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!