We got up early to collect our car from Avis at the airport and then went down to Ao Chalong to clear customs, immigration and the harbourmaster. It was very straight forward although the number of different forms seemed to be endless. Once again, we wondered what on earth, they do with them. We said goodbye to David and Peter off ‘Moonshadow’ because they were taking the boat back to Langkawi to leave it there for a year before continuing their voyage. We also said goodbye to Jaap off ‘Peter Pan’ because he announced that he was leaving the rally. Nice man that he is, when we told him we would miss him, he reversed the compliment.
We bumped into David and Valerie off ‘Kanaloha’, who we last saw in Mooloolaba. It turned out that they lived here, and they invited us for drinks in their beautiful house and to join them and some friends at a beach restaurant on Sunday. We commissioned a new cockpit table to be built and fitted by the joiners who had made a similar table for ‘Larooba’. It was quite a complicated design, and we were happy to have it delivered unvarnished, because the owner of the firm took all of his staff for a holiday over Christmas, and otherwise it would not be ready until after we needed to leave.
Tom was due to fly out from London, but Heathrow had been closed due to heavy snow. He eventually arrived four days late, having booked a single fare ticket with Scandinavian out of Birmingham to pick up a connection in Copenhagen. It turned out that Heathrow was no more able to deal with a snowfall than when I was working. They had only one runway operational, and many stands unavailable due to snow clearance, after two days! This meant that he missed his connection at Birmingham for Copenhagen, which in turn missed the connection there. Happily, SAS were on the ball and had rebooked him on a flight out of Zurich.
Meanwhile after a welcome party, Tony from the blue water Rally held a briefing for the next leg to Sri Lanka and opened the discussion about the passage beyond. Using the example of previous rallies, we were to cross the Indian Ocean to Salalah, in groups of four boats. Essentially, we were to keep in sight of one another and in the event of being attacked by pirates, we were to close up and make quote ‘a hard target’. Now how four fibreglass boats make a hard target was a puzzle that was compounded by his description of the historical problem of piracy. It would appear that mother ships would depart in the monsoon with a number of high-speed ribs on board and having identified a target the pirates would leave the mothership and attack. Heretofore, the mother ships had limited range from the Somalian coast. However, in recent times, the pirates had attacked and acquired some long-distance Chinese fishing boats which they were now using as mother ships. This meant that the radius of action of the pirates extended more or less right across the Indian Ocean. With this in mind, Sarah and I started wondering if the plan to route up to the Gulf of Aden was something that we really wanted to do given the real risk of piracy. This concern would lead us to do our own research of the situation much later.
I had been finding it uncomfortable to walk because my left calf had become quite swollen. In the first instance I thought it was due to an infection from a graze, however as it did not get better with antibiotics, David and Valerie suggested that I went to the Bangkok Hospital which David described as like visiting a five-star hotel.
He and Valerie had described to us an accident that occurred to David whilst he was lighting their barbecue. He had poured some alcohol onto the charcoal and put the open bottle down whilst he ignited it. Tragically, in doing so the bottle of alcohol ignited and the consequent explosion set him alight. He was fortunate in that Valerie was there and rolled him in a rug to extinguish the flames, but he was very severely burned. He spent the next six months in the Bangkok Hospital where he was fortunate to have such good care that unless you looked very carefully you would not be able to see the scars of the multiple skin grafts that he had had.
So, it was with some trepidation that I did visit this five-star hotel and can only say that the care that I had was brilliant. I was met in the lobby first by nurses who took my details and then I was immediately seen by the doctor on call. He initially thought that it was probably deep vein thrombosis, and I was promptly sent to the ultra-scan department where it was determined that happily the diagnosis was wrong and that I had a baker’s cyst. This is where the sack around a joint leaks fluid, but which usually clears up of its own accord. This was all done whilst Sarah and Tom were having lunch down in Ao Chalong. Amazingly, the charge for this care came to the US$200!
We took a trip up to the Big Buddha which was still in the process of being built. We signed a tile with our names which will be stuck on the border of the building. This meant that we will be ever a part of Phuket. A new boat ‘Saildance’ had joined the rally here which was a lovely Oyster 62 owned by Virginia who was American and Peter who was English, who were a lovely couple. They had a crew who had gone home for Christmas and so they were stuck in the marina because they did not like sailing without a crew. They invited us for a drink, and we had a long discussion about the shortcomings of the rally. They described how they were impounded in Indonesia and spent six days in jail lying on a concrete floor! This was because they had been boarded and did not have the necessary clearances. It was likely that they would have still been there without the intervention of the American Embassy to arrange for their release. The Embassy had been alerted by their son. This story confirmed our concerns about our status ex- Kumai.
Sarah managed to find a Buddha to take home after some discussion about its size! We stopped up at the Villa Market, supermarket in Ao Chalong and went back to await the arrival of the teak cockpit table, which unfortunately was too large and was taken away and returned on Christmas eve. It was beautifully made, and fitted perfectly, although the cupholder was too small. They took it away along with one of our cups and undertook to leave the modified version in the marina office for our return. This was because on Christmas morning we left the marina to anchor off Ko Hong which is just south of the James Bond Island. It was a beautiful anchorage surrounded by amazing limestone pinnacles. Once we had settled some local fisherman came alongside selling prawns. We bought a kilo for 200 Baht, two beers and a coke and now had our starter for our Christmas lunch. This was a rib of beef roasted on the barbecue and washed down with a bottle of champagne. Tom had arrived like Father Christmas with all sorts of presents and spares for the boat, so it was a lovely Christmas together. We pottered from island to island and finally returned to Phi Phi Don before setting off back to Phuket. We suffered an engine overheat again which was a bit of a worry as I thought we had sorted the problem, so the following day I took the heat exchanger apart to find that it was full of barnacles! How they got in there is anyone's guess especially given the temperature of the water, but once I had cleaned them out, the engine returned to running at its normal temperature.
We welcomed 2011 by lighting a lantern and sending it skywards along with thousands of others and watched the fireworks lighting up the night sky at midnight from our boat. Sadly, it was now time for Tom to go home and it was it was with a heavy heart that we delivered him to the airport to see him leave on 2nd January. At least his flight home was less of an epic than his flight out, as he went direct! We were now one of the last boats left in Phuket and having bunkered 500litres of fuel we finally departed two days later with our destination Galle, in Sri Lanka. This would be something that we were later to deeply regret.