Unhealthy Living/Nice Work If You Can Get It

The beast in situ

I swear up and down that I want nothing to do with that awful sailors' habit of talking about boat maintenance.

(Just kill me now!)

Normally, I talk about boat maintenance only with Alisa, after the kids are asleep, in the dead of the night, with the curtains drawn and a "to do" list growing under the pen held in her shapely fingers.

Boat maintenance. It's personal that way.

But, for all my denialism, boat maintenance is a huge part of my life. It's my hobby, it's how I while away my idle hours (ha!). It's how we've managed all the crossings that have gotten our family safely (so far!) from here to there. And, with my sideline career in marine biology that both allows us to keep sailing and keeps me forever slightly time-poor for doing the sailing, boat maintenance is my nagging regret, that part of life that I always feel just a little behind on.

So, with all that as a background, perhaps it's appropriate to, well, celebrate boat maintenance for once. Sure, the individual jobs might still give me varying degrees of heartbreak and heartburn. I'm not really handy, and even nine and a half years in, some of these jobs can be too much effort to be healthy.

But on the other hand...how good a problem is that, to have a life that is dominated by the maintenance of your own magic carpet?

So, here's a photo essay celebrating a boat maintenance victory - getting rid of our clunky old genset in South Africa.

The dang thing was occupying about a third of my maintenance time budget all by itself. We have beefed up our solar and wind power to the point where we didn't really need it. And finally getting up the gumption to rip the thing out gave us two things that every sailor should crave - simplicity and space.

How good is that?

The beast in cartu

And the scabby hole that was left after it was gone

The hole, de-scabbed.
Below: Nature abhors a vacuum, nowhere more than on a traveling sailboat.  We now call the hole the "sail locker"

And my next trick! Replacing the transmission in Curaçao. 95F/35C in the engine room.
Learn a lesson from the Brazilian sailors - only a speedo will do in this situation.