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This being our annual
maintenance issue causes me to reflect upon the fact that for many PMY
readers, working on boats is nearly as much fun as using them. Of course,
others tolerate maintenance as a necessary evil, and still others classify
such labor up there with tax audits and root canal surgery.
In another life I worked
on boats—diesel engines, actually—for a living. I wish that
experience allowed me to impart numerous pearls of wisdom to you, but,
alas, I came away from it with only two. One is never start a project,
however minor, on Saturday afternoon if you’re planning on going
out on Sunday. The other I learned in diesel-mechanic school, and it’s
served me well: When a problem occurs, look first to the simplest explanation.
The essence of this
dictum is based on the human—okay, the male—obsession to explain
all problems with large solutions. We seem bent on assuming the worst,
whether the subject is the funny knocking sound coming from under the
hood of the family car or that suspicious smudge on our chest x-ray. We
either refuse to believe or fail to remember that more often than not,
the worst never comes to pass, so it’s fruitless to go off half-cocked.
So when faced with an
engine that refuses to start, your typical American male thinks of removing
the cylinder head rather than checking the fuel gauge. At the least this
leads to needless worry; often it means needless expense.
It was not in diesel
school that I came to appreciate this philosophy but rather on one of
my first boat tests back in the late-1980’s. Outboard Marine Corporation
(OMC) had just introduced a fire-breathing, 460-cubic-inch engine, and
I’d been invited to test-drive a boat powered by it. Arriving dockside,
I found a flashy 28-footer surrounded by proud engineers, one of whom
introduced himself, helped me into the boat, and familiarized me with
the controls. That task completed, I twisted the key and waited for the
roar from unmuffled, through-transom exhausts. Instead, I heard the anemic
whir of a starter fecklessly spinning the big V-8.
In a flash the engineers,
armed with tools and instruments, were all over the engine. Theories flew
about like newspapers in a hurricane. Off came components, and as the
minutes dragged on, minions were sent for replacements. As faces reddened,
I prepared to return to my hotel room to catch the latest episode of “Divorce
Court.”
About 30 minutes on,
a young man who apparently had been hired to clean the boat uttered something.
The engineers disdainfully looked up from the engine compartment as the
lad pointed to a piece of coiled plastic on the sole. “It’s
the kill switch,” he said simply. The engineers, apparently struck
dumb, failed to move, so the lad jumped into the boat, picked up the plastic
gizmo that stops the engine if the driver is ejected, and snapped it into
place. A half-hour later, the reassembled engine roared to life.
Thus a problem that
could have been solved by a quick look around the cockpit consumed the
better half of a day. More to the point, a bunch of guys who should have
known better nevertheless expended needless worry and suffered needless
embarrassment, and I almost missed my ride. So next time something on
your boat or in your life doesn’t go as it’s supposed to,
remember that chances are it’s not a catastrophe. It’s probably
something small and simple.
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