Boat Units

There is a strange phenomenon that happens to anything that has the word boat attached to it. If you go to Home Depot and buy a normal everyday screw, that screw may cost 8 cents. If you go to a boat parts store and buy the same screw but that screw is going in your boat instead of your house, it will cost $1.29. I'm not sure why having something intended for your boat jacks up the price, but that's the way it goes.

There are multiple acronyms for the word boat. “Bankruptcy On A Trailer”, “Bend Over And Takeit”, or my personal favorite of “Bring On Another Thousand.” Some people say a boat is just a hole in the water you throw money into. Others say you would be better off just setting fire to a pile of money in your backyard because it will cost you less. One of our sailing friends has said, “I need to figure out how to attach a fire hose to my wallet so I can shoot the money out faster.” All of these sayings are sayings because they have some truth to them.

Some good friends of ours have devised a way to lesson the stress of shoveling money into their boat by calling that money “boat units.” Each boat unit equals $1,000. When they go to the boat store and buy some random tid-bits, rather than say “this bag of screws cost us a whopping $500, and there are only 12 screws in this bag!”, they can say, “wow, that only cost us one half of a boat unit. And look, we got 12 screws! What a deal!” For some reason, it takes some of the pain away to call the thrown overboard money boat units.

I've never understood their logic. I say let's call a spade a spade, and if something costs $1,000, let's just say we spent $1,000 on some stupid tid-bit that realistically should have cost about $50 if it wasn't on a boat. Actually, I never understood their logic until now.

Every person that I've known that has taken off to go cruising on their sailboat for an extended period of time has all said the exact same thing in the months leading up to their departure. “We are hemorrhaging money.” Getting a boat ready to tackle the mighty oceans takes lots of money. I'm sorry, I take that back. Getting a boat ready to tackle the mighty oceans takes a whole lot of “boat units.” Yep, boat units actually seems less painful to say.

We have had this boat for almost 10 years now, and in that time, we have been constantly upgrading and preparing it to take us around the world. We have shoveled not only time and energy, but tons of boat units into it as well. It seems that after all of those years of shoveling, we would be able to take a break from both the constant work of maintaining and upgrading a boat and the shoveling of boat units should be getting less too. Nope. That shovel seems to be getting heavier and the maintenance is still never ending.

I'm not at all trying to come across like I am complaining. We chose this lifestyle and we know what we got ourselves into...for the most part. But some of the recent shoveling of boat unit events were definitely never in our plans.

Some quick boat unit math of our unexpected expenses will tell you that our shovel isn't keeping up with the load that is going out. We might need a bigger shovel. A new mast, new rigging, a new liferaft, bottom strip and epoxy coat, satellite communications, etc, etc, etc... And the newest major problem to pop up has no price tag yet.

Brenda has a nasty habit of inspecting things at 3 inches from her nose. If we paint something, she'll have her nose practically touching the surface just so she can see that it's perfect. If she builds us some new canvas cover or shade awning, she'll agonize over the smallest detail, again to make sure it's perfect. I say “give it the 5 foot rule”. If it looks perfect from 5 feet away, it's probably perfect enough.

Well, just a couple of days ago, she was giving our flaking bottom paint a 3 inch from her nose inspection when I told her, “the yard is going to be stripping all of that off. Don't worry about how terrible it looks.”

She then said, “do you see this tiny crack?”

“Nope” (because I was giving it the 5 foot rule and because the yard is going to strip it off anyway and because I was basically ignoring her.)

“Come here and really look at it. I think something is wrong here.”

“Fine.” (I really didn't want to look at something else that might be wrong. But mostly, I thought she was just freaking out about some paint that was going to be stripped off anyway.)

And there it was. A teeny-tiny hairline crack that ran almost completely around the skeg. If you don't know your boat anatomy, the skeg is what holds our rudder and our rudder is what steers the boat. I gave a little tug on the rudder and found that the hairline crack is actually a big crack that is covered up by some flaking bottom paint. That little tug on the rudder showed us that our rudder was just barely hanging on by a thread. As much as I didn't want to see another problem with our little ship, it was the first time I have been grateful that Brenda is slightly neurotic about perfection.

If we were out in the middle of the ocean and the rudder fell off (it actually happens to a higher number of boats than I would like to hear about), then we might have had to spend some time in our life raft. And even though I like shiny new things, which our liferaft is, I hope to never have to use that thing. It's the most expensive piece of gear that we hope never comes out of it's case.

When I talked to the yard foreman about repairing the skeg, his response was, “Sure, we can fix that. It shouldn't be too bad. I would figure just a handful of boat units, give or take a few units.” He actually didn't say “boat units” but it was too depressing for me to write it out in numbers. I'm sticking with boat units.

Since I am a guy who loves numbers, useless information, and stats, I agonize over the amount of boat units that are being shoveled overboard. Brenda just says, “Stop freaking out. It costs what it costs and besides, you are perfectly capable of going back to work at some point if needed.” I think she threw me under the bus with the comment of me going back to work some day because there was no mention of her ever going back.

But the good news is that Episode 2 of our highly acclaimed video series is now up for viewing at good ol' Youtube. And the better part of that news is that it doesn't cost you any boat units to watch it.

Below is the link.

https://youtu.be/l4_omNnEnAQ

Brenda is giving our sails a once over and has just made the first cut to replace some webbing.  There is no turning back now!

It's a small space to work on such a big sail.

New sail slides and webbing courtesy of our new sailmaker (Brenda).  It actually looks a lot better than when the original sailmaker did it the first time!  Nice job Brenda!

It appears that I am taking a nap under the floor boards but I'm actually fixing a plumbing leak...and then I took a nap, but not under the floor because it's a lot less comfortable under there than it looks.