I’m a huge fan of things that work the way they should. A tool or piece of gear that does what it should, with ease and minimal stress is worth its weight in gold. We have a few of those and I love them and would do unspeakable things to keep them. We also have a few pieces of gear that I exhaust my entire glossary of expletives every time I use them.
The first is our jerry cans. We keep 15 gallons of diesel and 5 gallons of extra gasoline in 5 gallon jerry cans. So after we deplete some of the fuel in our tank I get out the baja filter, a short length of hose, and set it up to transfer some fuel. These jerry cans are new, I got them with my excellent employee discount at West Marine (which is an evil, heartless and nincunpoop of a company). They came with a sticker pronouncing how environmentally friendly they were with they’re special spill proof nozzle. The first time I tried to use these cans it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to get fuel to come out. You have to grip the nozzle and press it back towards the can, which opens a valve inside. Meanwhile, this valve is total junk and the gasket that seats the nozzle to the can is junk and fuel is dribbling all over the place. How a jerry can that leaks like a sieve is friendly to the environment I don’t know. A friend told me the other day that with my frizzled blonde hair I am starting to look like Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future. If I could travel back in time I’d sneak into my father’s garage and come back with his old metal jerry can with the flexible metal spout. It was practical, indestructible, and worked like a charm.
So, in order to get around out here safely you need charts. Maps of the water, and the underwater. Knowing where you are and what’s up ahead is quite important. How annoying is it when you’re in a new city and you come to one of those handy maps of the surrounding area with shops, restuartants, streets and parks all clearly labeled, but hmmm…where am I? No little red dot letting you know “you are here.” So in order to put us on the chart we have GPS. I’m not going to go into latitude and longitude, but we all know it’s a grid system that allows you to have coordinates for every spot on the globe. I bought the chartbook, published by Yachtsman that covers Mexcio to Panama, a bargain deal for around $100. What they did is take all of the charts, shrink them a bit, then cut them up into pieces to make pages. What they didn’t do is include a bit of the latitude and longitude scale on each chart. Without these you have a nice map of the area, but no way to put yourself on it, or identify a waypoint, a magic set of coordinates that is in safe water, to steer to? I wrote an email to the company months ago letting them know that they should maybe publish lingerie catalogs or business cards instead of nautical charts, no reply. So I ordered scales from a mapping store online, copied them and taped them to the charts where appropriate. Problem solved, but why did I have to do it? Why couldn’t some yahoo who prints these things have said,, “Oh dang, these maps are neat but no one can actually use them, maybe we should take care of that.”
I’m going to stop now, and praise a few things. The Bialetti coffee maker we use is amazing. We’ve had it for 5 years now, so it’s probably made at least 1500 cups of coffee without one problem. Ah, and the windscoop, a thin fabric scoop we hook onto our forward hatch that funnels an amazing fresh breeze right through the boat. We love it.
Lastly, Amanda just informed me that we have been on “vacation” more now than most people take in six years. I think I can put up with it for a while longer, wink wink.
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