by Judy Handley | Mar 1, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 130, Year 4: A Month in Boat Lagoon
Date: Sunday, March 1, 2009
Weather: Back to Normal-Sunny and Beautiful
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
Just after midnight our cell phone rang with a message to tell us our cell phone card had expired. We had plenty of time left, so that seemed weird. Then late this morning Mark was on the computer trying to take another look at flights home and a message came up saying our time on the wireless provider was expired. Then the room phone rang and it was the office wanting to know if we were planning on checking out today or if we wanted to renew our contract. Okay. We got the message. Time slipped up on us. We have been here for a whole month and everything was expiring at once. We then realized that our rental jeep would need to be returned as well. We got out the contract and read that we have until tomorrow at 2 pm to return the car, so we changed our plans to make use of the vehicle while we have it. We will not renew that rental as we will be spending most of the next month putting Windbird back together and won’t have time to go anywhere. So we hopped in the jeep, went to the marina office to buy another month of wireless, went to the hotel office to sign a contract for another month, stopped at the corner Seven Eleven to get a new phone card, and then headed south. We planned to stop at a hardware store to get some paint thinner to soak some of the screws and bolts from Windbird that are heavily laden with old caulk. We then planned to go to the south end of the island just to see it. We haven’t been all the way down to Nai Harn Bay yet and people say it is beautiful.
So we stopped at the hardware store to get the paint thinner and while I was paying for it, Mark was installing the new phone card. Yesterday we got an SMS text message on our cell phone from Tory and Piet Hein of Double Dutch saying they would be coming back to Phuket today (from Bangkok) and suggesting that we get together this week before they take off for South Africa. We messaged back saying any night this week would be great, but now we realized we wouldn’t have a car, so we called them to see if it would be possible to get together this afternoon. They were just arriving in Phuket by bus when we called so we said we’d meet in Ao Chalong in a couple of hours. This would still give us time to do some sight seeing, but once again practicality took over and we stopped to check prices of dehumidifiers at the huge HomeWorks store. They have zillions of air conditioners and air purifiers, but no dehumidifiers. While we were in the area, we drove across the street to Central Festival, the modern mall, to do some clothes shopping. Our sight seeing time was spent shopping, but that’s okay. There will be another opportunity.
We spent a fabulous late afternoon/evening with Piet Hein and Tory of Double Dutch. While we were eating dinner, Donna and Gerry of Scot Free II showed up. You just never know who you are going to see where out here. We really enjoyed the evening in the company of ‘double’ good friends and then came home to enjoy a video Skype call with Heather, Jed, and Sam. This was a great start to a new week.
by Judy Handley | Feb 28, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 129, Year 4: Windbird Gets Her Green Stripes
Date: Saturday, February 28, 2009
Weather: A Bit Overcast with a Few Dark Clouds
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
This is nail biting stuff. Watching your just painted beautiful white hull get covered with plastic and tape is not easy. Oh arrived with a new hair cut. Evidently he could not get the white tips out of his black hair, so he had to have it cut. Today he put on a headwrap before heading into the tent. We watched the first green go on and then came back to clean even more stainless hardware and sort through a year (in my case) or two (in Mark’s case) of paperwork. I have all of the brochures and booklets from every place we visited this year and I just have to get rid of some of it. Mark keeps all bills and important papers in his old computer pack, and it was bursting at the seams. We didn’t get it all done today, but we did get a start.
We returned to Windbird around 4:30 and found that the painting of the waterline and shearline stripes went well. Oh was already gone but they said he didn’t have green hair when he left, so that is good. The rest of the team immediately started taking the plastic off the hull. That’s when it really got tense. The crew is so very careful, but there are a couple of little green marks on the white. As always Luck says no problem and we know he will fix it, but it is nerve wracking. We are learning
to communicate with Luck despite our total lack of Thai and his minimal understanding of English. We think he was telling us that the cabin top will be painted on Wednesday and then we put hardware back on before he does the non-skid. If we understood him correctly, my birthday present next Thursday will be a visit back to the inside of Windbird. I didn’t think we would be this far along by March 5th, but things are looking good.
Tonight we meet Susan and Richard of Sea Bunny and Dave and Di of Amoenitas to go across the highway to one of cheap (but very good) local places for dinner. We’re anxious to hear how their teak deck replacement is going. Our goal for tomorrow is to really, really finish cleaning all of the stainless hardware and finish organizing the paper work. I’m moving along on photos. Today I went all the way back to our New Mexico visit and posted the one last folder from there and then got about six Australia
photo albums posted. I’m working on rounding Cape York and hope to get halfway across Indonesia tomorrow. Ambitious, but maybe I can do it.
by Judy Handley | Feb 27, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 128, Year 4: Teamwork
Date: Friday, February 27, 2009
Weather: Sunny and Hot
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
On the day after the BIG day, I’d like to reflect a bit on the teamwork we have observed with Oh’s crew. Almost everyone we talk to has tales of woe about having work done here in Thailand. We have been told time and again to stay with the boat at all times while work is happening. When the boss is not around, evidently a lot of workers simply don’t work. But we have had the total opposite experience. Oh only visited Windbird once or twice a day for short periods to check on things from the beginning. He has a young site manager named Luck who does a fantastic job and not once have we ever seen any of the crew sitting idle. They start work at 8:30 am, sometimes have a short morning break, an hour lunch break, wind down around 5 pm, clean up, and leave at 5:30. Every single member of the team seems to have amazing attention to detail so that even the Queen of Detail (that’s me) can’t find fault. We feel blessed to have happened upon such a great team. Of course, it will be years before we know if the job holds up under the pressure of time, but from all appearances, the quality of work is topnotch. Somehow Oh, at thirty-three, has put together a fantastic team and we feel blessed to have happened upon them.
We did have one little hitch with yesterday’s paint job. Late last evening we walked over just to take one more look and I found a sag in the paint about a foot above the muffler on the stern of the boat. The rest of the paint job looked so good that we weren’t really upset by this. But we did want to find out what the right thing to do about it might be. There are various opinions from having the paint job done again to leaving it alone or to lightly rubbing it out and polishing over the spot. When we talked to Luck and Pong this morning, they said no problem. They could rub it out easily, but we were worried about compromising the paint in that area. We called Oh and he said he would discuss this with us when he arrived later in the day. But by the time we did our second visit of the day, Luck and Pong had made the sag ‘magically’ disappear. Luck, with a great smile, and his best English, indicated that it just went away. He and Pong were obviously proud of the disappearing act and we are fine with what they did. The crew spent all of today taking tape off and masking off for the painting of the green stripes. The taping took longer than expected due to their absolute attention to detail. They measured, they eyed up close and from afar, they applied tape, and then took it off and reapplied. Windbird now sits ready for the green stripe painting which will happen tomorrow. So we are still one more day away from Windbird looking like her old self again.
Tonight we went to Neil and Ley’s rental home just up the highway from the Boat Lagoon. They also invited Bud and Nita of Passage, a boat from Honolulu that has been on the hard here since long before we arrived. We only met this couple yesterday as Nita has been out of commission having a knee operation, but she is mending quickly and we had a wonderful time tonight getting to know one another. It is always fun to talk to other cruisers having the same experiences, so we shared experiences about having our boats painted and refit here at the Boat Lagoon. Ley and Neil took us to one of their favorite restaurants. The food was fantastic and Ley had fun holding the resident bunny that she has come to know. We hope to spend more time getting to know Bud and Nita of Passage and Ley and Neil of Crystal Blues.
by Judy Handley | Feb 26, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 127, Year 4: Suey, Suey (pronounced ‘soy’) meaning Beautiful
Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009
Weather: Sunny and Hot; 90 degrees F, 61 percent relative humidity
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
The short story is that at 2:30 pm this afternoon, after three hours of continuous painting, Windbird’s hull is Vestal White and she looks beautiful (suey in Thai).
The long story follows . . .
7:15 am-First trip to Windbird to assure ourselves that the waterline is really where we want it. We had talked about this before now, but all of a sudden we were just unsure about lowering the waterline as Oh had suggested. We definitely had too much bottom paint showing since we raised the waterline seven inches in New Zealand. When Oh watched Windbird come it to be hauled out, he had marked the waterline the way he thought it should be. The hassle if the waterline is too close to the water is that you get a yellow scum line that is hard to clean. After our trip to the boat this morning, we decided that he is right so the way he had it taped off was right.
8:15 am-Second trip to Windbird to see if the crew had arrived so we could tell them we found a paint run under one of the fittings on the hull that needed to be sanded out. As soon as we got back to the room, we got a Skype call from Alan Kanegsberg. Alan is our good friend and fellow sailor back in Concord, New Hampshire. He has been following the logs and just wanted to wish us luck on this big day.
9:30 am-Mark made trip number three without me while I stayed in the apartment cleaning stainless. Oh had arrived and Mark talked to him about the waterline, asking if there would be a white stripe above the bottom paint and then the green boot stripe. We have not had a white waterline stripe since New Zealand and Mark didn’t remember the conversation we had with Oh when he recommended putting the white stripe back. Oh recommended a one-inch white stripe right above the waterline and then a three-inch green waterline stripe. Mark then walked around the yard to check the width of other boat waterline stripes.
10:30 am-Fourth trip to Windbird to watch the preparation for painting. By the time we got there all of the taping off had been completed, the concrete under the boat had been flooded with water to get rid of the last source of dust, even more temporary plastic covering had gone up to protect the hull from anything that might fall out of the air. While testing the paint guns and hose with the air compressor, Oh decided he wanted new hose and new hose fittings, so he sent Eu to get that. Mark hung around longer that I did as I needed to get back and rinse the rust dissolving gel off some stainless, and took some last minute preparation photos. Pong was suited up and ready to paint and the tent was being closed. Mark returned to the apartment and we sat and waited with butterflies in our stomachs.
11:45 am-Mark made the fifth trip alone, got a couple of pictures through a hole in the tent, but couldn’t tell much about what was happening.
12:45 pm-Ley called to say she drove by Windbird and saw some guys sitting out front. So we made trip number six over to see what was happening. When we arrived there was a young man standing at the tent corner watching what was happening inside, but the air was thick with paint so that it looked very foggy inside. We hung around and then Luck came out to mix more paint under the temporary tarp that was hung to protect the paint from the sun. He said they were on coat number two and things were going well. Oh was spraying on the port side with Lok holding the tank.
2:15 pm-As we arrived for our seventh visit of the day, Luck came out of the tent and said, “Three.” We assumed he meant the three coats were on. Oh was still spraying but almost done. When he emerged from the tent his curly black hair had white tips and even his eyelashes were white. We took a peak but didn’t go in yet. We ran to the store to get beer and juice, and some Snickers bars, for the crew and then we went in to see Windbird. The water was still running flooding the floor so no dust
could be kicked into the air to mar her beautiful sheen. And she does shine. The paint job looks perfect. I’m sure we’ll find little imperfections, but right now we are super happy and greatly relieved.
Oh is proud of the job and anxious to get the tent off so others can see. But first, the green shear line (top of the hull) and the green waterline must be painted. AwlGrip and Oh say that masking tape can be applied to the hull in twelve hours, so tomorrow morning the tape will go on and the green will be added. We then hope to let her sit until Monday before a heavy plastic is put on covering the hull while the cabin top is painted. Oh does the hull first so it has a longer time to cure before
going back in the water, but this requires that it be meticulously covered while other work goes on. While all of this is going on, Mark and I are working on photos and we keep cleaning and polishing stainless and searching for the nuts, bolts, and screws we need. We are finding lots of 304 stainless, but not as much 316 which is what we need. Tomorrow we will take a trip into Phuket Town to Bangkok Hardware. Ley and Neil tell us it is fantastic and maybe that hardware store will have more of
what we need. So the search continues.
by Judy Handley | Feb 25, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 126, Year 4: Big Day Tomorrow
Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Weather: No Changes-Beautiful, Hot, and Sunny
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
We feel a bit like expectant parents on the eve of birth. Why is having a boat painted so very different from having a house painted? I don’t know the answer to the question, but I’ve painted lots of houses and never felt like I feel tonight. The top coats go on Windbird’s hull tomorrow and we are really jittery. We’ll probably sit outside the tent tomorrow as Oh and his crew paint, just like being in the waiting room of a hospital delivery room. Of course, the result will be nothing so wonderful and fantastic as a newborn baby, but it will be our old baby with a new fa�ade. Right now Windbird stands ready. We’re having second thoughts about the location of the waterline and we’re a little apprehensive about the weather as we have had lightening tonight. The last time this happened, we had cloudy weather here and rain a few miles to the south. You really don’t want to apply top coat if there is even a threat of rain, so we could be delayed by a day. And we’ll just have to be at the boat very early in the morning to talk to Oh if we want to move that waterline. So we’ll just have to see what the morning brings.
Equus was launched early this morning with a bang. Thankfully the ‘bang’ was just the lighting of Chinese firecrackers to ward off any evil spirits. The launch went smoothly and Patti and Steve sailed south to Ao Chalong to check out of Thailand. Just after they launched, we walked over to Royal Phuket to say farewell to Robyn and Eric on Scorpido. Their boat looks great and they were just so excited to be off for South Africa. We also stopped by Freebird to say farewell as they will be leaving tomorrow morning. They are sailing in the area for the season, so we will probably see them again before we come home to the US for a few months, but it was great to touch base with them today. We really don’t know any of these people very well, but they feel like family. Out here, friends sail in and out of our lives but there is a very strong bond that ties us together. Even before we meet, we have so many things in common that no one else in the world would even understand. So world cruisers are a special lot and we value each and every friendship we make.
Last night we walked across the highway to the super good, super cheap little ‘restaurant’ that we have gone to a couple of other evenings. The owner/cook is a woman who exudes such powerful, positive vibes and her food is just delicious. We tell her to bring us ‘whatever’ and it is always wonderful and the cost is unbelievably cheap. So we had a great farewell dinner with Steve and Patti and their good friend Larry. Larry is a single-hander who now works here in the East Marine Chandlery at Boat Lagoon. He met Patti and Steve in the Mediterranean and sailed south through the Red Sea with them. So they have all come from the US from west to east and known each other for a long time. On our way to dinner, we saw David and Doreen Samuelson of Swan sitting by the launch area watching their African Gray parrot enjoy the evening sitting in the tree beside them. David is the rigger here at Boat Lagoon and he and Doreen have been cruisers since they were in their early twenties. They know no other life. David is from England and Doreen is from France. They bought a Westsail in the early 1970’s and then bought their current boat, a Swan named Swan, in 1979. They started their trek around the world and have made it this far in thirty years. What amazing people! And they are good friends with a woman who is a good friend of the people from whom we bought Windbird. It is just such a small world.
Today we had lunch with Ley and Neil of Crystal Blues from Melbourne, Australia. They are having their boat painted by a different contractor just a few tents away from Windbird. They left Australia in October of 2005 at the same time that we left the US, but unlike us, they have been in this area of the world since then and they are just a wealth of information. They are living in a rental home not far from here, so they returned tonight and we had dinner at our same favorite place across the highway. We’ll travel up to their neighborhood for dinner on Friday. We really look forward to getting to know them better.
So stay tuned for the progress report on Windbird. And hope with us that all goes well tomorrow.
by Judy Handley | Feb 24, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 4, Thailand Refit |
Day 125, Year 4: Nuts and Bolts . . . and Screws
Date: Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Weather: No Changes-Beautiful, Hot, and Sunny
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
It was truly a shop ’til you drop kind of day. It is amazing how long it can take to find a few nuts and bolts and screws. And after an entire day of shopping, we found only a few that we need. So the search will continue. We did return to Rolly Tasker to buy new sheets for our headsail and a new halyard for our mainsail. For those of you who are not sailors, lines that take sails up and down are halyards and sheets are those lines that attach to the bottom of sails and pull them from one side of the boat to the other. Even though it was our second visit to Rolly Tasker, we were even more amazed by its size. We also drove back out toward Ratanachai to find a welding shop called Luck Steel. We wanted to get a second quote on having new frames made for our currently bronze ports. We can’t afford new ports, but if we can afford new frames they would look a lot better from the outside. Nop, our stainless guy here at the Boat Lagoon is super expensive (although he does excellent work) so we are just checking to see if we can get good work a bit cheaper.
While out shopping we saw Robyn of Scorpido doing the very last of her shopping before they leave Royal Phuket tomorrow morning. They are returning to Langkawi to stock up on duty-free alcohol and then heading across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos, Seychelles, Madagascar, and then South Africa. Their daughter is getting married in October back in the US so they will leave their boat in Richard’s Bay on the west coast of South Africa and head home for the wedding. Their daughter, Erica, was here recently and bought her wedding dress at one of the kicky little shops in the Royal Phuket complex. So Robyn and Eric will have a little Thailand with them for the wedding in Seattle. Equus will splash tomorrow morning and they are also headed to Langkawi. But from there they will be heading south to through Indonesia to the Kumai, the Komodos, Bali, and then across the Indian Ocean to Chagos and South Africa. So tomorrow morning we say farewell to Scorpido and Equus and hope to see them in the US once we return with Windbird. Fair sailing to both of these wonderful couples. We will miss you.
We started our day with a Skype call to our son Justin and his wife Jo and then to my sister Patsy. Skype is really getting a workout from us here and it is just so wonderful that it is free. Jo is looking a little pregnant and is feeling great. And all is well with my family back in the US, so that is a good thing. We also got an email today from our good friend and birder, Patsy Decker. After the posting of photos with yesterday’s log, she was able to positively identify our little bird friend as a young, male Brown-throated Sunbird. The other birds that I thought were finches are Eurasian Tree Sparrows. So Sawatdii Kha, Patsy.
