California Witch Wool

Janet in Phuket, June 2011

Yep, Janet's here! She looks pretty darn good.  Billy Clyde Puckett would  approve, I believe. A great compliment lost on Janet because she never read "Semi Tough" and doesn't even know that Billy Clyde was my fictional football hero back in the day when I still had fantasies. It's very nice to have my sweet, long and leggy wife around again. Having been together for about twenty five years, not seeing her for nearly three months has been very strange.

New teak on a sunny afternoon, lovely!

The boat is about done. All the teak is down, caulked and sanded. All the deck hardware has been re-installed. Most of the peripheral jobs have been done or are well under way.  The only real set back has been the galley counter tops which were installed last week. It was a sloppy job and I thought the installers were to return the next day and clean up the installation. Wrong, they went back to Bangkok. 

Sloppy work from the counter top crew.

 It's a long boring story but the owner of the company agreed after one look that this was not acceptable and a different install crew will be here tomorrow with new material and this time it WILL be done right. Right now the decks are being gone over inch by inch and minor flaws in the caulk or wood work are being corrected. It is a beautiful job of decking. 

Every phase creates it's own mess.

Choi spent days sanding....

...followed by more days of sanding by Nuie...

...and searching for and repairing flaws in the caulk.

 Phon seems to take special pleasure in the detail work. His work on the anchor locker hatch is really lovely and it was especially demanding. He could have done it in a  more simple manner, as it was originally, but this looks much nicer.

Straight grooves get the router.

Everything else gets the hammer and wood chisel.

The completed anchor locker hatch.

Janet and I have been doing a little exploring. I've shown her a few little haunts.  My Thai motorcycle survival techniques have become a little more refined. Since it's impossible to predict what may happen next I've just adopted a few basic tenants and identified some constants in their behavior. First tenant, defend yourself at all times. They really are trying to kill you. Second, remember the first tenant. Third, don't try to get even. Get mad and then forget about it. It'll all happen again very soon. Most frustrating and dangerous Thai traffic behavior? Slowly, with infinite slowness, pulling out directly in front of you in heavy traffic. The flip side is slowly, with infinite slowness, slowing in traffic to nearly a complete stop before turning across two lanes of traffic into a side street. Signal, Ha, ha ha! Most dangerous adversary? Anybody in a new pickup or RV, or the old Thai  buses, or the three wheelers, or, or, or.....

A quiet country road but it could be in eight lanes of heavy traffic.

 We took the long moped ride up to the 'big Buddha' and survived the trip. The Buddha is impressive and the view lovely from it's mountain top. I've shown her a couple of the very western style malls where we can get most of our favorite goodies.

A really big Buddha

What do it mean?

 It's very nice to have her here and life around the 'pad' is a lot more fun than it has been the past few weeks. I think there will be a couple more days of deck work and then, when the lines will no longer interfere with the work,  I'll begin re-rigging.

Nirvana?

So please stay tuned. There will probably be some finished boat pictures in the next blog. And I've started putting captions on photos. I'll go back through the entire blog and add captions eventually. Also, for those who don't know, you can enlarge any photo just by clicking on the photo.

Love to all,
Bill & Janet
SV Airstream