Day 139, Year 4: Still in Low Gear
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day; No Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
We’re still in low gear. Work on the boat is happening but certainly not at the speed we had anticipated. Nop’s guys did show up this morning to start installing the arch and stainless hand rails on the aft portion of the boat. That work took a lot of Mark’s attention as he had to watch and give direction. I stayed in the “shop”-my new name for our apartment. Mark would come back to the “shop” periodically with more things that needed to be cleaned, so I was kept busy all morning. Mark talked to Oh this morning on the phone and then Oh called Luck and Luck was put on the job of preparing our hatches for painting. We had hoped that Oh might have other crew to do this so Luck could keep working on the mast, but we’ll take what we can get.
We walked down to the bottom floor of our apartment building to have lunch at a little French restaurant called The Winch. Mark didn’t feel like he had the time to walk to food alley for lunch and I am sick of ham sandwiches made in the apartment, so the lunch break was fun and the food was great. We installed a couple of items on the cabin top in the afternoon and then went to Ley and Neil’s home for a visit before taking them to the airport for their trip to Singapore. We drove back from the airport in their rental car that we don’t have to return until Thursday, so we can do some shopping tomorrow. We picked up Linda and Pieter of Dutch Touch and drove over to the Royal Phuket Marina for dinner at Limoncello. We traveled across the Pacific at the same time as Linda and Pieter, but we have never really had a chance to get to know them. So we had a great time tonight learning how they met as engineers for Proctor and Gamble. Linda was a design engineer and Pieter had risen to the management level. Their story is fascinating and we are so glad that we got to spend time getting to know them a little better.
Since part of tomorrow will be spent shopping, I have a feeling we will not get up to speed until Thursday. But we will get there eventually. The reassembly process is even more tedious than we anticipated. It is really hard to start punching holes in that beautiful cabin top, but it must be done. Mark did install the little hatch over our galley this morning and he said he felt he had crossed a threshold. We’re not in fourth gear yet, but at least we are not in reverse!
