Sailing has been likened to standing under a cold shower ripping up £10 notes. It’s an outlook that occasionally has the ring of truth. Tom opted to take economising measures
Like the rest of us, I’m always keeping a weather eye on my boating budget. I never begrudge a penny on sails and I won’t sell my engine short on filters, oil, coolant, belts and the rest. There’s no escape from the annual hit for antifouling, and if the propeller shaft starts wobbling in the cutless bearing, stump up I must. This year I’ve treated myself to one or two new lengths of Dyneema running rigging. That’ll be a joy all summer. It’s the safety equipment that sticks in my throat. I part with hundreds of pounds of the hard-earned and, if fortune favours my efforts, I’ll probably never use the stuff.
Take the liferaft: I’ve had the same one for ages and, every two years, here it is again demanding a service. I’m a hands-on sort of chap so two seasons ago I decided to tackle the job myself. There can’t be much to it, I thought. Because most of my sailing is around the coast these days I’m not particularly interested in the tins of biscuits, the cans of water and everything else that might be in the pack. The important thing to me is that when I throw it over the side and pull the ripcord it’s going to inflate, the canopy will open and the tubes haven’t perished from old age. With these priorities in mind, I imagined I could pull it out of its valise, open it up, scrutinise the tubes and check the gas cylinder that blows it up. If this was anything like the ones on my lifejackets, I reasoned, I’d reassure myself by unscrewing it, peering at the numbers stamped in the side to see what its weight should be and replacing it if it fell short. I could then check the various gadgets for firing it to make sure they were in good shape, examine the drogue and the blunt-nosed knife, perhaps change the night-light battery and cram the whole thing back into the bag. I’d save myself two or three hundred pounds for what couldn’t be more than a morning’s work.
How naïve can you get?
It came out of the valise OK, but I soon discovered it was in a hermetically sealed plastic bag. This was not a promising start. Never despair, however. My raft is stowed in a place that, if it ever gets wet, the least of my worries will be that the inner bag has been damaged, so I pressed on and carefully worked my way in. Once I had the beast open on my front lawn, Plan A went smoothly
