I WOULDN'T GO WITHOUT IT Provisioning for our first passage

There was a TV advertisement a few years ago in which a young woman declared winningly to camera that she wouldn’t go anywhere without her Mum… Mum deodorant that is.

Well, if you are a cruising sailer, your Mum is pretty well the only thing you can go without.

For our first passage, my naïve idea of ‘supplying’ our boat was to make sure we have plenty of water, wine, food and sunburn cream. 

Forget the wine for a moment.  Let’s start with the supply category ‘spares’. This covers spares for every moving and non -moving part of the boat.  There are probably hundreds of ’spares’ required, ranging from ropes and halyards of multiply sizes and grades, anchors, impellers for each pump, extra pumps themselves, various belts and bits for various engines, pipes and hoses for every inlet and outlet valve ever thought off, bits and pieces for generators, radios, tanks and cooking appliances.  Spare for this; spares for that; spares for the other.  Mountains of them.

In addition to cataloguing and storing the spares themselves (storeman position available) there is enough work for a part time librarian to accession and maintain all the literature.  There are mounds of manuals for everything on board.  Mainly they are helpful for establishing the maintenance schedule so that theoretically you don’t need the spares.  But, they come in handy when repairing items on the run (i.e. daily). For someone for whom constructing an Ikea bookshelf was a challenge, the instructions for replacing the impeller in the macerator pump was a doozy.  Practical guides and manuals aside, for the theoretically-minded, there is the extra cache of volumes to ensure that you can not only do it, you can realise why. (Why Does a Diesel Engine Work?  Theory of Rope Splicing for Dummies; The Whys and Wherefores of Waves; Understanding the Electromagnetic Spectrum for Yachties etc )

Then, just as you think you are on top of spares adn maintenance, you have to check that you have a veritable Bunning’s Warehouse of the tools vital to a sailor’s life. I realise now that I had a very Pollyanna view of ‘sailing tools’ before I got on board.  I had a very nice set of navigation instruments, a shackle spanner and some terrific sailing gloves.  Little did I realise that more important to me would be, inter alia, a set of huge bolt cutters (to cut away the mast when it falls?), grease gun, angle grinder, soldering iron, huge numbers of imperial and metric spanners, Allen keys, vices, clamps, jig, fret and hack saws, hammers and mallets, sewing equipment, vacuum pumps, screw drivers (various), compressors (four?) and generators. I had optimistically thought that the presence of a number of hairdryers on board was a sign of the elegant life, until I realised that they are actually used to heat flexible piping before deploying onto their fittings.

In addition to standard tools that anyone would recognise, there are a range of bent, twisted, welded, cut and generally surreal implements that have been customised by the indomitable David Casson to suit this particular yacht and its unique nooks and crannies.  The engine mountings awkward to access?  Here is our customised spanner handle that makes it easy.  Stern gland in a devilishly unreachable place to check?  Here is a fabulous customised spanner that you can use with your eyes closed?  Head blocked up? Here is a fully customised flexible set of micro tongs with a remote spring control that can get tiny bits of loo paper from inside the pipe without disassembly.

But wait, there is more. There are solvents, cleaners, polishes, bleaches, glues, detergents, paints, greases, oils, conditioners, buffers, tapes and a myriad of other consumable gunk needed to clean, etch, prime, degrease, polish, seal  or otherwise finish the job. Plus the disposable gloves, overalls and masks for the operator. In my youth I used to campaign against the nuclear subs that berthed in our bay, fearing that they might sink and cause an environmental mess.  Your average small sailing vessel might not have nuclear power (at least I haven’t found any on our yacht yet) but it has enough chemicals on board to rival a Bopal factory. 

And here was me thinking that tee tree oil, eucalyptus oil, vinegar and vanilla were all we needed. 

Then of course, because of all the gunk, all the tools, all the sparks, flames, moving parts, and because boats move around and can sink and people can get ill or injured, there are  the safety and environment procedures to be learned, safety and environmental regulations to be complied with, and safety equipment to be checked and stored.   Our 44-foot sailing boat is chock-a-block with alarms, safety devices, mandatory licences, registrations and compliance certificates.  There is a pile of safety equipment you literally cannot jump over: life raft, PFDs, flairs, radios, radar, depth sounder, EPIRBs, hand-held radios, GPS, danbouy, life rings, safety harnesses, fire blankets, fire extinguishers, first aid kits. There are environmental protection procedures for dealing with hazardous waste including holding tanks for bio waste. 

Our mentor in these matters (my favourite person David) said that he nearly had a safety-induced accident when there was a fire in the engine hold.  A piece of paper had blow onto a hot pipe and ignited. He  opened the engine hold,  gently blew out the flame, stepped back and nearly broke his leg on the mound of fire extinguishes and fire blankets that his partner had instantly deployed behind him, as per approved procedures.

So, back to supplying the vessel for our first trip:  I think we forgot the wine.