I guess I'm giving away my age when I say that I can recall being able to sharpen wooden pencils without a pencil sharpener.
Maybe as gift the clutch pencil is good but for on my boat, only wooden pencils. If I have to, I can sharpen them with my teeth!!
Hey, if you have teeth that strong still, you're probably good for a few years yet.
Anyway, the reason for my post is just to share some experiences that I have had. Firstly, if you are planning on selling your skills to less skilled sailors, you need to be careful about making friends. I have had several occasions in anchorages where I have invited poeple to our boat, put up a decent (but inexpensive) meal, opened a bottle of wine and in discussion spoke of a problem I was experiencing (as we all do). I would get advice and assistance from the guest, freely offered, only to discover the next day that he charged another boat for the same advice because they just up and asked him. By being freindly, I got the service for free. This will happen to you too except you'll be giving. It's hard to charge your new buddy!
Yes, we've considered this. While we plan on working very much on an ad-hoc basis, the element of barter would tend to keep things friendly. We are also willing to trade skills, like "we'll scrape the crap off your hull if you repair our head" (some people would consider this a good trade!). An approach we've considered is announcing on cruiser nets that we are available for "consultation" before we arrive, but this obviously skirts the prohibition on commercial activities. Another tack is to list skills on boat cards...along with issuing really nice boat cards. Word will likely get out.
If it doesn't, it's not critical. As I said, ad hoc. One idea I had was anchor recycling: In some popular anchorages, it is likely that there are unbuoyed, snagged or otherwise abandoned anchors on the seabed that might be retrievable by diving on them. Get the kid to chip off the barnacles, replace a couple of clevis or cotter pins, and sell 'em to other cruisers at cut-rate. Or trade them for diesel, or crates of beer. You see where I'm going with this.
An example: A guy's wife wanted desperately to call home. The local phones were rubbish. We had an Iridium phone on board. After a liesurely dinner, she made a $10 call to the US and her husband spent the next 4 hours helping me solve a problem on my boat for free. And he usually charged EVERYBODY by the hour.
Yes, this is very much how we would like to work. Something that meant ten bucks to you had a huge payoff. And yet I bet the fellow who gave you four hours of free consultation and labour felt quite satisfied with the transaction, because it was a problem with his wife he otherwise could not solve. Imagine if I can make a laptop talk to a printer or a GPS on a modern cruiser!
The other thing is not to understimate the effect of small gifts. We once used a mooring in a popular anchorage in the Pacific that ordinarily cost $25 a day. Unwittingly, my wife gave the children of the owner of the mooring a whole lot of fun but almost valueless toys. They were so thrilled the gifts, and their dad was so thrilled at us taking the time to be nice to his kids, that after staying on his mooring for 5 days, he bluntly refused to charge us anything for the stay and, on top of that, allowed us to to refill our water tanks FOC where other boats were paying for the pleasure.
I am very pleased to hear this, not because you saved money, but because the currency of simple friendliness still has value. Because our boat is a big steel thing with lots of deck and the ability to tie down stuff, it is quite possible for me to give either people or "light freight" a lift from island to island, and if I wasn't trying to dodge a cyclone or otherwise needed to get somewhere to a clock or calendar, I wouldn't have an issue solving a local problem. Having a kid on board makes one more approachable, I think, as does having a boat that, no matter how much I spend on paint, will never say "rich Western bastard".