Capt. Marc, veteran of multiple ocean crossings, and instructional pro, invites you to join him for lessons and/or excursions under sail. By special arrangement only.
Blowback 3 – Entropy Rules
We achieved escape velocity on a foggy September morning. Songline, ship-shape and bristling with new boating gadgets, loped southward on a light westerly. Over the days and weeks that followed we grew accustomed to the rhythms and routines of voyaging. For the first month life seemed idyllic.
Then the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) began to intervene.Remember that one? It was the lesson you had in high school physics where they told you that everything in the universe is falling apart. Well it appears that the universe includes all of those expensive boat things I had purchased and lovingly installed. By the time we arrived in San Diego, I had a long list of equipment that needed to be replaced or fixed. I poured over my warranty cards and began calling manufacturers, angrily demanding satisfaction. Surprisingly, many of them were cooperative. They solved my problems with sage solutions and replacement parts. I was so pleased to see my gadgets working again, that I even bought more gadgets designed to make us safer and happier while voyaging.
Whole again, we left U.S. waters and continued southward toward warmer climes, Mariachi music, and cheap beer. It took another month for Entropy to rear its head again but by this time San Diego, with cheap phone calls, marine chandleries, and FedEx shipping, was a thousand miles to the north. Little Mexican towns like San Blas, Tenacatita, and Barra de Navidad, could supply the basics but fixing watermakers, laptop computers, and electronic gadgets was not among the basics. After a few ten-dollar phone calls I found a few manufacturers willing to help, but shipping parts meant waiting weeks and paying mordida (bribes) or huge import duties. Thwarted, we pressed onward, as ever more of our gadgets became excess ballast.
I reasoned that most of our broken stuff was non-essential. Did I really need five cockpit data displays where one would do? I knew I didn’t, but all the same, those broken things ate away my soul. A habitual victim, under my breath I cursed the manufacturers for the money spent and promises broken. How dare they! With each failed thing, another dark little cloud formed in my brain, diminishing my sense of well being and numbing me to beauty everywhere. Then I started getting it. As my sailing buddy Howard liked to say, “Don’t sweat the little things”. Little by little, little things rolled over and died. I took a deep breath. They would just have to wait until we arrived in a big city again. The windlass down-button died so we used gravity to drop anchor. A lead-line showed depth where it counted, so we cast on approaches. A hand-pump shunted fuel as well as an electric one. So we pumped. I stopped sweating the little things.
We were almost a year into our voyage, having transited the Panama Canal into the corner pocket of Western Caribbean, when big things began to fail. The first thing among many was a leak in our primary fuel tank. I tuned the SSB to 8104 and described my problem to Panama Net participants.
A fellow named Paul came back, “Can you get to your fuel tank? Over”
“Roger”, I replied, “I can remove the tank from under the aft berth, Over.”
“Good”, he said, “head for Green Island in the San Blas. I’m the only three-spreader rig you’ll see. Set your anchor inside the reef and pull the tank. I’ll pick it up first thing tomorrow morning. Over and out”.
True to his word, Paul dinghy’d up to us the next morning and after a cup of coffee and a bite of Kuna coconut bread, motored away with our fuel tank. He returned the following morning.
“I used to build motorcycle gas tanks out of fiberglass and resin”, he explained, “Piece of cake. Now your tank’s better than new”. I looked it over and couldn’t even see where the repair had been done.
That guy Paul looked to me like he stood about ten-feet tall. It’s when you’re way “out there” that you discover the stuff of real cruisers. No fees were demanded and no tribute required. Fixing boat stuff is just a part of voyaging.
It was in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras that I finally got it. On New Year’s Eve of 2000 we were having pizza at a little café on the island of Guanaja, when we met a family of four Israelis who had been cruising their 32-foot boat, Summerwind, for fourteen years. I downed a beer and started groaning about our broken Yanmar engine mount.
“It is going to take forever and a fortune to get a replacement shipped to this place”, I whined.
Skipper Yoav rolled his eyes. In a thick Israeli accent, he fired back at me. “Stop crying. Sooner or later everything on your boat will break. Be glad! There’s nothing you cannot fix!”
The next day we scrounged some scraps of iron and bits of old tire, fabricated a serviceable engine mount, and had it installed before dark. The engine ran on that mount for the next six months.
From that day forward, I resolved to no longer be victimized by adversity. The problems of voyaging were the voyage itself. Solutions were always within reach. Some just required a little more perseverance than others. So I stopped carrying replacement parts and started concentrating on collecting tools and malleable materials that I could shape into solutions for the infinite number of mishaps that would inevitably occur during our voyage. Duct tape, epoxy, and stainless wire led the list, but pieces of metal stock, wood, and plastic milk cartoons also took a place among our stores.
I hit Pause again.
Before I went voyaging I’d lived in a fantasy world from which Entropy was artificially banned. The things I bought were supposed to last forever. When it turned out that they didn’t, I spent my hard earned money buying new stuff or hiring people to make old stuff work like new. Every problem was someone else’s fault and every solution was someone else’s responsibility.
Voyaging in a small boat gave me the gift of problems of the first order–my vessel and the sea about me. It took me a while but I did eventually get it.