With the new season upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, many of us are engaged in commissioning our boats. It is that time of year when flowers bloom and sailor's hearts turn to sailing. Growing up Dad and I would spend some of our winter weekends and evenings working on boat stuff at the house. . With the advent of spring we would spend out spring weekends installing the gear and casework bought or built over the winter, and prepping the family boats for the season ahead.
Back then, there was never a sense that we should farm this work out. It was all part of owning a boat. We learned about the boat and ourselves by doing new tasks we had never done before. We improved the boat by the things we upgraded or repaired. Dad's workmanship was exemplary. I always tended to move too quickly to achieve his excellence.
Certainly there were times and tasks that Dad did have the yard do as the demands of business sometimes prevented him from doing some particular pre-launch task. We had a joke between us based on an incident that happened one year early in our growth as sailors. That year Dad ran out of time to varnish the wooden mast and boom on our boat before she was scheduled to be launched, so he had the boatyard do it. We were at a yacht yard with a great reputation for high quality work. In the car as we drove down to the boat after the varnish work was done, Dad said with grave respect, "Now we will see what a professional varnishing job looks like."
Once in the boatyard we made a beeline to the spar shed to see how the mast and boom came out. Compared to our typical job, it was not very well done. There were visible brush hairs and brush marks, dust and holidays. From then on, when one of us did a less than ideal job on something, the running gag was "That sure was a professional job of it."
For us, and for many sailor of my generation, it was simply taken for granted that by and large, and as much as possible, we would do our own work on our own boats. It was a basic mores that approached an ethical imperative.
But more and more, I run across people who began sailing and grew up in a time when ‘normal folks’ didn’t maintain almost anything in their lives. It is not that I am judging or blaming folks who don’t do their own maintenance. After all, I grew up in a different time when fixing and maintaining your own cars, boats, appliances and so on was more normal. But obviously times have changed. Truthfully, for example, I must admit that I have not worked on my own cars in decades.
And part of this shift is that boats and boat gear has become way more complicated and less easily self-maintainable. Boat yards are much more aware of pollution issues and so restrict what owners can do. Some products are only supposed to be sold to professionals or at least require specialized knowledge and tools. Even supposed plug and play systems like NEMA 2000 wiring isn’t exactly plug and play without spending time learning how it is supposed to work and what wire types, connectors and converters are required, or once installed aren’t the the easiest to troubleshoot.
Yet, it strikes me that a boat owner pretty much needs to know how everything on the boat works to be able to troubleshoot an issue mid-cruise or passage. I admit that purposely own very simple boats to maintain and if I don’t know how something works I either learn how it works or don’t put it on the boat. (That is the lame excuse why I still have an antiquated alternator and charging system).
Locally, I find myself coaching all kinds of really smart people on how to maintain their boats. Once we go through it one time, they get it. But before that, no one has showed them how to do it, so it remained a mystery to them.
Sometimes this is really basic stuff like pumping out a holding tank, hooking up a shore power cable, tying on a fender, or winterizing a water system. (Those are all real cases but to be clear, I do not mean that as a criticism of these people in the slightest.)
My esteemed and accomplished colleague, MarkofSeaLife often makes the case that it is easy to learn to sail. I agree on some level that for some people, maybe even most people, it is easy to develop enough basic sailing skills to own a boat and sail her. It is all of the other stuff associated with sailing and boat ownership that I wonder about.
My wife will tell folks that there is almost nothing too minor for me to overthink it. Maybe this is just another case of me overthinking this. But maybe not.
Respectfully,
Jeff
