April 13, 2008-April is the Hot Month
wingssail image-fredrick roswold
Judy
April is the hot month in Thailand; that is the common wisdom.
Cruisers who leave their boats here and fly home for the summer have done so by now. Those who stay here are either at the dock with their air conditioners running or they are sweltering.
We are onboard Wings. We would be sweltering too save the cooling effect of our shade awnings and a little breeze here at anchor which blows through the cabin.
Judy & I came down from Bangkok for a long Songkran weekend to spend some time on the boat and to get out of the city. Four days is enough time to go sailing, or at least get out of the marina, so we provisioned a little on Friday night and moved out to Phang Nga Bay. It is hot. It reminds us of the summer we spent in the Sea of Cortez but there the heat was dry; here the humidity is way up; in some ways worse. But like in the Sea, the water here is warm; going for a swim is like getting into a warm bath; it does not cool us much. Even a cold shower afterwards is not cool; all the water in our tanks is warm. But one of the reasons for coming out here was to find a place were we could clean the bottom of the boat, including the bottom of the keel where we damaged it in February, so we will be swimming and we will be taking hot showers afterwards. That’s life.
It’s not all bad.
Last night the sea-breeze came in and it was very nice sitting in the cockpit with a glass of wine.
We had a front row seat for a show the Gods put on for us. Over Krabi and Ao Nang there were some high electrically charged clouds, not exactly towering thunderstorms but storm clouds never the less, and lightning flashed and distant thunder rumbled most of the evening. The lightning crawled along the tops of the clouds like Jupiter drumming his fingertips, another reminder of the Sea of Cortez where in 1997 running from a cyclone we ducked into a small cove called the Kitchens and watched similar lighting every afternoon. In the Kitchens we watched ominously; last night we didn’t feel threatened. I guess by now we’ve seen enough storms to be able to tell when they are moving away or coming on. We could see the show over Krabi was headed southwest; it was moving away from us.
We put on some new music, The Kills , Midnight Boom, a soft sort of punk rock, if those terms aren’t so mutually exclusive that you can’t imagine such a thing. Punk Rock isn’t usually the kind of music we listen to with a glass wine in the cockpit in a remote anchorage in paradise, but last night it worked. It went well with the lightning storm we were watching.
The thunder matched the beat of the Kills’ music. On the backstay the American flag joined the festivities; in the gentle breeze it flapped from side to side keeping the rhythm of the music. We finished the bottle of wine and for the final act of the lightning show we poured some Thai whiskey.
At midnight the curtain fell, the show was over, we went to bed.
We don’t plan on moving much this weekend; sit here, clean the bottom, do some small repair projects, relax, and go back to Yacht Haven early so we can put the boat away before we fly back to Bangkok on Tuesday night.
Click here for a few more photos.
Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Phuket
JudyApril is the hot month in Thailand; that is the common wisdom.
Cruisers who leave their boats here and fly home for the summer have done so by now. Those who stay here are either at the dock with their air conditioners running or they are sweltering.
We are onboard Wings. We would be sweltering too save the cooling effect of our shade awnings and a little breeze here at anchor which blows through the cabin.
Judy & I came down from Bangkok for a long Songkran weekend to spend some time on the boat and to get out of the city. Four days is enough time to go sailing, or at least get out of the marina, so we provisioned a little on Friday night and moved out to Phang Nga Bay. It is hot. It reminds us of the summer we spent in the Sea of Cortez but there the heat was dry; here the humidity is way up; in some ways worse. But like in the Sea, the water here is warm; going for a swim is like getting into a warm bath; it does not cool us much. Even a cold shower afterwards is not cool; all the water in our tanks is warm. But one of the reasons for coming out here was to find a place were we could clean the bottom of the boat, including the bottom of the keel where we damaged it in February, so we will be swimming and we will be taking hot showers afterwards. That’s life.
It’s not all bad.
Last night the sea-breeze came in and it was very nice sitting in the cockpit with a glass of wine.
We had a front row seat for a show the Gods put on for us. Over Krabi and Ao Nang there were some high electrically charged clouds, not exactly towering thunderstorms but storm clouds never the less, and lightning flashed and distant thunder rumbled most of the evening. The lightning crawled along the tops of the clouds like Jupiter drumming his fingertips, another reminder of the Sea of Cortez where in 1997 running from a cyclone we ducked into a small cove called the Kitchens and watched similar lighting every afternoon. In the Kitchens we watched ominously; last night we didn’t feel threatened. I guess by now we’ve seen enough storms to be able to tell when they are moving away or coming on. We could see the show over Krabi was headed southwest; it was moving away from us.
We put on some new music, The Kills , Midnight Boom, a soft sort of punk rock, if those terms aren’t so mutually exclusive that you can’t imagine such a thing. Punk Rock isn’t usually the kind of music we listen to with a glass wine in the cockpit in a remote anchorage in paradise, but last night it worked. It went well with the lightning storm we were watching.
The thunder matched the beat of the Kills’ music. On the backstay the American flag joined the festivities; in the gentle breeze it flapped from side to side keeping the rhythm of the music. We finished the bottle of wine and for the final act of the lightning show we poured some Thai whiskey.
At midnight the curtain fell, the show was over, we went to bed.
We don’t plan on moving much this weekend; sit here, clean the bottom, do some small repair projects, relax, and go back to Yacht Haven early so we can put the boat away before we fly back to Bangkok on Tuesday night.
Click here for a few more photos.
Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Phuket
Labels: Thailand
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