It’s Thursday evening now, internet is poor and writing this blog is affecting our reception of BBC 6 music live, via the net. Life can be so tough at times. We are at anchor on the NE end of Ko Phanak. We left the Marina on Tuesday morning about 11 am. No problem leaving the pontoon, until I tried to motor out and the vibration was a bit much and the speed very slow. I concluded the prop was fouled worse than I thought. We motored slowly around to the fuel dock but the tide was quite low, the fuel dock is right in the shallow area. I would have to approach it from the wrong angle and do the boaty equivalent of a handbrake turn in order to go alongside without going aground, as we approached and the depth dropped to 3 metres with another 50 metres to go, I bottled out. I wasn’t sure how the boat would handle with such a fouled prop, anyway, we have half a tank of fuel, should be good enough for a while.
So off to Ko Phanak, an island with lots of Hongs (big caves with no roof and beaches sort of thing, hong means ‘room’ in Thai), Kathy is going to write more about these, and as we haven’t seen one yet, I wont say anything, but they’re supposed to be amazing.
We stopped for lunch just a little way out from the marina and I dived on the prop, I have a garden hoe like tool which I scrape the prop with, it takes a bit of time as the prop is just a little too far down for me and my snorkel, I’m practicing holding my breath. Once that was done, and we had a little lunch we pushed on. Not much wind so we continued to motor.
You can see our planned route, the black line, and our corner cutting course in yellow. Only a short journey, but it took us into a whole new landscape, we anchored for two nights at the bottom of the island and today we moved to the top on the other side. We haven’t launched the dinghy yet, mostly relaxing and enjoying not being tied to a dock and that routine. This is my favourite part I think, no need to do anything, and nobody is going to bother you, so you really can just swing on the anchor, day in , day out, watching the sun rise and set, followed by a big, nearly full moon right now. A fisherman motored past today in his longtail and waved a fish at me, I shouted no thanks back, as he caught me off guard, and my instinctive british ways have me saying no before I thought it through. Kathy added insult to injury by saying I should have bought it as it was the only way I would get one! So when a few hours later another fisherman waved a fish at me, I called him over and a deal was struck. £6 for a large fish like thing that will make 2 meals, no idea what it was, it looked rather angry, but tasted great.
That’s the moon, special effect caused by Kathy keeping a spare stock of greasy cream on her iPhone lens!
After saying all of that, I have been getting up early and working till late writing software. I took on some data processing and analysis work a few days ago, I’m talking (well my software is) to 3 big wind turbines in Eastern Europe and trying to predict how much electricity they will generate from an amalgam of various weather forecasts available. So basically I’m pulling in 4 different weather forecasts every 2 hours, and predicting the generation by the turbines and providing that data to the Electric grid so they can forward plan. I’m then pulling back the actual power generated and comparing that with the various forecasts to see the errors and trying to work out how to get the forecasts more accurate.
I did ask myself why on earth am I doing work, the answer is mostly that it pays quite well, I did a little bit of work over the Christmas period and so far I have earned enough to pay for the new sails, and all my marina fees for the last 3 months, Also I’m keen to see how practical it is to sit at anchor on a boat in Phang Nga bay, writing software and working with remote data servers and turbines. Quite practical it would appear, assuming you don’t mind paying high 4g data fees, (well £1/day, mustn’t grumble). So it might mean I have to spend a few months extra in this paradise before we move on, as I said, it’s a tough life. 😉
Entertainment has revolved around twitter of late, I’m captivated by POTUS and his tweets, each one, seemingly crazier than the last, being followed by a dissection from the NY Times and others, #FASCINATING, 🙂
Tomorrow we are up early and will launch the dinghy, and explore some hongs before the tour boats arrive and disgorge their scores of day trippers with their kayaks. Later I want to learn how to do some OPC data transfers, any of you techies out there good at this?
Paul Collister