Eventually we woke to sunshine after days of overcast, rainy, windy weather, so we took the opportunity to dinghy ashore for our respective walks; Elaine’s stroll around the gardens and Roy’s exercise walk. It was a rather long one for Roy, though, as he decided to walk to the nearest grocery store, some 3.5Km away, to top up our fresh fruit and vegetables. This allowed Elaine to enjoy a coffee and continue her passage planning efforts in the comfort of the air-conditioning of the Port of Call restaurant, primarily organising the volumes of information into activities to be completed before departure, activities to be undertaken while underway, anchorage details, provisioning options, refuelling option, connectivity options, specific formalities required and associated costs, as well as agent contact details, by country, all of which continued once we were back onboard and continued for most of today as well.

Roy also continued with his efforts of importing tracks and routes of yachts that have gone before us and successfully completed that activity today.

Since we’ve only scratched the surface of what still needs to be done, though, it’ll be a good few weeks before we can say we’ve completed this planning exercise, but it’s certainly keeping us occupied and busy. Probably a good thing, given that the miserable weather returned today, not to mention the fact that we woke to the news of more restrictions on Phuket Island. In essence, we may as well be back in lockdown as there’s precious little to do for fun at the moment regardless of the weather conditions.

The 32 new local infections, excluding 2 more Phuket Sandbox arrivals testing positive for COVID-19 and 3 new patients brought back to the island for treatment under the “Bring Phuket People Home” campaign, brought the total number of new local infections on the island in the past seven days to 254, with 382 people now under medical care or supervision. This prompted the Phuket officials to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol in all restaurants again and reinstate the ban on all “social activities”, the latter specified as “all people are to refrain from organizing parties, celebrations, and festive events”. However, traditional ceremonies that cannot be postponed, such as funerals, ordinations, marriage and religious or merit-making ceremonies, may be held with permission and must comply with all COVID-19 prevention measures. We also learnt that an entire village a few kilometres to the north of our anchorage was placed under a complete lockdown, with no access in or out.

This order was posted at 10:13pm last night; just 1 hour and 47 minutes before it came into effect. Restrictions are literally changing by the hour now! A tad disconcerting as we have absolutely no idea what we may awaken to next!