by Judy Handley | Dec 26, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 5, Thailand |
Day 61, Year 5: The Day After Christmas
Date: Saturday, December 26, 2009
Weather: Most Sunny; E Winds 10-15
Location: Nai Harn Bay, Phuket Island, Thailand
We started our day by having a wonderful brunch on Scot Free II. That led to some boat talk and to some boat problem solving on Scot Free’s VHF radio. They have been able to receive but not to transmit, and that usually indicates an antenna problem. We tried a different antenna that had been offered on the morning net, but that didn’t work. So we came back to Windbird where Mark climbed the mast to remove our antenna, and then take it to Scot Free II where Gerry went up the mast with it. This did it. We now knew that Scot Free needs a new antenna as their radio worked perfectly with our antenna. But antennas are hard to find here. So that search will continue on Monday.
Mark and Gerry went to shore to try and find a rental car for Monday, but they found nothing. It is such a small beach that we were sure someone on shore would have been able to point them in the right direction. But not so. When they returned I called Shirena and got the phone number for the rental agency. Sure wish we had done that before going to shore, but now we have made a connection on the phone and will go in tomorrow morning to sign the agreement. But not toooo early.
We are hoping that we can stay on the boat most of tomorrow and just catch up on life. We tried to connect with Justin, Jo, and Ziggy today, but that didn’t happen. Maybe that will happen tomorrow as well. We sure hope so as we are overdue on our Ziggy time.
by Judy Handley | Dec 25, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 5, Thailand |
Day 60, Year 5: Christmas Fun
Date: Friday, December 25, 2009
Weather: Partly Sunny,Variable Winds
Location: Nai Harn Bay, Phuket Island, Thailand
What a fun Christmas we have had. Starting last night with the buffet on Jungle Beach, continuing with a late morning gathering on Truest Passion, snorkeling in the afternoon, a late afternoon salad course on Shirena and followed by a traditional Christmas dinner on Windbird. In between all of this, we had some great Skype call connections with our kids. We saw Sam and Jonah on Christmas Eve (our Christmas morning) and then again we watched them opening their stocking gifts on Christmas morning (our Christmas evening). At the very end of our day we got to see Justin, Jo, and Ziggy and all of Jo’s family in England. We are so thankful that we had good Skype connections. That was the best Christmas present ever.
The party last night was so much fun. We sat at a table with Robert and Tina of Shirena (Australia, Robert by way of Poland), Donna and Gerry of Scot Free II (Canada), Richard and Susan of Sea Bunny (England), Nannette and Stuart of Truest Passion (Australia, Stuart by way of Scotland), and Guy and Annika of Street Legal (England and Sweden respectively). The little restaurant hosting the party is often referred to as Jungle Beach. The food was good, the band was great, and the people selling touristy things made the evening become even more lively. Gerry decided that he had to buy sunglasses for all of us that have little lights all around the rim that can be turned on to blink. So we became the brightest table at the party. Then either Donna or Tina bought us all Santa hats with blinking lights around the white band. We were looking good. And then a young woman came by with traditional hill country hats. You just have to see these to understand, but I had to have one and will wear it every Christmas Eve for the rest of my life. The whole evening was just great fun.
Truest Passion had us over for a late morning social today. Richard and Susan of Sea Bunny dug out a bottle of Pimm’s No.1 that has been in their bilge for a few years. This is a gin-based alcohol and mixed with lemonade it was a perfect warm Christmas morning drink (a traditional English summer drink). Then we went snorkeling before heading back to Windbird to cook the turkey breast and make the mashed potatoes and gravy. At 4 pm we went to Shirena for a champagne toast and salads. Tina made a wonderful beef tenderloin Thai salad and Donna added a Greek salad. Both were absolutely delicious. On Windbird we had Butterball turkey breast, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, asparagus, and finished off with pecan and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. We are stuffed!
Then came the highlight of the day. We had an absolutely fabulous Skype connection with video and got to watch as Sam and Jonah dug into their Christmas stockings. We almost felt like we were there. We talked to Mark’s sister and to my sister, and ended our Christmas day with a Skype video call with Justin and Jo. Unfortunately, Ziggy was sleeping and hasn’t been awake much since arriving in England late yesterday. But we got to see him sleeping and we did get to see everyone else. We will try another call tomorrow and hope that Ziggy has recovered from the flight. Now it’s time to get ready for Boxing Day.
by Judy Handley | Dec 24, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 5, Thailand |
Day 59, Year 5: Warmest Holiday Wishes from Windbird
Date: Thursday, December 24, 2009
Weather: Partly Sunny, Becoming Overcase; SW Winds 10
Location: Nai Harn Bay, Phuket Island, Thailand
It might not be warm where you are, but we can honestly send you the warmest of wishes at this glorious time of year. It is always in the 80’s here in southern Thailand at this time of year and this afternoon, I have been baking stuffing, a pecan pie, and a pumpkin pie for Christmas Day. The oven is tiny, so each thing had to be baked one at a time. That has raised the inside temperature to almost 95 degrees F. So truly, warmest wishes from Windbird.
Whether you are family, land-based friend, or fellow cruiser, we will be thinking of all of you during the holidays. Every year of our voyage, my hope for the new year is that I will have more time to communicate with each of you more often. I’m really hoping to send out monthly letters from Windbird and the next one will be due on New Year’s Day. So until then, enjoy where ever you are and whomever you are with. We are missing family terribly right now. It is a hard time of year to be so far away. But we have done everything we can to be able to connect with them via Skype with video on Christmas Day. The only thing that could alter our great plan is the fact that almost everyone else in the world will be trying to do the same time, and we might not get through. If that happens, we’ll just have to be satisfied with the day after Christmas.
We are celebrating Christmas Eve with cruisers from around the world. We will meet on shore and be treated to be scrumptious buffet at a little resort that welcomes cruisers this way every year. But it is not really the food that we are seeking, it is the camaraderie of fellow sailors, all far away from home. Tomorrow we will have dinner with our closest friends from the past year of sailing, Tina and Robert of Shirena and Donna and Gerry of Scot Free II. Scot Free just arrived and they are going to shore to the buffet with us.
We had two great Skype calls today, one with our friends Alan and Helaine in Concord, NH, and another with Jean and Ken of Renaissance 2000 in Richards Bay. It was so great to talk to them. Our son Justin, Jo, and Ziggy should have arrived in England today and our daughter Heather, Jed, Sam, and Jonah are at the farm in Maine. We have family in North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, West Virginia, and Florida. We have good friends in Australia, in Vanuatu, in Fiji, in Malaysia, here in Thailand and all over the US. We are all spread out all over the world. So joy to the world!
by Judy Handley | Dec 23, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 5, Thailand |
Day 58, Year 5: Quiet Day in Nai Harn
Date: Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Weather: Most Sunny; E Winds 10-15
Location: Nai Harn Bay, Phuket Island, Thailand
Compared to most, this was a very quiet day. I did laundry, Mark moved the location of our VHF radio placing it inside the boat at the Nav Station and installed a new remote mike in the cockpit, and we took the dinghy to shore to explore internet café possibilities. This beach is one of the less frenzied ones in southern Thailand. Most of the beachfront property is owned by a Buddhist monastery and as far as we can tell there are only two major hotels in the Bay, a Meridian and something called All Seasons. That was not of much interest to us until we returned from our two mile walk that did not produce an internet café. We can call our kids from the boat, but we wanted good internet to make video Skype calls on Christmas. It doesn’t seem to be here, so in the morning we will go to the fancy Meridian Hotel called the Royal Phuket Yacht Club (not a yacht club in any way, shape, or form) and see if they will sell us wireless internet time. We will then have to test it to see if it will handle video, and if not, we might need to take a taxi ride on Christmas evening so we can see our kids on Christmas morning in Maine and Christmas afternoon in England.
Landing a dinghy on the main beach here is interesting in that there is a slight swell pushing you up on the beach even though the wind is blowing the opposite direction. We landed the dinghy with no problem, but the next swell sent Mark flying into the water and the sand was so soft that we had a real challenge pulling the dinghy up out of the water. And the landing at the little resort where we will have Christmas Eve dinner tomorrow night is a rock strewn obstacle course. So it’s much easier to just sit here on the boat than to go ashore, but we will just have to get a little braver.
Last night we had three wonderful telephone calls to the US. I talked to my sister-in-law Conda and brother Dickie, Mark talked to Heather to see if the colds the boys have were any better (Sam is better; Jonah was not.), and I talked to my friend Linda Stuart in Concord, NH. This calling card that allows hour long phone calls with almost no cost is wonderful. We do that with Skype on the computer, but being able to make a phone call on a cell phone that is crystal clear from anywhere that has a cell signal to anywhere else in the world is really unbelievable. We’ll make more calls over the next couple of days and connect with family and friends back home.
Tomorrow will be a cooking day for me. I plan to bake a pumpkin pie, a pecan pie (Mark’s favorite), and get the onions and celery cut for the stuffing for Christmas Day. I also have to bake banana bread as the bananas we bought in Ao Chalong were starting to draw fruit flies. I hate those little things. So Christmas Eve day for us will be a busy one and then we will go ashore for the big dinner tomorrow night. So the hurry, scurry of the holidays is here.
by Judy Handley | Dec 22, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 5, Thailand |
Day 57, Year 5: Check It Out!
Date: Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Weather: Most Sunny; E Winds 10-15
Latitude: N 07 degrees 46.473 minutes
Longitude: E 098 degrees 18.031 minutes
Location: Nai Harn Bay, Phuket Island, Thailand
Check out the updated website. Our son Justin gave us an early Christmas present and got the new information on the site for us. We were so excited. We find it hard to believe that we didn’t have time in more than two and half years to at least update once a year, but I guess we have been that busy. We still have to update the map of Where We Are Now and add back the sailing itineraries from the first two years that somehow got lost in the transfer. But we are up-to-date and that feels wonderful. Thank you, Justin and Jo, for taking time in this very busy season to get this done for us.
And another thing we absolutely love is this 3G modem that allows us to have internet access anywhere that we have phone service. In Thailand that is almost everywhere. And we should definitely have cell service in Cochin, India. We know there is 3G service in the southern Maldives, but it all stops when we reach the Chagos. But once again when we are in Rodrigues, Mauritius, and Reunion, maaaaaybeee in Madagascar, and definitely in South Africa, we should have cell service, and therefore, internet. I think Windbird has just come into the 21st century.
We waited until the tide was rising to move from Ao Chalong to Nai Harn Bay. It is only about ten miles, but it is a shallow ten miles and we thought it best to do it on the rising tide. Nai Harn is the southern most bay on Phuket Island and it is lovely. It is beautiful in the way that anchorages in Maine are with rocks all along the shore and deciduous trees covering the hills. There are no palm trees here and no dramatic limestone karsts, but the white sand beach is lovely, albeit covered with tourists. We are pretending that the white sand is snow. And speaking of snow, we talked to our daughter Heather last night after we sent the log and found out that New England and much of the northern east coast of the US has been blanketed by snow. What a nice early Christmas present for folks in the northeastern part of the US.
Robert and Tina on Shirena have been in this bay for three days now and Robert came over soon after we arrived to invite us over for Happy Hour. They are planning on leaving Thailand just after the New Year for the northern Maldives and then northwest to Salala, Oman. There has been some recent pirate activity on the route from the Maldives to Salala, so they are going to head almost due north from the Maldives before heading west to Salala. Others are going straight to Cochin, India, and then north to Mumbai (Bombay in times past) and then west to Salala. These Somali pirates are making life most interesting for many people.
Tonight here is early morning in the US and we are planning on making a few phone calls. The CAT international card we bought is unbelievable. It costs less than a 1/3 of a penny per minute to talk to anyone anywhere in the world and our cell is not charged as we dial into an 800 number. We are not sure if we can make Skype calls using the internet on the boat as Thailand is still 2G not 3G. But we are going to try that tonight as well. So we’ll report on that tomorrow night.
by Judy Handley | Dec 21, 2009 | Sailing Logs Year 5, Thailand |
Day 56, Year 5: First Christmas
Date: Monday, December 21, 2009
Weather: Overcast Day; ENE Winds 15-20
Location: Ao Chalong, Phuket, Thailand
We started our morning at the Twin Coconuts using their free wireless to connect with Justin, Jo, and Ziggy. It was their Sunday evening and they had chosen Sunday as their Christmas in the US day. It was evening for them and they had had a wonderful day. And at Twin Coconuts we actually had a Christmas tree that was in the background as we talked. So with their cheery moods and our little Christmas tree, we actually got in to the Christmas spirit. Our main present for Ziggy was a Radio Flyer push wagon and Justin and Jo said they got an amazing video of him when he discovered it early on Sunday. He is not walking yet, but he immediately stood up and started pushing it around. So that was a success. We took some Skype pictures of him as we talked and those will be posted with this log when we have high speed internet. He is such a cutie. Justin, Jo, and Ziggy will be flying to England on Wednesday, and we really hope we can have a video Skype call with them there on Christmas Day. We’ll just have to see where we are and whether that is possible. So today was our first day of Christmas and we’ll just keep on celebrating through the next few days.
We had a huge list of things to accomplish today, and we did a lot of them, but not all. We got the rental jeep and headed out to find Him’s shop. We did, but he was not there. In a phone conversation with Him, he told us to call again tomorrow. So obviously the alternator is not yet ready. We dropped off one of our two LP tanks to be filled and then headed toward Phuket Town. We stopped at Rolly Tasker to see if they would replace a hundred feet of line that we bought there last spring. There was one place where it seemed like there had been an internal splice that kept the line from going through the pulley at the top of the mast and the rope clutch on the side of the mast. Without any questions or any receipt, they did replace the line. So score one. From there we went directly to the Boat Lagoon area. We made a stop at each of the two chandleries that are on the way there looking for a few items, but we found nothing. At the Boat Lagoon, we picked up some items from Canvas Creations who made our cockpit enclosure last year and dropped off the board that our aft toilet sits on. It was in dire need of replacement and we were told we could pick up a new one at 4 pm. We stopped to see Larry at East Marine and stopped at the Royal Phuket Marina next door to the Boat Lagoon to see Neil and Ley on Crystal Blues and Judy and Dave on Freebird. Crystal Blues was on the hard when we were here last year in the Boat Lagoon, but because of one thing and then another, they were just launched on December 4. We knew they planned to leave Royal Phuket tomorrow and we just wanted to say hello. What we didn’t know is that Ley had to have an unexpected operation last week in the middle of trying to get the boat up and going, so they are a little behind. Because of tides, they must leave Royal Phuket tomorrow or they can’t leave for another two weeks. So they were scurrying about trying to move out of their apartment and get things ready to leave. They will go to Ao Po Grand Marina and finish their jobs there. Judy on Freebird wasn’t home, but Dave was there and we dropped off some of the Red Sea and Med books that they wanted to buy from us. By this time it was 12:30 and we were just getting ready to shop. How time flies!
We had a list of electronic needs that we attacked first.. We bought a 3G modem for our computer that should allow us to get internet when we are anywhere where there is phone service (Mark just told me that he downloaded emails, so I guess it is working.), a 350 watt inverter to be able to keep our computer running for navigation purposes without using the boat’s inverter which takes way more power, and a barrel connector that will allow Mark to connect cables and move the location of our VHF radio. That all sounds easy, but it was not. It took multiple stops to find these things and by the time we were done it was 3:00 and we hadn’t had lunch. So we made a brief stop to eat and then started our food search. We found a source of rolled oats for our granola that makes it cost 1/3 of any other breakfast alternative, and we found another source that had bulk sunflower seeds, but that was just about it. It was starting to get dark and stores were closing, so we headed back to Ao Chalong. We will continue again next Monday, but for now we are going to stop and relax with friends for Christmas.
We will go into town in the morning to return the rental jeep, pick up our propane tank, check with Him about the alternator, and do some Christmas dinner shopping. By noon we should be on our way to Nai Harn Bay. We are looking forward to the change and the chance to catch up with friends we haven’t seen since last year.
