Day 146, Year 4: Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Weather: Beautiful Day; Late Afternoon Wind with Light Rain
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
We didn’t dress in green today and we didn’t drink green beer, but Mark will sit in our green deck chair and cook dinner tonight. I guess that is our St. Patrick’s Day celebration for this year. Heather wrote that she and Sam will be having green eggs and ham (bacon) for dinner to celebrate. Jed is attending a conference in Washington, DC, this week, so Sam and Heather will be having their celebration alone. Whatever you do to celebrate, enjoy and think of us in a land where St. Patrick’s Day is just not on the celebration list. Boston is a much better place to be for this holiday.
We had a surprise visit late this morning from Donna and Gerry of Scot Free II. They had a good friend from Canada with them. Their friend, Dave, flew in yesterday, and will be with them for a couple of weeks. It was great to see them. If things keep moving along, we might be in the water by the end of the March and see them out in the islands.
This week’s work is slow and arduous. The primer on the mast was hand-sanded today. The crew is using a wet sanding process which is slow but the sanded areas look fantastic. Yesterday they did a fill around the rough areas where the spreaders are connected to the mast and those areas were painstakingly hand sanded today as well. Most of the mast is done, so I would imagine that the mast and boom will both be ready for the next step by the end of the day tomorrow. The hatches look great. Evidently yesterday’s rain didn’t hurt the paint job. I think they still need a coat of clear AwlGrip and then they will be ready to install. My original estimate of all painting being done by this Saturday might have been a little optimistic, but we still have four workdays and we’ll just have to see how much can happen. After all painting is done, the crew will then sand the bottom of the boat. We will do the bottom just before we go in the water. We are really hoping to be in the water by the end of the month, but again that might be too optimistic. Putting the hardware back on the mast could take a much longer time than we are estimating.
So what did Mark and I do today? Mark says we did a lot; I feel like we did very little. But we did make progress. Mark spent the early morning buying wire at Octopus for the lights and solar panels on the arch. While doing that he checked to see if they had speakers that would fit where the old ones were in our cockpit. He then walked over to the marina office to get a letter from them that we will take to Immigration tomorrow. Our Visa is up on Monday and we are so hoping to avoid a trip to Myanmar (Burma) or Malaysia to renew. Our plan is to take our letter from the marina saying we have boat work in progress, along with pictures of the current work, and to ask for a fifteen day extension. When you apply for a Visa at a consulate outside of Thailand, you are given a two month Visa. Then you can apply for a thirty day extension to that from within the country. We are now at the end of that. We know that some other cruisers have been granted a short extension for boat work in progress without having to leave the country and enter again. So we are hoping this can happen for us. If not, we’ll try to do a day trip to the Burma border. It is only five hours from here, whereas Malaysia is about a ten hour drive. So wish us luck at Immigration tomorrow.
While Mark was doing all this I went to the boat and worked on cleaning caulk from the wooden frame that surrounds the compression post on the ceiling of the main cabin. I made a huge mess doing this and then spent a bit of time vacuuming the main and aft cabins. I sanded the companionway that was varnished on Sunday and did another coat of varnish at the end of the day. After searching for speakers, Mark spent the rest of his day installing new wiring for the solar panels, wind generator, and the two lights on the new arch. He got everything connected on the top end but will not run the wire through the stainless tubing of the arch until the modifications are made. That will require welding and we don’t want new wire inside stainless tubes that will be heated by the welding process. I sanded the teak boards that are attached to our sissy bars around the mast and gave those a couple of coats of teak oil as well as varnishing the companionway way one more time.
Most of tomorrow will be spent going to Immigration to try for an extension and doing a bit of shopping while we have the rental car. If time permits, Mark will work on devising a way to get the new wiring from the arch into the boat. This is going to require drilling a hole in the bottom of the lazarette that holds our propane tanks, putting in a tube for the wires, and then completely sealing that tube that the wires run through so that there is no way that a possible propane leak could enter the inside of Windbird. Whew. That seems complicated, but that is what must be done.
