So, after a quick breakfast, we weighed anchor and set off into Phang Nga Bay for a fun morning of sailing, accentuated by a baby manta ray leaping out of the water just in front of Paw Paw.
Starting out on a beat, we practiced our tacking with the new, larger headsail, then slowly progressed to a close reach and a beam reach, passing Koh Maithon en route doing 8.2 Kts in 12 Kts of apparent wind; doesn’t get much better than that! We then moved onto a broad reach to practice our jibing, with a run on headsail along, bringing us back to the anchorage around noon, where we found others out enjoying the great sailing conditions too; racing was underway in Chalong Bay.
The exercise was definitely worth it, not only to confirm we hadn’t forgotten how to sail, but our electronic instruments needed a few adjustments after Roy had reset the chartplotter and the autopilot a few days ago. These included our tacking parameters on the autopilot, reestablishing the COG (Course Over Ground) and Heading vectors on the chartplotter and recalibrating the autopilot so it could track again. Also, after watching the videos we took, there’s a few more shackles and blocks that clearly need a bit more lubrication to get rid of all the squeaks!
It was a great morning of sailing and it had been ages since we’d just taken Paw Paw out for some fun in the sun!
Back at anchor, though, as news of the new variant out of South Africa sparked global alarm, a variant that has drawn scrutiny because it has more than 30 mutations of the spike protein, world markets took a tumble, various travel and border restrictions were reintroduced and the realisation of what this could mean to people’s lives moving forward, including our own, didn’t bear thinking about! We decided it was best just to be ostriches and ignore it all for now!
