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!

090209 Day 110 Boat Lagoon, Phuket, Thailand–Boat Lagoon Front Yard