Setting Sail
From the editor
Someday I’ll write a book called something like Twenty Things About Boat Ownership That Really Make Me Mad. It’ll be a litany of maintenance woes interspersed with fulminations about optimistic weather forecasts and pessimistic launch dates. Deck leaks will figure strongly, as will outboard motors and bilge pumps. Holding tanks will get at least a chapter of their own. So will through-hulls.
What’s really been bugging me lately, though, is that the new project boat has been transformed into a Twilight Zone episode. Who knew, as the question now goes, that a boat could be so complicated? With the jump from 34ft to 39ft comes a new level of complexity coupled with an increase in volume that, during this lengthy refit, has been as much of a curse as a blessing.
Not that I don’t like the extra room; it’s a pleasure to be able to get to the back of the engine without inserting myself headfirst and upside down into the cockpit locker and thence under the cockpit. I’m certain that older boats especially were built by aliens weighing no more than 80lb and blessed with extra-long, triple-jointed arms and suction cups on their fingertips; how else could they spin a nut onto a bolt that is impossible for me to reach without removing half the interior?
No, it’s the onboard poltergeist that’s getting to me. You know the one. It waits till you’re sunk in concentration on the task of the moment and then it has its malicious way with you. It opens the drawer you’re working under so you scalp
yourself when you straighten up. It waits till your hand is on the lip of the cockpit locker and then nudges the lid shut. Not satisfied with the volume of your cursing, it takes the top off the varnish can and then places it right behind your foot. When you’ve done cleaning that mess up, it steals the small but expensive part you’re just about to install and hides it where you’ll find it three days later, just after its replacement has arrived.
It may take a break for a day or two, just long enough to get you to drop your guard, and then it’ll be back in action looking for more mischief. This is no time to get the bosun’s chair out, or to embark on a blackwater plumbing project.
It’s all enough to drive you to drink, although as I’ve found, having a G&T slide off the cockpit table and into your lap when the poltergeist rocks the boat is no way to end a trying day. s