PHUKET: Royal Thai Navy engineers repaired a motor on a stranded refugee boat carrying about 450 men, women and children and let them sail off towards the horizon about 1.40am today.

The people wanted to go to Malaysia, a Navy spokesperson said, adding: ''We made sure they had food and water and medicine for emergencies.''

Releasing the vessel means the ring-a-rosy game on the high seas of denying a landing to boats containing thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees will continue as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia scramble for solutions that do not involve landings in their countries.

The boat had been off the coast of Thailand, near the sea border with Malaysia, when fishermen found it yesterday.

International media, including the BBC and the New York Times and at least one news agency, beat the Royal Thai Navy to the scene to record plaintive cries for help from those on board.

Overnight, a much smaller vessel achieved what all those on the fleet of as many as seven purpose-modified trafficking vessels want: a safe landing on land.

A rickety boat carrying 106 men, women and children landed on Surin island, a popular diving destination north of Phuket.

Because the vessel had reached Thai shores, the Royal Thai Navy followed protocol and carried the occupants to the mainland.

The passengers off the vessel were being questioned today by Immigration officials at a detention centre in Phang Nga province, north of Phuket.

Discussion at the highest levels in Thailand - and probably in Malaysia and Indonesia - now centres on what to do next.

However, the one solutions that would fix the problem - demanding that Burma stop pushing Rohingya into the sea and grant them citizenship instead - appears to be an answer its neighboring Asean members find too alarming.

Instead, Thailand is proposing an international gathering of 15 nations for May 29 with the ''Burma Solution'' apparently not even on the table for consideration.

What's being contemplated instead is the detention of Rohingya, Bangladeshis and other unwanted arrivals on two islands off the coast of Ranong, another province north of Phuket.

This was a measure first discussed in 2008.

However, the proposal was put to one side back then in favor of the notorious ''pushbacks'' in which the Thai military towed vessels out to sea and released them - without engines or any means of propulsion.

Survivors landed in Indonesia and the Indian outpost of the Andaman and Nicobar islands to blow the whistle just as Phuketwan journalists revealed the location of the secret island where the boatpeople were being held in Thailand.

With the nightmare of needless deaths at sea revealed, the Thai Government switched to the ''help on'' policy.

Under Plan B, Navy vessels intercepted boatpeople in international waters, giving them food, water and aid, and urging them on to other destinations.

Over the six years since the ''help on'' policy became standard, traffickers in Thailand turned it into a ''help yourself'' policy.

The tacit hands-off approach by successive Thai governments allowed traffickers to buy and sell boatpeople at will, with virtually no enforcement.

Drug dealers turned to human trafficking instead because it was far for lucrative and extremely safe - for the traffickers.

Little wonder that the brutality, the deaths, the rapes and the torture, increased because of the impunity from apprehension and punishment.

The number of victims, meanwhile, increased as trawlers were modified specifically to carry people and touts scoured Bangladesh especially for extra passengers to fill the holds, inspiring victims with tales of better pay in other countries.

Discovery this month of the bodies in the jungle camps of southern Thailand and along the Andaman coast finally ended the ''help yourself'' era.

The reaction, however, remains incomplete. What follows the ''help yourself'' policy? Thailand now still has a massive problem and its leaders are ignoring the obvious answer.