15 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
Before breakfast, I went for a 15-minute run, which didn’t go well - I could feel the tightness of the pulled muscle in my back and my chest felt very tight as I breathed. This is not good news.
At the boat, my first “little” job was to remove the boom gooseneck fitting from the mast, so that I can get some bushes installed. All I had to do was to unscrew 16 bolts. Unfortunately, half of them played hard-to-get and one little devil refused to budge. I ended up heating up the bolt; smacking it with an impact driver; grinding a bigger screwdriver slot and finally got it to move after thirty minutes of effort. Half of that time was spent running up and down the ladder to get tools.
Glenys meanwhile, was pressing on with the sprayhood, having cut out the main panels and has just started the sewing.
It was so hot in the afternoon that I stayed in the apartment for a couple of hours after lunch. I eventually ventured out at three o’clock when the sun was a little less severe and spent a couple of hours refitting the rudder shoe to the skeg. I sanded all the surfaces; re-tapped the threaded holes and re-cut the threads on the bolts with a die. I’ve opened up the holes in the skeg a little bit, so that I can centralise the shoe and it’s all ready to pour in the polyester filler to finish the job.
16 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
Glenys continued to work on the sprayhood, while I went to the dentist for a check-up. It was a lady dentist and she found that a filling needed replacing, so I had it done straight away. After injecting my gum, the she-devil set to cleaning my teeth. She was very thorough and used various methods including an evil device that was a high pressure, pulsing, salt-solution gun, which she remorselessly worked over each tooth - it wasn’t pleasant, but my teeth are the cleanest that they’ve ever been.
I’ve heard that the dental work in Thailand is very good and low cost, so I asked her for a quote for replacing all of my amalgam fillings with white fillings, which came out at £50 per filling and £400 for a crown. This is much cheaper than the UK, but I think I’ll wait and get a quote in Malaysia and do it later in the year.
With half of my face numb and an aching back, I didn’t feel like working on the boat, so I sloped back to the room and chilled out for rest of the morning.
After lunch, I felt guilty and strolled to the boat. The water pump for the engine has arrived, so I arranged to have it fitted tomorrow morning. This changed my priorities and I had to spend a couple of hours refitting the two alternators. I then had a go at scraping the old sealant out of the top channel in the windscreen frame, but it’s hard to get at and I gave up.
17 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
Lucky Glenys spent the day hiding in the air-conditioned room, continuing to sew the new sprayhood. She’s got the main panels done and is now at the tricky part of making sure that the zips are in the correct place, so that the material is correctly tensioned when the spray hood is installed.
Bob from YSE Marine came on board and started to fit the freshwater pump. While he was working on the engine, I lowered the main sail to the ground and, using a modicum of brute force and ignorance, I hammered the sheave off the main sail clew. The clew plate was looking a bit battered by the end of the process, but being aluminium, it was soft enough that I could straighten it all out.
The sheave looked in a terrible state with half of one side completely broken off, but there’s enough for the rigger to measure it and get a new sheave made. I’m going to replace the riveted shaft with a threaded bolt, so the rigger is also going to make a stainless steel bush that will stop the bolt threads damaging the inside of the new sheave.
I went back to the rudder shoe and pulled out each of the bolts, smearing releasing wax onto the threads to prevent polyester resin sticking to the threads, which would make it very difficult to turn the screws when the shoe needs to removed again. I applied thread-lock adhesive to the ends of the threads where the bolt screws into the other half of the rudder shoe and used a centre punch to flare the ends of the bolts a little bit - I don’t want these bolts to work their way loose.
Nai’s guy (Lek) and I then spent an hour or so mixing and pouring in a very runny polyester paste bound with micro-balloons. I’m glad that he had the foresight to mask off the lower part of the rudder with cling film because the polyester went everywhere. We’re letting it harden over night before finishing the job.
I scraped the rest of the sealant from the windscreen frame. The carpenters lent me a couple of hooked tools that they use to get caulking out of the grooves on teak decks. One of the tools was like a hooked chisel that cuts when being pulled, which was very useful, but the job still took me a couple of hours of grunt work.
For the last few days, we’ve been having problems connecting to the boatyards Wi-Fi network and I’ve been cursing the hotel’s IT team. I’ve tried to get help from the hotel a couple of times, but they speak little or no English and not been any use. Strangely, Glenys’ iPad connects without any problem, but neither of our two laptops will connect.
In desperation, I took Glenys’ laptop to the hotel lobby, but still couldn’t get a connection. I was too late to see an IT guy, but I was able to use one of the hotel’s Internet PC’s to do a little research. It seems that Windows 10 has some problems with “losing” network drivers, but I obviously can’t download any test utilities or get on-line help without an internet connection - Arrrrggghhh!
18 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
I took both laptops to the boat and found that I could connect to my router on the boat, but still couldn’t connect to the Boat Lagoon Wi-Fi. I spent a couple of hours trying different things, but no joy - it’s now become a “Challenge”.
Lek came to finish off the polyester for the rudder shoe, but the Volvo engineer, Bob, didn’t arrive, so I moseyed over to YSE Marine and found that he needs to get a “special tool” to finish the job which should be here in a few days.
The carpenters are pushing on and have laid most of the main deck and half of the coach roof. They are now fitting shaped pieces of teak at the boundaries of the hatches and chain plates. The edges of the deck next to the coach roof are getting the same treatment with complex teak panels being laid with the ends of the planks carefully shaped in an arc. It’s looking so good that I’ve booked a provisional launch date of the 14th March.
My back has been playing up, so I had a lazy afternoon and then picked up a car to go to see a physiotherapist. I’m a bit dubious about physiotherapy because the ones that I’ve encountered have given me non-invasive exercises and I’d rather get the invasive, quick fix of an osteopath. However, this guy was great.
The first thing he did was to violently realign my neck and spine - I love the sound of joints crunching. I was then subjected to 15 minutes of hard massage, more stretching of my spine and then 30 minutes of ultrasound, electro-massage and heat pads. I was in there for 75 minutes and it only cost me 900 Baht (£18).
19 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
We hired another car to do some running about. A car costs £20 per day to hire and a motorbike costs £6 per day, but it’s a lot easier to hire a car and much more pleasant to drive around. The traffic in Thailand is manic with hundreds of motorbikes constantly weaving in and out of the traffic. Not many people bother to indicate and being undertaken by aggressive drivers is very common, but it’s a challenge and I enjoy it.
We bought a car stereo to replace the one that I’ve broken and then we went to the supermarket. I sloped off to the nearby Bangkok Tools. I’ve been to many hardware stores in our five years of cruising and this place gets my vote for “Best in the World”. I spent a happy hour wandering around, buying hard-to-find things like grub screws for the PSS seal, 3mm thick rubber matting to make spacers for the windscreen and plastic self-adhesive brackets for cable ties (which I’ve had on my list since leaving Panama two years ago). I confess to buying a few things that weren’t on my To-Buy-List.
20 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
I had a very lazy morning, but I managed to drag myself out to the boat in the afternoon. I was pleased to see that there were nine carpenters working on our deck, most of them working on their own little section of the deck, fitting edging planks or cleaning the caulking grooves.
I had a more detailed look at the engine and the engineer (now to be known as Bodge-it Bob) has removed the timing belt without locking the camshaft or the injection pump in place. This is extremely worrying because the positioning of the various pulleys on the timing belt is critical. If the belt is out by even a few teeth, the valves can hit the top of the pistons with devastating results. Unfortunately, everyone at YSE Marine is on holiday until the 23rd because Monday is a Public Holiday.
Some of the Thai workers bring caged song birds to work with them. The birds are called Red-whiskered Bulbuls and are held in beautiful wooden cages. The workers carefully space out the birds so they are about 20 metres apart and they are rewarded by the birds calling to each other - it very nice.
I’ve discovered that there are Birdsong competitions, where the bird cages are placed together on a frame, with the owners standing 5 metres away. Each owner calls his bird’s name, encouraging it to sing and to fly around the cage. There are various events which are judged on melody, tone and movement. I’ve heard that there are local events on Sundays, so it would be interesting to go and see a competition.
21 February 2016 Boat Lagoon, Phuket
Despite it being a Sunday, I woke up feeling all dynamic, so after breakfast, I wandered off to the boat. Nai’s carpenters have tidied up the deck and I could see that the teak is almost fully laid. Most of the edging pieces are in place, with just a few of the central pieces to be fitted. The guys still need to do some fine work to cut 4mm grooves at the edges of some of the planks and then all the grooves will need to be cleaned of adhesive.
I guess they’ll be finished with the woodworking in three days, and then they’ll be ready to squirt black caulking into all the grooves. This has to be left to cure for 5 days and then they’ll sand the deck to finish it off. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and think that we have a fair chance of launching the boat on the 14th March.
I tidied up the saloon, which had tools and spare parts piled up everywhere, then put some bilge cleaner down into the sump with ½ gallon of water. I’m going to let it soak and give it a good scrubbing tomorrow.
We’ve only three weeks before we go back in the water, so with a heavy heart, I started to tackle varnishing the aft cabin. The wood surrounding the hatch was looking particularly tired, so I rubbed that down to the bare wood - an hour of holding a sander above my head…
After lunch, I sanded down the panels and mouldings around the middle of our bed, which gets a lot of traffic and knocks. By four o’clock, I’d finished the tedious preparation and then spent an hour putting on the first coat of varnish. It looks worse than it did before I started - varnishing is not my favourite job.