Day 74, Year 5: Trip to Phuket
Date: Friday, January 8, 2010
Weather: Mostly Overcast Day
Location: Nai Harn Bay, Phuket Island, Thailand

It was a good day. I started the morning by talking to my sister and her daughter Jennifer, and then I called and talked to our daughter Heather. My sister told me that England has been covered in snow and then we wondered if our son Justin was able to fly home from London. We still don’t know the answer to that. This fantastic phone card that we bought for $10 US allows us to call the US and talk for hours, but we haven’t figured out how to call other countries. If we stay up late enough we will be able to call Justin if he is back in New Mexico and if not, we will call him in the morning. Hopefully he got home safely or is still in England enjoying the snow.

We took the local bus to Phuket town today and followed the instructions given to us by Al and Beth on Sunflower for finding a place to have large scale charts copied. We borrowed the charts from Scot Free II and the Sunflower’s directions were perfect. We paid the bus driver less than an extra US $1 to take us to the area we needed to go to do the copying. Not a bad service. We got the copying done and then walked back to the center of town. On the way, Rob and Sharon on Frenzy II called us and arranged a lunchtime meeting with us. Rob had asked on the IO Net if anyone had a copy of MaxSea that he could get. We did and so we met for lunch to give him the CD. We bought $100 US dollars worth of New Zealand cheese and 20 pounds of white flour to complement the whole wheat flour we bought a couple of days ago, and then we hopped back on a bus to Nai Harn. On the way back there was a motor bike behind the bus with a side wagon. There was a little boy, probably three or four, sound asleep in the side wagon surrounded by presents. It must have been his birthday and it was such a perfectly Thai photo. We hope the photo we took was a good one and we will post with this log if it is.

When we got back to Windbird, Ed and Lynne of Constance invited us over for sundowners on their boat. They also invited George and Ellen of Wind Dancer and Jeff and Cathy of Mirage. What a great group of cruisers! George and Ellen are headed back to the US for family celebrations and will probably meet up with us in Maurtius in late August as they head toward South Africa. Jeff and Cathy are going to the Chagos and will be there while we are there. They will then return to Thailand. It was a great chance to meet people that we will be seeing more of during this sailing season. And I am so excited that Ellen of Wind Dancer has sweet basil seeds and fish fertilizer that she can give to me so I can have fresh pesto in the Chagos.

The other great news we got today is that our Air Breeze wind generator can be sent to a service center in Mumbai (Bombay), India. If we don’t figure out the problem before we reach India, we can then ship the wind generator to the service center and get it back before we leave there. This was very good news.

The refrigeration repair guy comes to Windbird early in the morning and hopefully he will be able to assure us that all is really well with the refrigeration. So things are happening and unless something unexpected comes along, we will be checking out of the country on Monday, moving to Patong to do our last fresh food provisioning, and heading for India sometime late next week.