Happy Holidays from Thailand

Rafting down the impromptu lazy river

Christmas Eve marked the start of the seventh year that we have lived aboard Perry. It is also the fourth Christmas we have shared with our friends on Field Trip.

Digging a channel from the sluice to the ocean

For the kids, this Christmas has been spent mostly at the beach. Lately we haven't been around many great beaches, so it's nice to get back to what feels like our cruising roots.

We have also been eating. The Old Phuket Town night market featured marvelous sights and flavors. We tried many different foods we hadn't had before and enjoyed all of them. Only about half of the food we ate featured pork, including what turned out to be a big bag of crispy streaky bacon. Spending so much time in Indonesia and Malaysia has meant that pork is only available from limited areas where there are a lot of Chinese and not a lot of devout Muslims.

Best meat-on-a stick since Cartagena

We had Eggs Benedict with Canadian bacon for Christmas breakfast and pork tenderloin for Christmas dinner. Are you sensing a theme here?

Speaking of bingeing after a long period of going without, we spent the entire day (twelve hours) at the mall on Boxing Day. We watched two movies (Aquaman and Bumblebee), both of which we enjoyed. As an interesting side note, the audience is asked to stand before the start of a movie while the King's Song is played and scenes from the King's life are shown on screen. Other than the movies, one book (for Mark, of course), and food, we managed to escape without buying anything. It is a beautiful and huge mall but we got our fill of consumerism and air-conditioning for awhile (we were freezing by the time we left). As it turns out, our time may have been well-spent on shore because when we got back to the boat that evening, the boat was rocking all over the place from the big waves, wind and current.

We are continuing to check boat projects off the list, but the ones that are 'done' keep rearing their annoying little heads. The fridge conversion isn't turning out as well as we thought. Now that a bit of frost has formed on the plates, decreasing their efficiency, the fridge is running 24 hours a day. Matt drilled some holes in the floorboards to allow more ventilation but it still gets pretty warm from running so much. The consensus of the brain trust at Cruiser's Form (there is one user there that runs a legit marine refrigeration business and is worth his weight in gold) is that the condenser is not big enough for our system. We hope the company can fix it, but they are closed for the holidays.

Questions about the shmooshed seal are also awaiting the reopening of the company after the holidays. I started cleaning our bottom, which has grown lots of crud (including tons of hard barnacles, which we haven't seen for a long time), but am staying out of the water today because of the waves. The rockiness of the boat means Matt won't be going up the mast and neither of us really feels like doing much at all on the boat. So off to the beach it is!