Breakages aboard yachts are a simple fact of life and never welcome. When you are miles away from the nearest chandlery, however, you are forced to develop new skills to get by
The harsh reality of sailing full-time is that things inevitably break. Whether your boat is old or new, whether you’ve recently made all sorts of expensive upgrades or been sailing on a shoestring budget for years – it makes no difference. Boats are just so complex and have such a huge variety of fittings and components that, over the years, one by one and in no particular order, elements will either suddenly fail or slowly fall apart. So much so that every serious bluewater cruising boat has practically every cupboard and locker full of spare and replacement bits and bobs. Not to mention all the old ones that you never throw out anyway, just in case.
But spares and extras are very much connected to being in lands of plenty – where the chandleries are abundant, easy to access and well-stocked. It also hints at always having the available funds to fork out for the essential engine water pump or new halyard or tin of non-skid deck paint.
For those of us who venture further than most, who do more than simply go offshore, who cross oceans, choose cruising grounds where there is no pilot book, or find anchorages using satellite, there is a whole other level to provisioning and carrying everything you might need in case of equipment failure or breakage. And, by far the best tool in this particular toolbox, is ingenuity.
Yes, you can order a replacement part, but it may take several weeks or a few hundred miles more sailing before you are able to get somewhere to pick it up. So most long-term sailors hone their MacGyver skills, learning and developing inventive ways of mending what they can, with whatever they have to hand.
The small plastic intake elbow pipe at the back of one of our marine toilets on board cracked. A new £20 part sent from Germany would be around £60 including the shipping out to Asia. But with care, the right resin and a nifty fix, the old one can be made to work fine for years, until we can get a visitor to bring one out to us. We had to cut away patches of historic water damage to some of the cabinetry in our saloon, as the peeling veneer looked rather ugly. In some of these areas we were able to install thin marine plywood, nicely varnished, to restore the woodwork. In other places we simply removed the wood altogether and used white paint, keeping the boat looking well-maintained and cared for. Up on deck we had a strand of one of our lifelines
