Ranong

Three months have passed since our last entry… We’ve been busy.

No major repairs had been undertaken on Dali since November 2011. After 6 months of sailing up and down the coasts of Malaysia and Thailand, the boat needed some love and care to fix its injuries. We headed to Yacht Haven Marina in the North of Phuket for a month of work.

The biggest job would be fixing the leaks at the hull/deck junction at the back of the boat as well as on the bow. While the hull is solid fiberglass and most of the deck is a fiber/balsa wood sandwich, the sections around the cockpit and on the bow are just plywood covered with fiberglass. Due to bad isolation, some of the plywood was rotten and needed to be changed. Both storage areas at the back of the boat were leaking water !

The diesel tank was completely clogged up from not having been cleaned for years. The only way was to take it out, cut a hatch into it, clean it and put it back.

Our cushions covers were old and tired, and we were excited to replace them with the fabric we had purchased in KL’s Little India a few months back.

As you start working on the boat it is hard to stop. You keep on taking things apart, finding new areas that can be improved or repaired. The toilet needed a major servicing, the anchor chain and anchor could do with a galvanizing, the anchor winch needed maintenance, one of the chain plates had cracked and a replacement had to be ordered from Bangkok, the water tanks were leaking and needed repairs, a new main sail was in order…the list is long.

And the weather didn’t help. As soon as we docked, it basically started raining for a month, a very unusual thing for May-June in Phuket. This made everything more complicated as we tried to protect the working areas from the rain so that the resins used in the repairs could dry properly. And during this time we were still living on the boat, moving it’s contents from one area to the other as the jobs moved on, sleeping in the middle, with very little living space.

Luckily, we ran into Chris, an Australian sailor aboard Lady Bubbles, whom we had met in Koh Tachai a few months back and happened to be doing repairs on the opposite dock ! He was leaving his boat for a month in Phuket while going back to Australia, had rented a room nearby, and offered us to stay in it for two weeks while he was gone ! Thanks mate ! This enabled us to start on a brand new paint job inside the boat, while the rain kept pouring and a lot of other jobs where on hold.

After enjoying the freedom we had in the past months sailing the gorgeous waters of the Andaman Sea, it is not easy being stuck in a marina for weeks. No more virgin beaches, crystal clear waters and outrageous sunsets. Just work all day. Trying to figure out the best ways to fix complicated systems. Driving around Phuket town trying to find the spare part that’s missing, or the greasy machine shop that will do the welding job you need… before heading back to the dull Marina life where every boat just floats there, sadly tied to its pontoon. And then, slowly but surely, you start to move on. You’re not taking things apart anymore, but putting them back together. The boat starts looking less like a workshop and more like a living space. The exit is near…

Then there are administrative issues. Our Thai visa was only valid for a month. We needed to get out of the country. The fastest and cheapest solution when you are in Phuket is to do a visa run to Myanmar, 300km to the north. It turned out to be a lovely trip under the rain. We decided to rent a car and drive up the West coast to Ranong. From Ranong you can take a long tail boat for an hour, crossing the estuary that separates Thailand from Burma. On the other side of the boat trip you really are in a different world ! A much poorer world; with hundreds of boats living of border trading activities. Dozens of cute children jumping from boat to boat. Very chilled custom officers in a little hut that only accept brand new or ironed US dollar bills. Buddhist temples everywhere. An intriguing country where I would have loved to spend more than half an hour.

Back in Thailand, we stopped at the impressive Ngao waterfall. It felt great to be on the move again. The green hills of South West Thailand in the rain really soothed us after a long month of work…

A month and a half had passed and we were almost ready to move back onto the boat and finish all the jobs. The leaking was fixed, the serviced diesel tank was installed, the cushions were ready everything had been freshly painted and we were putting the last finishing touches when the phone rang…

That’s another story.

Philippe