A lovely week was had sailing around the East coast of Phuket and the West mainland of Thailand sheltered by Phuket.
A very nice cave around Ao Nang was explored. It feels so good to be able to just walk sometimes.
The view from the upper chambers of the cave, made for a bit of an uphill climb. The stone formations in that part of Thailand really are amazing. It’s so great to be able to sail amongst them with so few people. The tourists from land based travel all get bundled up into the same locations like cattle in a meat packing plant and the rest of the places are virtually empty.
But as usual with this trip the fun part has to end 
We set off for quite a long sail in the open ocean. The original plan was to stop at the 2 islands about halfway down the trip but the wind made it such that we would have had to add about 5 hours of sailing to make that anchorage so I got to choose to press on. Ah, forgot to mention this was my first long passage as the captain. First person chosen on the course – lucky me. After leaving immigration in Chalong Thailand where the red line starts we sailed all day and night down to Ko Lipe which is just a bit NW of Langkawi. I did get to hand the boat over to one of the other guys for the leg down to Ko Lipe which was nice as I was absolutely spent. Night sailing in the open ocean was nice although a bit testing with the waves hitting from the sides in a sloppy sea. We anchored in Ko Lipe around 7am after a 22 hour sail. I think everyone slept pretty well at that point.
Getting out was a bit challenging as the channel funneled into a narrow gap between some rocks that required some careful navigation planning, but I’m still here writing about so it couldn’t have been too hard. After that it was just a slog into Langkawi, clear immigration, fix the boat up and clean. Having a well earned 2 days off before the next classroom session begins.
My Road 