Thailand

January 24^th: Got up early – well time to be honest, we are now 8am + risers, so 7am is an early start for us now. Jessie thought it was hilarious that we had to set the alarm for 6am one morning, she is used to us getting up at 4.30 or 5am every morning. Mind you – it is still dark here at 7am! Anyway I had a lot to do before we leave for Thailand today, I wanted to make the most of the marina water and power – water for the washing machine and power for the air conditioning so I could clean the inside of the boat.

We upped anchor at 11:30am and headed out. We had a perfect day, not much wind and calm seas – “Southern Star Weather”!! It is only 25 miles to Koh Lipe, an island in the Butang group so a nice quick hop for us. Steve and Claire from Almacantar are going to join us in a couple of days and we will travel together up to Phuket.

We are travelling at the moment with no cards in our Furuno chart plotter, we sent them off to Australia to be loaded with the charts for Turkey and the Med, and they are now held up in K.L. as they want duty and taxes paid. Currently arguing with Customs as we asked for them to be shipped to us in Langkawi, which is duty free. As far as navigating goes we still have our Coastal Explorer navigation system with C-Map charts on the apple-mac, the iPad with Navionics and Google Earth with Goops. We have decided against paper charts now as they are so expensive and we don’t really use them. We spent many hundreds of dollars on paper charts for NZ and Vanuatu and we hardly used them.

We arrived at Koh Lipe, just after 4pm. Wow, white sandy beach complete with swaying palm trees, nice clean water, and very beautiful location! Dropped the anchor in about 17 metres of water, and very unusually the anchor did not grab! Hmmm, strange, pulled it up and lo and behold!!! We had a Thai long boat propeller, shaft and engine hooked on our anchor!!! Unbelievable!! Our anchor chain was wound around the shaft a couple of times. How this happened we have no idea! So Robbie tied a rope around the anchor and then lowered it while I held off the propeller from damaging our Gel coat. We had a couple on a Kayak hanging around watching the proceedings, which was a bit un-nerving but they offered to help which was nice. We managed to lose the problem once we held on to the anchor with the rope and lowered the chain again, it came off.

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