Bottom Cleaning in Thailand
I expected Phuket to be a smallish island ringed with hotels, resorts and restaurants, connected by a pretty coastal road – but I’m surprised at how big Phuket is. It can easily take an hour and a half to drive from end to end, and with many of the roads being “inland”, you often don’t even get a sense that you’re on an island.
We chose to berth at the Ao Po Grand marina simply because it was the closest marina to the quarantine anchorage, but it is also well located for another round of boat jobs. Good chandlery shops and marine professionals abound here – it’s the complete opposite of India where we could spend days searching for relatively simple items or services.
But the benefits of being in a top-quality, full-service marina don’t come cheap. Touristing is really good value here, but marinas in South East Asia are surprisingly expensive. This one is four times the price of the one in India and ten times the price of the sailing club marina in Dubai! You can see why many budget-oriented cruising sailors spend most of their time at anchor.
We knew we would need to haul Aroha out of the water for a further round of boat jobs. In a perfect world we would have done this in India before setting off on the long passage here, but with virtually no recreational boating there, I had nightmares about hauling her out in a shipyard more accustomed to heavy wooden fishing boats and her falling over or some other disaster.
The main jobs were replacing the propeller and servicing the sail drive, which had developed a concerning vibration, and reapplying the antifoul paint that deters marine growth under the waterline. The two contractors I selected, following other yachtie recommendations, turned out to be excellent. G&T Boat Yard and Phuket Marine Engineering cracked on with their respective scopes – making good progress until I discovered that the rudder bearings and housings were shot and needed replacing. I’d earlier noticed a bit of play in the rudder and some pitting corrosion on the lower bearing housing and suspected that something more serious might be afoot, so it was on the top of my list to check properly. The requisite parts arrived from Europe, following a frantic few days of identifying and then ordering parts online. True to the nature of boat jobs and directly proportional to the cost of the boat yard you’re using, we then discovered another problem – spots of osmosis in the rudder. This is where water penetrates into the fibreglass layers and can cause serious problems if left untreated. Thankfully it wasn’t too serious, but the dry weather required for repairs was becoming more scarce as the monsoon season set in.
Maintaining a boat is a pretty expensive hobby. Many sailors make themselves feel better about what feels like throwing endless money into the ocean by referring to costs as “boat-dollars”. So, a new propeller might cost one boat-dollar, antifoul two boat-dollars, or an autopilot control unit three boat-dollars, etc. It’s all less painful than thinking of paying thousands of dollars each year to keep afloat.
In spending “many many boat-dollars” first in India, and now again in Thailand, our ratio of carelessly cruising through the warm waters of SE Asia, to effort expended and money spent is looking extremely poor at the moment!
Helen had to return to the UK for family reasons and I moved into a local hotel while Aroha was in the boat yard. With the boat jobs feeling like they were dragging on a little, I was starting to get a little stir crazy. I did have the company of a pretty large spider who had taken up permanent residence in my hotel room. I named him Sidney and he was a decent enough roommate, though it was a bit disconcerting when he went AWOL a couple of times – it was always more comforting to know where he was! During my enforced land holiday I made friends with quite a few other bugs and beasties while enjoying the great outdoors, and thankfully Phuket’s not a bad place for that.
I’ve found some brilliant hiking trails here. My favourites are through the virgin jungle – it’s amazing just how much life the jungle here contains – sometimes the jungle chorus is such a racket of squarks and squeals, it sounds like the jungle is trying to send a fax. Equally interesting is hiking through the small rubber, banana or palm oil plantations – public access is pretty open here, so you can walk through villages etc – it seems so long as you have a big smile on your face and a cheery “sawadee-khrap!”, then the Thais don’t seem to mind at all.
I was also eager to see beyond Phuket, and I arranged to meet up with a couple of ex-Dubai friends who now call Thailand home. I was pleased when they suggested a weekend at Railay beach. This place is a rock-climbing mecca and for that reason has long been on my “must visit” list. Although I wouldn’t be fulfilling the dream of anchoring in a quiet bay and rowing ashore for a morning of rock climbing, this trip was a good recce for future floating visits. There was considerably more beer than climbing over the weekend, but I was glad to get off Phuket island and explore a bit. I also took the opportunity to drive to a nearby marina to check it out for a future possible visit with Aroha. It’s the cheapest one in the region but despite the claims of being “full service”, needed a bit of imagination to deserve that self-proclaimed title.
When cruising, our dinghy becomes the equivalent of our car. You need to use it to get to and from the shore, and shops, as well as adventuring about. With many holes and torn seams and its corresponding inability to stay inflated, we started referring to its slumped form as our “hovercraft”. Determined to repair rather than buy new (and knowing that a replacement would cost about four boat-dollars…) inspired me to at least try to repair it. It was a pretty big job – several of the surgeries involved Helen and I having our hands inside the dinghy as we manipulated patches into place. The finished project didn’t look pretty, but each subsequent repair held a little more air. Our friend Peter suggested the name “Patches” which I spurned at the time, not wanting to admit defeat. But, I had to give in to repairing the last seam and sent it to the expert repair workshop. But, now that he’s floating once again, he’s been formally christened “Patches”.
At times it felt like the boat jobs were going on forever. My friend Richard gave me a timely reminder to remember to enjoy boat jobs because there’ll always be more. I decided to embrace this more positive mentality and began a new approach of “celebrating the wins” – the CTWs have helped to ensure that I appreciate the achievements that have been made and focus less on the ones that have remained uphill challenges. A couple of weeks back when I had to ask the marina for a visa-extension letter confirming my address, they wrote “Boatyard, Ao Po Grand Marina….”. It seemed a bit cruel mentioning the boatyard and not “Berth B22….”. Regardless, four weeks and a satisfactory number of dry-enough-to-fibreglass-and-apply-antifoul days after hauling out, she was again lifted up by the weird lifting machine and transported back to her natural environment – the ocean! It’s now time to address that poor cruising to boat-job ratio!
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