Day 119, Year 4: World’s Largest Custom Built Sail Loft
Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Weather: Sunny, Beautiful Day; Lightening and Sprinkles at Night
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island

Today we visited Rolly Tasker Sailmakers in Phuket Town. The sign inside claims this to be the world’s largest custom built sail loft with 9038 square meters of floor space. It is huge. It is certainly the largest sail loft we have ever seen and we were amazed at what they offer for sale. Every piece of hardware you might need for sails and rigging can probably be found there. It was truly overwhelming. We were actually out looking for RG 213 coax cable to connect our VHF radio to the antenna. The old cable needs to be replaced and we found out last night that they don’t have it here in the Boat Lagoon and the cost of ordering it was out of sight. We didn’t find coax cable at Rolly Tasker, but we did see Piet Hein of Double Dutch and Steve of Oz and spent an hour or so just looking around. The location of Rolly Tasker was south toward Ao Chalong, so we drove on down there to go to the best dinghy repair shop we have seen in all of our travels. We needed a new handle for the front of the dinghy as our current one pulled out sometime in January. We got that and on the way back to the Boat Lagoon we stopped at Phuket Marine Electronics and found what we (and they) believe to be the equivalent of RG 213 cable. This is labeled as RG 8A/U here but it is much larger than normal RG 8. It looks right, but it was so much cheaper than we expected that we are just not sure. If anyone out there knows more about this than us, please let us know!

Work on Windbird continues. The hull sanding is complete and today was spent sanding the cabin top, cockpit, and the mast and boom. The welder from Nop’s stainless shop showed up today and secured the spot welds so all the stainless could be removed and taken to the shop for final welding and polishing. We worked on hardware inventory and started the hardware cleaning process. There are loads of stainless screws, bolts, nuts, washers, pulleys, cleats, and on and on that need to be soaked in diesel fuel and then cleaned to get rid of the old caulk before they are put back on Windbird with new caulk. Mark started today with the big items like the winches off the mast and will continue on tomorrow.

We had dinner here in the Boat Lagoon tonight with Susan and Richard of Sea Bunny and Nannette and Stuart of Truest Passion. Nannette and Stuart are just here for a few days getting a few repairs and getting the boat cleaned and polished. Richard and Susan are our new neighbors across the way from Windbird. Sea Bunny is a 1985 Halberg-Rassey that needs a new teak deck. They came in on Monday and already the old teak is mostly off. The speed of the work done here is amazing. We did learn at dinner tonight that we need to go to have our Visa renewed tomorrow instead of Friday. Evidently if you go in on the last day before your Visa expires you can sometimes get fined for not coming in ahead of time. Not sure we understand this, but we won’t take any chances. So tomorrow morning we will head back to Phuket Town to get the Visa extensions and then back here for more boat work.

090218 Day 119 Boat Lagoon, Phuket, Thailand–Visit to Rolly Tasker