Baling Wire and Chewing Gum

I received a comment in an email from one of my readers:

This boat sounds worse than my Dad's old '41 Ford that he held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. But you people are paying big bucks for these repairs and are going across the Pacific Ocean in this thing. My sister and I only drove the old Ford around town! I guess you're feeling confident about the condition the boat will be in at departure?

My readers that have a boat will probably recognize that this comment came from someone who doesn't.  :)  Honestly, if this was a power boat I probably WOULD be nervous but since it is a sailboat and we have had ZERO problems with anything to do with the sailing aspect of the boat (well, other than user error) I know we can get to Hawaii.  Not having a refrigerator is a bit of a bummer but certainly not insurmountable.  We already have a plan for that and since we still have a working holding plate in the reefer box it actually stays quite cold if you put something in there (i.e. dry ice) to freeze the holding plate's eutectic solution.  I anticipate having no problem keeping the box cold into the second half of the race.  Then we start eating spaghetti with canned meat sauce, snickers bars and stuff like that.  If you have seen "Morning Light" (the Disney movie of the young people who did a Trans Pac race a few years back), we will be eating MUCH better than they did!

The managing partner made a significant discovery through this latest boat yard experience.  He was continually being told that he was better off repairing what we had instead of replacing the troublesome items because the equipment we have on board is "the best."  For example, we have "the best" refrigeration system, "the best" electric heads and "the best" autopilot.  The reefer is now kaput, the electric heads are currently working after MANY visits from "the head guy" and many parts being replaced and the autopilot has NEVER actually worked despite numerous expensive parts being replaced. So the discovery Scott has made is that when the shop tells you the thing you have is "the best" and you should repair instead of replace you MIGHT want to consider ripping the damn thing out immediately!!  What it is actually "the best" at is lining the repair man's pockets and not actually WORKING!!!  Or maybe we just have bad luck!  All the items that ARE new (where Scott went ahead and ripped out the old and put in new) work just fine.  But it IS a boat so it is only a matter of time!  Hopefully a LONG time though.  We are running short on baling wire and bubble gum!

This weekend we slummed it on a friend's power boat on our yacht club's cruise out.  Here we are setting up the lounge chairs on the top deck.  It was such a hassle to go up and down the steep ladder to get more beer but we managed somehow.  Before long we had four plastic chairs up there along with the steamer chairs as we had so many visitors.  One person jumped in to swim back to his boat.  :)  Tons of fun.