Neil writes:
The last half of our stay in Thailand went by so fast. During this time we had a medical emergency of the highest order, a thorough refurbishment of Active Light's decks, a haulout and bottom paint in a big commercial shipyard, a visit to Ankgor Wat in neighboring Cambodia, and a three-week visit to see our new grand daughter in Ethiopia. It was a very, very eventful, stressful, and hardworking time for us. As many of you already know, the medical event was emergency heart surgery for myself. We had just gotten back from our month's stay in northern Thailand, as reported in our last letter, when Nancy began insisting that I see a doctor for a long-overdue medical checkup. I had been experiencing chest pains for many years, but my American doctor kept telling me it was only heartburn or GERD. Well, an exercise stress-test with a cardiologist at Phuket International Hospital showed possibly 70% blockage in one of my heart's main arteries. He recommended an immediate angiogram and possibly a single balloon stent procedure, either at the well known Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok or back home in the USA. After checking with our insurance agency, we learned that the Bumrungrad Hospital is indeed a respected institution, so we somewhat casually took an overnight bus to Bangkok, having been assured by the Phuket cardiologist that this was a serious, but not life-threatening procedure.
Well, life has its little surprises. Results of the angiogram in Bangkok showed complete blockage on my heart's left main artery and 80-90% closure of the two right mains. The recommendation of the cardiologist, Dr. Aram Chusid, was for immediate open heart surgery to perform a triple by-pass procedure. More hurried phone calls to the USA with our insurance carrier assured us that they would support us in this operation and even gave us background information on the designated heart surgeon, Dr. Patanasak. We have to say, our insurance carrier, Federal Blue Cross/Blue Shield, was great throughout this ordeal. They even arranged for direct payment of the medical costs. Okay, gulp! It all happened so fast, we didn't have time to get very frightened, and it wouldn't have done any good anyway. We had brought but a single change of clothes with us. So, Nancy signed up for three weeks stay in our favorite Bangkok hotel, the Krit Thai Mansion, and by the next evening at 2230 hours, I had undergone a six-hour operation that involved five (5) bypasses. I cannot say enough good things about the two cardiologists who helped me, Dr. Chusid and Dr. Patanasak. They and the nurses and the entire Bumrungrad hospital were just first rate. The facilities are like a five star hotel. I seriously doubt we could have afforded such excellent care in the United States! I feel so lucky. The rest of this story is all good news. The operation was "textbook perfect", my recovery was rapid and excellent. Seven months later, I weigh 88 kgs. (194 lbs.), my cholesterol level is at 170, I have sworn off drinking forever on Dr. Chusid's advice, I am strong again and feel better than I have for 25 years. I workout with a karate and a floor exercise routine for two hours every other morning. I reflect upon the whole event as a great stroke of luck for me, given that I had some clogged tubing in my chest. Now I have a new supercharged carburetor for a heart!

Nancy writes:
The prospect of having a major heart surgery is daunting enough, but to undergo the procedure in a foreign country far from support of family and friends made us more than a bit nervous. I had returned from a visit to the States only the month before. While there, I had seen a report on the 60 Minutes television show about a hospital in Thailand that was attracting patients from all over the world. The report detailed the world class facilities and staff of this institution. Now we found ourselves at that hospital and comforted by the fact that we knew something about it. Our insurance company has working agreements with Bumrungrad for direct billing. My job got a lot easier as I only had to make phone calls to make sure the paperwork required was getting sent back and forth. The little cell phone we had purchased reluctantly when we arrived proved its worth. The hospital has an excellent Foreign Patients Center that helps with any difficulty clients may have. They walked me through the visa extension process doing all the paperwork and accompanying me to the immigration office where they made all the arrangements for another 60 days stay in country. They helped other clients with housing, transportation and communications back home to their various countries. We had spent ten days in Bangkok earlier, so I had a fair idea where things were. We knew a hotel that was reasonably priced and centrally located and the food, money and transport systems were familiar. After I knew the surgery had been successful and that Neil was going to recover, it was a matter of waiting and watching him improve daily. We could relax a little. I spent my days at the hospital with Neil and the evenings sending progress reports to family and friends at the email shop across the street from our hotel in the MBK shopping complex. The fellow who manages the place speaks good English and helped us with information several times. We cannot say enough good things about the hospital and its staff and the various people at the hotel who knew our situation and were especially helpful and supportive. They were all wonderful. We were so lucky to be where we were when all this came up.
The hospital was truly an international one. We saw only a few Thais being treated there. The corridors were filled with people from the Middle Eastern countries, the women covered head to toe in flowing black robes. One of Neil's roommates was an ex-pat Brit who lived part time in Thailand and part in Cambodia. His young Cambodian lady friend visited him daily. I met several Americans in the waiting areas who had come here for treatments as they could not afford the same care in the United States. Here, the costs were about one fifth the cost of the same procedure done in the US. We felt that the care Neil got was as good or better than we would have had in the States. We were interested to see that many of the guests at the hospital were less than kind or polite to the Thai nurses who gave such good care on the wards. The nurses told us that they were required to have an RN degree to work here in a nursing capacity. These ladies are well-trained and competent. Most of the nurses spoke fair English and all spoke some. They were very attentive to the wants and needs of the patients under their care. They were happy to find that Neil was trying to speak Thai and liked helping him with vocabulary.

Neil writes:
Back at the marina, we instituted a morning walk routine, at first only on the long marina docks, but soon we were walking up the hill overlooking Yacht Haven Marina, down into the nearby little Muslim village, detouring around a rubber plantation, and out to the highway and back. This was probably about a 6 km walk and it took a while to work up to it, but I was soon able to clip along in slightly over an hour, . . . not counting the time for the numerous stops to exchange greetings with the many Thai Muslim people with whom we became familiar. They were, for the great majority of the time, very pleasant, accepting, and courteous to us. About 5% of all Thais are Muslim, the majority are Buddhist, and a few Christians

The marina at 0700 local from the overlooking hill, our morning walk begins.

A Thai waterfront home, several Muslim fisherman families live here.

At the risk of pontificating to our friends, I want to say that we have met, interacted with, and observed the behavior of a lot of Muslim people in the last two years in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. I have these comments regarding them. First of all, there are an awful lot of them, although the Christians still outnumber Muslims about 2:1 on a world wide head count. (Christians: 1.9 billion, Muslims: 1 billion) Secondly, with very few exceptions, they seem to be a very decent, conservative, moderate people, very concerned with family values and moral behavior. It is not customary for Muslim wives and daughters to go out in public exposing breast cleavage, belly button, or legs. They do not display images of voluptuous women in advertisements, magazines, and newspapers. Their media do not turn out videos portraying violence, sex, and materialism. On the other hand, we did not see evidence of abused and repressed Muslim women, as is sometimes portrayed in the American press. We saw Muslim women in traditional and western attire running travel agencies, commercial enterprises, riding motorbikes, and surfing on the internet. It could be argued that Muslims might hold the moral high ground compared to the western world. I think it might be a good idea that we westerners tried to learn more about Muslims and develop a more amicable relationship with them. I don't think they are going to go away. They are growing in numbers as a religious group as Christianity is perhaps in decline in the face of scientific advances over the past two of centuries. I have a feeling that our problems with the Muslim world are just beginning. I wish I could explain my feelings and impressions better, but I am not a talented enough to do so. I simply wish we could all be more understanding and tolerant of each other. Anyway, we have almost always been treated very graciously, very honestly, and generously by Muslim people.

Motorbikes were THE mode of local transport, this fellow stops to say hello on the edge of the rubber plantation.

We often saw water buffalo, this one was enjoying a grassy bog on the way to the main highway.

The little Muslim village had two poorly stocked stores, a couple of open air restaurants, a barber shop with two women barbers, several batik cotton shirt shops, lots of open air vegetable stalls and a centrally located mosque. Oh, and the den of vice and all local corruption, an out-of-doors pool parlor on the outskirts of town where it is suspected that some customers may have surreptitiously consumed a beer while indulging in a game of pool. Big fun for teenagers in this village was to cruise on a motorbike from the center of town to the top of the hill overlooking the marina, congregating in secretive clusters of boys and girls to exchange whispered confidences, perhaps sneaking a hand-rolled cigarette made of some awful local tobacco. There was an air of 1950's small town American innocence about it all. After a while, we detoured our morning walk around the town, through the rubber plantation, because we found ourselves stopping so often to talk with people. We never once walked through this village without being offered a ride on a motorbike or a car!

A small portion of the kids attending the local Muslim primary school.

Shortly before our exciting hospital adventure (ha, ha), we had noticed a plank that had lost adhesion to Active Light's port side deck. It was during a heavy rainstorm that we noticed a little water squish from between the deck seams on one foot of planking. "Oh, oh"!, we thought, "Better do a little exploratory surgery!" Well, one thing led to another, and given my acknowledged love of carpentry, we soon decided that we would replace all the teak deck planks along the house sides, port and starboard, taking advantage of the availability of cheap, grade A quality Thai teak. As it turned out, that single plank was the only one which had lost its original 30-year-old Thiokol (adhesive) bonding. There were only three other places, where the planks were joined in a butt joint, that water had seeped in over the years and deteriorated the fastening and wood surrounding it. These places were repaired and the whole exposed substrate was given a good soaking in International Everdure and West System Epoxy before the new planks went on.
We did all this work ourselves, much to the consternation of our friends and local Thai carpenters. The Thai people do a good job in gluing beautiful teak to fiberglass deck substrate without screws or fasteners of any kind. The integrity of such a job depends entirely on the SikaFlex product 298 and its required primer. Furthermore, although it is a brag, I did not see any local shipwright's work which I considered superior to what I can do, . . . and I saw lots of jobs I would not have accepted. The downside of this story is that we began the work at the start of rainy season, had a three-month pause for heart surgery, and then took more than three months of pretty hard work to complete the job. I will devote a single short sentence to describe over six months effort to keep the exposed decks dry with a rag tag assortment of tarps and plastic tubing during the Thai rainy season. It was hell! On the upside, we now have very solid teak decks, a watertight boat again, and a lot of renewed pride in our sailing vessel. We found the underlying Brunzeel plywood substrate, the Alaskan yellow cedar frames and bulwarks to be in near perfect condition, still smelling of that heavenly cedar resin. What follows are a lot of pictures and a little comment on the work.

This is the port side where the demolition and exploration all began.

A good healthy half inch of teak was remaining after 30 years!

Here is an example of the old butt joint method of continuing a plank. The planks were square-cut and caulked, pinned with two angled bronze screws one half inch from the butt end. With the screw so close to the plank end, the plank inevitably split and leaked after 30 years service. We replaced all planks where a split had developed at the screw.

The new improved method, planks and lap joint set in 3M 5200 adhesive.

The old screw holes were filled with a teak peg set in West System epoxy.

Neighbor Terry of Argonauta inspects the first plank that went down.

Nancy laboriously applying the yellow seam tape.

Planks down, plugs in, set in resorcinol glue for better UV resistance.

Showing off our quite good lap seam joints.

And new margin planks, . . . oh yeah, I'm good!

Re-bedding the stanchion over the new margin planks.

3M 5200 was used to glue the planks down to the Brunzeel. All surfaces were wiped heavily with acetone to remove any surface oil prior to sticking it down. All screws were set in a bath of West System epoxy, and the plugs were set in resorcinol glue. Seams were caulked in black SikaFlex 292 with the proper seam primer and the yellow decoupling seam tape sitting in the bottom of the groove. Nancy painstakingly inserted all those many meters of tape herself. It took almost as long to get that tape settled down flat at the bottom of the seam as it did to lay the plank. There is a proper machine for laying this tape, but not of the proper size for our 3mm seams.

One more plank to go.

All planks down port side, . . .

The grade A Thai teak (which probably came ultimately from Burma) was bought and milled for us by Nai and Toe Shipwrights at Boat Lagoon. All the teak was tested with a moisture meter for a moisture content of less than 12% before acceptance. We were very happy with all the wood products we bought from Nai and Toe. Kuhn Toe is a second-generation Thai boatbuilder and certainly the best on Phuket island. We never had any mix-ups with them, but we were always very careful to deliver our many requests to them via a neatly drawn and clearly specified engineering drawing.

. . . and on the starboard side

Starboard side ready for caulking.	Nai and Toe at Boat Lagoon are the best shipwrights in Phuket.
Caulking still wet, Nancy surveys the final product. She helped so much!	Cleaning up after a day's work was often the hardest part, we were so tired!
After the decks were finished, we had always been bothered by a discolored patch on one of our deck frames through which one of the long primary winch bolts penetrated. Salt water had leaked down the bolt and discolored the laminated frame. So, with the availability of excellent woods, we decided to replace it. This was done by lying on my back across the icebox, feet hanging out over the stove and working in the light of a headlamp. I would like to have made a nice 5:1 or 8:1 tapered scarf joint, but in such a cramped space, and with the supporting (offending) bolt tying the whole works together, I opted for a butt joint set in resorcinol glue. The result was acceptable, the leaked was stopped, no one was hurt, and Nancy and I are still friends. Overall, we are still impressed with the high quality woods and products used in the construction of Active Light and with the generally high level of work that went into her original construction, a compliment to builder Cecil Lange and first owner Dick McCurdy.	Not the most accessible place to repair a deck frame!

The purple drop cloth collected more than a couple drops of resorcinol.

Not a color match, teak on cedar, but an acceptable repair in a tight spot.

Nancy writes:
The six-year-old upholstery down below was getting pretty travel-worn and frayed. The foam that we were sleeping on had long ago bottomed out and was getting uncomfortable. It was time to buy some new foam and sew some new covers to replace the shabby old ones. We had to decide whether I would do them again or could we afford to hire them done. We found it difficult to find the materials to do it ourselves and the costs for having it done were very good compared to US prices. Several other cruisers had used Lek Kanboa and been happy with their work so we decided to start with an estimate from them. The company does auto and home upholstery and curtains and recently branched off into yachts. Alex DaCosta, their marketing director, was our main contact with the company. He speaks excellent English and was very helpful in getting our project done. We chose red Thai leather for our covers and hoped we hadn't made a mistake. When the new cushions were delivered, we were thrilled with the results. Months later we are still happy with them. We would recommend Lek Kamboa Company to anyone looking for this kind of work in Phuket, Thailand. The photos below show the new cushions and new red leather pillows with several of the old plaid pillows. We soon replaced the old covers with red and navy Thai silk covers that can be bought at local souvenir shops. We are pleased with our new look.

Portside settee folds out to a seven foot double berth. The books are a major enemy of our waterline. The photo beneath our karate belts is of our son Ron with grandbaby Anna.

Starboard settee with food and sewing lockers beneath, DVDs, CD's, trombone, flute, camera, and art supplies behind. I don't even know what all is in there, it is one of Nancy's sacrosanct areas.

Kuhn Sang fits new one inch 316 stainless pipe to our stern pushpit.	The finished work, we are very happy with this upgrade, looks much better!
And Neil writes: Another upgrade we decided we could afford was a new walk-around, standing headroom sun awning. Along with the new cushions down below, this was another one of Nancy's projects. We had admired one built for our neighbor, Ralph, a German fellow two boats over from us in the marina, so we asked the same fellow, Rick of Palm Sails/Cobra Sales out near Ao Chalong, sew us up a copy. We opted for a high-end ivory-colored Stamoid material with rollup side curtains. We have been very pleased with the result. When we are at anchor with the full-boat awning up, we feel like we have a whole new shaded sun porch on deck to walk around under, working, sitting, reading, or hanging out clothes to dry. However, we feel obliged to add that we had a very difficult time dealing with Rick as a businessman. He constantly missed deadlines and appointments as he kept delaying completion of the work for over four (4) months. We began to regret having given him half of his fee up front and to think of him as somewhat irresponsible in that he seemed totally unconcerned that his failure to meet a promised appointment or schedule fouled up our entire day as we waited for him to show up or even call. Furthermore, we had a lot of trouble with leaky seams once the awning was finally delivered. Long distance phone calls to Sail Rite in the USA assured us that a Stamoid awning should never leak unless it was sewn with a needle that was too big or the sewing machine speed was so fast that the needle heated up and melted the fabric as it sewed. We finally stopped the seam leaks with liberal applications of Rain-X water repellant. In all our six years of posting this webpage we have given an unfavorable review of work paid for to only one other vendor. We would not do business with Rick again.
Active Light at anchor with her new full deck sun awing up.	Underneath, it is like having a whole new room to lounge about in.

Nancy's birthday dinner at The Haven restaurant near the marina. Friends are Dan, Marian & Dana from Windwalker III, Andrea & Terry from Argonauta, Neil, Dorothy from Purr, and John from Sloop John B.

After fifteen years of pursuit, Dorothy finally let Peter catch her. All the cruisers staged an after-marriage ceremony for them. They are both lovely and remarkable people who were very nice to us.

Hassan, an energetic man who works as an independent day laborer in the marina. He is putting a son through medical school in Bangkok.

Friends in the marina, our neighbor Tony is a writer from Japan. Kuhn Dhao and Kuhn Pui work aboard two of the larger yachts.

During all this time, I continued to exercise almost daily with floor exercises on the finger pier alongside our boat each morning. These included pushups, situps, stretches, leg lifts followed by all the karate exercises and kata I could remember, plus a rigorous routine of leg kicks. These started out quite simple, as I was still pretty weak for the heart surgery, but soon progressed to a normally challenging level. I began to feel stronger and more and more normal. After about four or five month's recovery, I could get a full days work out of the old body again. As we finished the deck work, we rested a week, then booked a week's time at a local commercial boatyard in downtown Phuket. We decided not to go to the more "yachtie" lift out facility known as Boat Lagoon for reasons of price, tide, and availability of products.

Approaching Rattanachai boatyard, in downtown Phuket, on a high tide.

Rattanachai is a full out commercial boatyard.

Rattanachai Boatyard has no lift out (Travel Lift) facility, but instead a marine railway which can handle much heavier commercial vessels. We were a bit worried about being handled roughly, but as we eased into the haulout bay, four line handlers snaked heavy lines over to us and steadied us in the middle of the slip as two divers with "hookah" hoses went down into awfully foul water to set up the supports on the railcar that was sliding down under our keel. The result was the gentlest haulout we have ever had. We did not even realize when we were free of the water.

One doesn't often see people caulking wooden boats these days.

As we came out, a Thai fishing boat was hauled right behind us.

Cables were swapped on our rail car, with Active Light and us still aboard, and we were moved forward about 100 meters, the bottom was pressure washed, and then shunted off sideways to our temporary home. Ladders, water hoses, and electrical cables (220v) were provided immediately. Unfortunately for us, an old metal boat owned by a German couple was placed alongside us next day, so we had to endure his grinding noise and iron grit for several days until he cut his entire rusted transom out and was hauled off to the sandblasting bay. Little rusty mementos of his visit remain with us even now. To be honest, he was at least apologetic about the mess he made.

Active Light on her railcar before pressure washing.

The happy couple didn't realize how much work lay ahead!

We began work next morning by scraping all the old bottom paint off by hand, then lightly sanding the surface down to, not through, the five coats of barrier paint we had applied in New Zealand two years earlier. This process took about four days of hard, hot labor. The barrier coat still looked good with almost no new tiny blisters. Nancy's assignments were to strip the entire rudder and propeller units (very delicate and important work) and repair the numerous small nicks in the bow, which our large and sharp 66 lb. Spade anchor had gouged into the gel coat topsides.

Neil scrapes and sands the bottom.

Nancy repairs the anchor gouges.

I just love boatyards. I love to be in a boatyard working on my own boat. I think true happiness is just living aboard your own boat in a good boatyard, getting to see your boat's bottom every day, make improvements, seeing all the other boats, talking with other boat owners about their boats while the whole design is exposed to view. Boatyards are great! This boatyard was like none I had ever been in before. There was a predominance of commercial fishing boats from Southeast Asia and so many of the yachts were interesting designs from foreign countries.

It was a big, dirty, commercial shipyard.

We saw designs we had never seen. How can these things be seaworthy?

As our own bottom work progressed, and as our neighbor cut away more and more of his hull, we sprouted more and more protective tarps, shielding us from metal grinding bits and the fierce sun. This boatyard had a tradition of a ten o'clock morning "noodle soup break". The work whistle would blow and everyone, yard day laborers and boat owners alike, would line up for a styrofoam bowl full of hot, spicy noodles, for free. Hey, a whole 15 cents benefit, eh?!. Actually, it was a somewhat refreshing tradition and we looked forward to it each day. The boatyard staff was quite helpful and were especially good at obtaining parts and supplies for us. If we could explain what we wanted, if they did not have it, they would send a fellow out on a motorbike and one hour later the item would be in our hands. This saved us a lot of time hunting down parts. We have grown to realize that almost everything is available in Thailand, but you have to hunt for it. There is no single repository for marine supplies.

Active Light is hidden in there amongst all those tarps!

The first two coats of bottom paint are copper red.

One of the nice things about a haulout at Rattanachai was the number of good local eateries nearby. By walking only about half a kilometer each evening after showers, we were in the midst of a local street market with the best little Thai restaurant on the corner opposite a Seven Eleven store. Beautiful plates of seafood stir fry could be had for only a couple of dollars. The cook, Kuhn Jaine, treated us very well.

The street and night market. We always felt safe.

We thought Kuhn Jaine was one of the best cooks in Phuket!

Back in the boatyard, our work was wrapping up. We had been there maybe nine days and were quite happy with the work we had done and the condition of Active Light's bottom. I am so happy we put in all that protective effort in New Zealand! The yard workers moved the balancing struts on our cradle so we could paint beneath them and we even paid the extra fifty dollar fee to have the boat lifted and the keel support blocks moved so we could scrape, sand, and repaint those places on the bottom of the keel too. Our final coat, the third ablative coat, was black and laced with a good dose of TBT poison to prevent marine growth. We shall see how it works. I don't remember exactly, but our final bill was something like US$250, but that included some of our bottom paint and supplies. We used the same local ablative product the commercial fishing boats all use, made by Jotun.

Yard workmen moving our side braces.

Active Light ready for relaunch.

Our work is done!

You can see why the narrow hull goes to windward well in choppy seas.

There is a Buddhist tradition of firecrackers and an offering of flowers to Buddha accompanying the launch of a vessel. For only a five dollar fee, we purchased (from the boatyard) the ritual package of firecrackers on a red string. We opted for the "500 Bang" unit, hung it from the bowsprit and had one of the workmen light it just as we hit the water. What a mess of red confetti paper it made, but we all had fun and Active Light is hereby blessed with good luck for all future journeys. We are not being facetious here, we both think Buddhism is one of the world's more attractive, logical and tolerant religions.

Fireworks, flowers, and blessings on relaunch.

The relaunch was as gentle as the haulout. The trick is to get in or out just at high tide, when everyone else wants in and out too. We were an hour late, but with our relatively shallow draft we had no problems getting to deep water again. About eight hours motoring under blue skies and no wind found us back in our slip at Yacht Haven with a clean, new bottom. One would think we could finally rest! But no, Nancy had dreamed up more two trips she had long wanted to take and goodness knows, she deserved a reward for suffering through the multiple hardships of heart surgery, deck planking, and haulout without complaint.

Heading out to open water.

Thai long tail fishing boat passing us on our way back home.

Islands abound in beautiful Phang Nga Bay about 6 miles NE of the marina.

So off we flew to Bangkok to play and shop for a week before catching a flight on to Siem Reap, Cambodia to see the famous temple complex of Angkor Wat there. And within a few days of our return to Phuket, we flew off to Addis Ababa, the capitol of Ethiopia to see Shawna, Joe, and our new grand daughter, Anna. But those two trips are the subjects of our next two web pages. Meanwhile, back in Phuket, we want to say that, . . .

In the past six years we have visited many countries and reserve a special place and fondness in our memories for several of them; our music student friends in La Paz, Mexico, the stunning beauty of landfall at Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas, the spirituality of Easter Island, the beauty, climate, and fine people of South Island, New Zealand, and the amazing outlback of Australia, and let us not forget Tasmania, what a jewel in deep southern waters! But never before have we been so ready to sell the boat and retire up north in the cool low hills amidst the teak and bamboo forests west of Chiang Rai. Thailand has everything, beautiful people who are clean, industrious, courteous, intelligent, and they even like Americans. The food is wonderful to taste and even healthy, if you stay away from the coconut cream curries. The dollar is strong, prices are cheap. We cannot say enough good things about Thailand. We became very comfortable here with the people, the language, even with left-side automobile driving.

Marina staff, Nick, Zara, Ohr, Poh, and Pern were always great to us!

Our good friends Heiko and Rose from the huge catamaran Bavaria.

Our last night at the coconut Bar and restaurant with James and Phen.

It is so hard to say goodbye to friends. If we had a home away from home, it had to be Phen's Coconut Bar and Restaurant. When Nancy was visiting back home, Neil ate here every night for almost four months straight. The place looks out over the water about a half kilometer from the marina. Kuhn Phen is the owner and the only cook and dishwasher. She can turn out a wonderful seafood stir-fried rice dish in about ten minutes with shrimp, squid, fish bits, and whatever in it at any level of spiciness you want. She was kind to us on so many occasions and we love her dearly. At Phen's the lights were always low, the music always good, there was no blaring television, and it was always peaceful. We also put on some very memorable guitar/trombone performances there with other cruisers. What a lot of good memories!

View from the dining area.

Phen in her kitchen.

None of these marina buildings existed when we arrived over a year ago.

Nancy and Neil at the gate to A and B docks.

Saying goodbye to the crew at Laem Prow Travel.

Chang and Mogens of the catamaran Samba.

It took about six months for Kuhn Chang to warm up to us. She is a young Thai women from the Issan agricultural region of NE Thailand and the partner of our friend Mogens aboard the modern catamaran Samba. She is the funniest little lady, very clean in her habits of eating and hygiene, does not smoke, drink, nor eat meat. She would spend part of every day out foraging in the nearby forests for wild herbs and plants and she could sit for hours catching the tiniest little fish to cook, sometimes in the pouring rain. She is very quiet-spoken and takes good care of Mogens, sometimes " getting after" him if he misbehaves. She has the single peculiarity of wandering around in either a red or black brassier, day and night with knee-length shorts or a sarong. We regret we do not have a photo of her in her red brassier, but she was a lovely sight to behold!
Mogens is a jazz enthusiast and we got to know him through that mutual interest, but Chang would never speak to us for the longest time. "She is really shy!", Mogens would explain. Gradually she began to stop by Active Light and talk to us and tell us the funniest stories about her life in Bangkok and her experiences sailing with Mogens from Spain to Thailand. Her memories are all colored by what there was to eat in each country and how clean things were (or were not) in Italy, India, or Spain.
Several months before we left, Mogens bought her a little fuzz ball of a dog, some pedigreed yippy little thing. It brought such enormous happiness to her, you had to like the dog too.

Chang in the black brassier with little Tikki.

Having said our goodbyes, we reluctantly left our slip late one evening and moved out to anchor for the night about five miles east of the marina. We were in company again with our dear friends, Dan, Marian, and their daughter, Dana, aboard Windwalker III. Dan was having trouble with his integrated shipboard GPS/Radar/Depthfinder unit and had rigged a temporary transducer on the end of an oar which he fastened outboard of the starboard stern. Dan is one of those multi-talented persons who can fix anything in a pinch. He possesses "talent in the abstract", as Joseph Conrad so describes the principal character in Lord Jim. The ability to fix anything, anywhere, with whatever bits and pieces lie ready at hand is without a doubt the single most necessary trait a long distance cruising sailor must have. Without it, he/she won't get far, no matter how well prepared or expensive the vessel may be. This being said, we had a great deal of fun teasing Dan about operating a fifty-foot, $200,000 yacht with the fathometer taped to the end of an oar jury-rigged athwartships.

Dan's jury-rigged depthfinder showing, Capt. Marian at the helm of WWIII

. . . while Chief Cook and Engineer Dan raises the anchor.

Next morning both boats weighed anchor and moved on southwards toward Langkawi, Malaysia, a duty free port where provisioning is good. The Corleys pushed on through the night, but we opted to stop off at the tourist hot spot, Phi Phi Island, which was so devastated in last year's tsunami. So many people, tourists and locals alike, lost their lives here in that disaster. We did not go ashore, anchoring up in the shadow of steep limestone cliffs for a good night's sleep before heading out next morning for Langkawi.

A lighted Thai fishing boat anchored in 30m about 40km offshore.

Approaching Phi Phi Island.

View north up into Ton Sai Bay on Thailand's Phi Phi Island.

A Malaysian training ship in Bass Harbour, Langkawi, Malaysia.

We arrived in Bass Harbour, Langkawi next morning to find the Corley's waiting, having reserved a slip for us at the Royal Langkawi Yacht Club, where we spent ten days shopping, visiting, and doing last minute voyage preparation jobs before setting out across the wide Indian Ocean for Cochin, India and beyond. And that, too, is the subject of yet another webpage.

Neil and Nancy
s/v Active Light
Langkawi, Malaysia