Day 150, Year 4: Waiting for the Weather
Date: Saturday, March 21, 2009
Weather: Rain Overnight and Off and On All Day
Location: Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket Island
The good news for today is that the additional bracing on the arch is welded in place. It looks great and the arch is much stronger as a result. The bad news is that the rain just didn’t let up today. There were no periods of sunshine, so the mast and boom didn’t get painted. This means we won’t be able to start reassembling the mast on Monday, so our timeline is being pushed forward. We are not yet in panic mode, but we are getting close. Only Luck and Pong were working today and there wasn’t
a lot to do. It rained overnight and the skies never cleared. There was thunder in the morning and rain off and on all day, but not one bit of sunshine. So Mark and I focused on projects on deck while Luck did things like polishing the prop and cleaning the dinghy and moving it to the back of the boat so we could raise it on our new dinghy davits. We couldn’t do this until the very end of the work day when Nop’s crew finished the arch, but it was exciting to be able to raise the dinghy and see
how that is going to work for us. The other jobs that we tackled today included putting up ceiling panels in the boat, sanding away at the bronze ports to get rid of the layers and layers of green, and once the welding on the arch was done Mark was able to get the wiring run from the wind generator and solar panels down to the deck. For the first time, the work is starting to wear a bit as it just keeps going on and on. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.
We just talked to Jean and Ken on Renaissance 2000 via Skype. They are in the southern most part of the Maldives off the southern coast of India. We could not believe it when we saw them pop up on Skype. We had no idea there was any wireless internet in the Indian Ocean, but now we know there is in at least one location. How fantastic! The inter-connectedness of the world is making it smaller and smaller all the time.
