Day 141, Year 4: Exhausted Yet Exhilarated
Date: Thursday, March 12, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day; No Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island

Unlike yesterday when we took a mid-day break to go shopping, we worked on the boat from 8:30 to 5:30 today and we are exhausted. We didn’t work that hard, it is just the heat. I am so grateful that we have the tent over us. Otherwise I think working on the boat all day would just do us in. But at the same time that we are exhausted we are also exhilarated. Windbird is looking just great. Our crew worked on the mast and boom all day again today and it looks like they are very close to painting.
They will do the epoxy primer first, then the normal primer in the same time frame. The next day they will apply the final AwlGrip coats. At least I think that is what they will do. Oh came by today and brought the AwlGrip Bright Aluminum paint that they will use to paint the hatches. He also brought an AwlGrip Clear and said that the hatches will need the clear coat to protect the surface. So tomorrow or Saturday could be an exciting day.

I have been working so hard that I haven’t taken as many photos as usual, but I will be posting update photos with tomorrow’s log. So many things are happening at once. In addition to Oh’s crew working on the mast and boom, we have Nop’s crew that come and go. They have started but not finished the arch and stainless handrails on the aft part of the boat. But progress is being made. Mark is a little worried that the structure is not as stable from side to side as he would like, but we are not
sure what to do about that. We had Richard from Sea Bunny come over and give us his opinion and he thinks we should just leave things as they are. If there is a problem we can come back next year and have something added to stabilize it if needed. We took wallboard from our aft cabin up to Pro’s Carpentering today. They cut new pieces for us as the old board had been damaged by a salt water leak at some point. We also took an aluminum track that runs across our foredeck up to Nop’s shop this
morning to have it polished. It looked just awful and nothing I could do made it look any better. But by day’s end it is installed on Windbird and looks fabulous. It probably won’t stay that way long, but it sure looks great now. I spent a great deal of my day sanding the handrails on the cabin top and sanding all the varnished wood around the companionway. I didn’t do any varnishing today, but will probably do that at the end of the work day tomorrow. There is just too much dust in the air
in the hardstand area to even think about doing varnish work in the middle of the day.

If you are reading this you are probably totally confused by all the work that is happening. And if you are not, you are better than we are. We can hardly keep up with it ourselves but we are having fun trying.