Anduril Sailing Blog: Joys of Christmas Breakage

In a house things break and wear out. On a car things break and wear out. And on a boat things break and wear out disturbingly quickly. It is bad enough that we live in the age of rapid obsolescence for all things consumer, but the pace of equipment failure in the salt-water environment of an ocean-going boat makes the owner feel like a rat on a treadmill - at all times just barely keeping up.

Adding to the problem is the fact that a modern boat is chock full of complicated systems. Because things break so often we try to have redundancy in all things critically important. What this boils down to is that now there are two devices to break and require repair. Erg.

Electrical and electronic systems are among the worst. In the salt air, upon all things made of copper sprouts verdigris. What the hell is verdigris you ask? Well children, it is the enemy. And the enemy is green scum on your wire. Eww, say the little boys and girls: not on your wire! Well yes, it is true. Corrosion of wire is a terrible boat disease and almost all boats have it too. The lesson, children, is that if you are thinking about touching that boat, don’t. Wait until you are old enough and ready to marry.

And married to Anduril we now both are. Happily married we would say, but nevertheless constantly having to attend to her every need. And as with any aging body, sometimes her bunghole plugs up. That was Alice’s job to fix, yesterday, using her snorkel and mask. Good girl that Alice. Poked up the hole using her stick while Greg operated the plumber’s helper from above. Turns out that a glob of toilet paper from her big bung hole had stoppered her little bung hole. Thankfully, it was Alice’s glob of TP that stoppered the hole. Otherwise this could have turned into a situation involving marital strife.

Our sailing friends Rob and Debra have their own throuple relationship with Avant, who all of a sudden started acting up severe. All within 48 hours her hoses split, her pump leaked, her control cables broke and her gypsy stripper went jammy (hey, look it up).

If you are curious about how these boat throuple relationships work, the usual thing is that when your throuple third starts making trouble, you ask other throuples if they wouldn’t mind coming over to help with getting her ready for action. This activity is known as “roving”. Jesus, what? Get your minds out of the gutter! Roving boat repairers.

What all this means is that the holiday season, along with the holidaying, included a long share of heads-and-arms-stuck-in-awkward-places. Boats are notorious for their mighty resistance to all repair work and rovers can be identified by their many bites, scratches and bruises. Rovers are also known to disturb serene anchorages with their sudden loud utterances (#%&$!).

To be fair, it wasn’t all crescent wrenches, blow torches and wire strippers. Here in Costa Rica, Christmas and New Years also happened.

Our friend Mer had booked a week at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica and as luck would have it the resort was nearby to where we were going to be. Mer was immediately tasked with transporting boat parts down to us from Canada. Her bag of delivered boat jewelry was a welcome gift and we also got to spend her birthday with her, which was fun.