Nov 26, 2004 - Happy Thanksgiving
by Al & Beth Liggett

We just finished dinner--leftovers from yesterday's Thanksgiving Day feast: cold sliced turkey, green salad, the 2 remaining pieces of pumpkin pie. I suspect that while we are dredging thru the leftovers, you are just getting things into the oven. Maybe even sitting down to enjoy?

We celebrated with 2 other boating couples. We were talking over the past few Thanksgiving celebrations, where we were, and who we were with. Like last year--when our "intimate" group turned into a cast of thousands! Oh well, there was plenty of food and it was good.

For various reasons, I volunteered to cook the pumpkin pie and the turkey this year. It was a definite challenge! First: find a turkey. The imported ones like Butterball are huge and quite expensive. I did find a locally produced turkey--4.2 kilos. When you convert Baht to Dollars, and Kilos into Pounds, it works out to about $1.70 per pound. So maybe it's a good thing that I can only get a small bird into my oven! My oven looks large enough, but there is not much room between the burner heat distribution plate and the top of the oven--even by removing the rack assembly. We do a force fit with the turkey--Al steps on the breast and breaks the bone and ribs to flatten Mr. Tom into submission for the oven. They cook just the same you know.

Second challenge was the condition of the inside of the boat. At the moment, all our floors are out of the boat and into our room for basic rehab and varnishing. This leaves me standing on top of the fuel tank in the galley, and about 5 inches lower than usual at the counters. Add into this equation the fact that there is no water in the galley. Well, there is water, but you can't use the sink. Our workers are still sanding and fairing the hull; we didn't want cooking discards and dishwater gunking up their fine job.

Then wouldn't you know that they pick THIS ONE DAY to have a full scale power outage. So, my thoughts of cooking in air conditioned ease went right out the window! The fans were working overtime to help dispel the oven heat from the galley. And don't you think it's unique to ferry the supplies and implements for cooking this bird up a ladder into the kitchen? Another challenge getting the HOT stuff back down the ladder without burning or spilling!

We've been watching the progress of a Typhoon in the South China Sea. A very strong Mongolian High kept pushing it South where it would be in warm water and not dissipating. It degraded into a Tropical Storm on Wednesday, but was still due to pass directly over Phuket with 40 to 50 knots of wind. On Thursday...Oh Boy. No floors, no galley sink use, a hot oven in a closed up boat, with tons of wind and plenty of rain? Couldn't we cancel Thanksgiving this year?

In the end it was a non-event. DEFINITELY something to be thankful for! And the turkey came out good, the pie delicious. Great friends to share it all with.

Some other things to be thankful for:

The mast has been stepped back on deck! Hooray!! They had to move us a week ago and to do that they took down our tent. It has been too hot, just insufferable on the boat. We did hook up the air con--for me really, as I was trying to do some sewing and it was just miserable below. We are thankful that the weather has been so gorgeous, allowing our workers to move right along with work on the bottom of the boat. But it has also been HOT-HOT-HOT to the nth degree! With the mast up, we are at least be able to put awnings back up and get the direct sun off the deck.

On the down side of things, it seems our bottom won't be ready in time to launch us BEFORE the Boat Show in December. The marina service basically shuts down during the Boat Show, and nobody can move. It finishes the 12th of Dec. and we have a tentative schedule to splash down on the 13th. The other part of this equation is that there is not enough tide to do the thing at any other time either. It's not that we are so deep, it is that this marina does not regularly dredge their channel. Only enough water for us to make the hour-long passage in or out of the marina on the full moon tides or black of moon tides. And December tides are just not very big ones anyway.

When I think about it though, maybe that is really something to be thankful for...the extra weeks have allowed us to re-do the floors, something I despaired of ever seeing done this year. I wanted to do them last year--but there was all that engine work, so not a good idea to have shiny bright floors. Then came all the painting and varnishing; we'll do it "after", we said. And during all the haul out work is surely NOT the time to worry about stepping, however carefully, on newly refurbished floors.

And in the grand scheme of things, we are truly thankful that this mega-haul out is almost over...