Stuff Breaks

It's pretty much a law of cruising that your stuff will break. Maybe not everyday, and maybe not all at once—but if you take all your possessions and expose them to heat, humidity and lots of shaking they just don't last as long as you might want. This means you need to do lots of preventative maintenance and become really comfortable with taking stuff apart. Because, for the most part, warranties really aren't that useful out here...
The problem is, once apart, things don't always go back together. No matter how carefully you disassemble them you always end up with a random spare part. Over the years we've probably ended up with enough bolts, bushings and whatchamadingies to build an entire somethingorother.
The other law of stuff breaking is it never breaks in a convenient location. Stuff gives up the ghost only after you've left a harbour with repair shops. Right now Evan is trying to fix two spear guns, do maintenance on two BCs, nurse two computers with intermittent faults and convince our camera it really wants to hang in there for a few more weeks. Our options for finding spare parts for this stuff is just about 0. So we either cobble together the repair—or learn to live without.
Sort of and intelligence test VS. enforced simplicity.
----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com