem is that Windbird looks like a brand new boat and it is very, very difficult to even think about putting anything back on her for fear of marring the new paint job. The second problem is that some of the things we tried to put back on just didn’t make the grade. The big stainless pieces we have cleaned so meticulously looked great, but the hatches which had been locked inside Windbird the past few weeks, did not. They are Bowmar hatches and are anodized aluminum painted to look like stainless steel. We had never noticed the bubbling in the paint before but we have decided that they cannot go back on as is. Luck gave us his wire brushes that we could use to strip them with our drill, but after working for more than hour, Mark decided this was not the job for him. First of all he has strained muscles in his lower back and bending over and holding a heavy drill is just not working for him. Second of all, we think we will have a better product if we have someone else do the job for us. So we will talk to Oh in the morning to see if he can do the job for us, and if not, we know we can find someone here who can do that. But in the meantime, finishing the job of putting cabin top back together will be a bit delayed. There were other factors that slowed us down as well. The sissy bars that go on either side of the mast have a teak board across them and the boom crutch has a teak piece that actually cradles the boom. The stainless looked great after yesterday’s cleaning, but I decided that I just had to clean that teak. Another slow down was the fact that Nop could not come today to put the arch and handrails on. He says tomorrow, and we shall see. So we didn’t come out of the gate like gangbusters, but we are working slowly and steadily.
The crew worked all day sanding on the mast. The scaffolding has been taken out of the main tent and moved to the side ten where the mast sits. The height of the scaffolding gives more room below for working. About two-third of one side of the mast looks done after today’s work, so I think it will take the rest of this week just to get the mast and boom ready for painting.
Mark did put the bases of the sissy bars and the boom crutch in place and is ready to install those first thing in the morning. He also has the hatch over the galley ready to install. It is a new addition since we bought Windbird and doesn’t need the refurbishing that the others do. We also got the framing for the dodger and bimini in place so that Muzza, the canvas guy, can start his work tomorrow.
So we are making progress. And even though things went a little more slowly today than expected, we are still working at 10 pm. The aluminum mast steps and an aluminum track that goes on the deck needed cleaning, so that is happening tonight. Windbird looks so good that we are having a little difficulty adjusting to the new look, but that is a great position in which to find yourselves. Give us a couple of more days and we will think she always looked this good.
Tonight was even more interesting that the day. We decided to walk across the highway to have dinner at the super cheap, super good hole in the wall restaurant. We left here about six and got to the highway at 6:15. Normally there would be unbelievable traffic and we would have to wait a very long time to cross. But tonight there were policemen walking and security guards everywhere and very little traffic. We couldn’t figure out what was going on, but it was so easy to cross the highway and that was a relief. As soon as we reached the restaurant, the gray clouds rolled in and it looked like the heavens would pour down upon us at any moment. The woman who owns the restaurant commented on the fact that our friends were probably not coming due to the bad weather. But eventually our friends did arrive and they explained what had been happening that we had totally missed. The King was headed south to Phuket Town and all traffic had been stopped. They had not been allowed to cross the road until he passed. So we must have just made the cut and gotten across before everything came to a stop.
When it was time to leave and go back across the highway, everyone headed out but at the last minute I stayed behind to meet the couple who had just arrived and who rent the apartment right across from ours. Just as I started talking with them I heard a commotion out in the middle of the highway. Evidently when Mark and the others had left, there was absolutely no traffic. So Mark decided that he should dance in the empty street and was being told by a Thai policeman in no uncertain terms to get out of the street. I got there just as Mark escaped the policeman and got to the median. You really don’t want to tangle with a Thai policeman. We did make it safely across the highway and then realized that the traffic was stopped once again because the King was now heading north. Mark and I actually waited to see the entourage of expensive cars and silver vans and police car after police car. Maybe it is like this in the US when the President is on the move. I guess I have just never been there.
by Judy Handley | Mar 8, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 137, Year 4: A Sunday Morning Surprise
Date: Sunday, March 8, 2009
Weather: Torrential Rain Early Morning; Partly Sunny Day
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
What a wonderful surprise we had this morning. When we arrived at Windbird this morning, Oh was unexpectedly there and had removed much of the tape and plastic masking from the cabin top and all of the plastic boat covering. So we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow after all. We got to the unveiling of Windbird today. There is still much to do tomorrow to remove more of the taped areas on the cabin top and cockpit, but we got to see our baby today and she looks great.
We worked under the tent all day cleaning the big stainless pieces that have been stored away under the boat during the painting. We had a really torrential downpour in the wee hours of the morning and threatening clouds all day with no more rain. But the clouds kept the sun from coming through full strength so we had a cooler than normal day to help us get acclimatized. We are hoping that Nop is coming tomorrow morning to put on the arch and the new stainless rails on the back of the boat. We also hope we get to start putting hardware on the cabin top. So things are going really well here.
