How much stuff do you have on board?

The difference between a new boat and one that has been running for some time (working, living aboard, cruising) is the quantity of stuff that is on board. You might think that with all the shipments and packages we have brought on board, One Love must be packed with stuff by now. That’s really not true, at least not using today’s definition of the word stuff. By stuff I mean all of the miscellaneous bits and pieces that we keep on the boat “just in case.” Not spares exactly but lengths of line, blocks of wood, shackles, screws, pins, etc., etc., etc.

Yesterday, for example, one of my tasks was to attempt the repair of our watermaker by replacing the O-rings in the pressure vessels with new ones. The ones that I was to put in were slightly larger than the previous ones and because of that, we were told that we’d have to use a “persuader” (a mallet and a block of wood) to get the end cap back on. The mallet I had but a block of wood? Nope. I would have had several on ZTC though.

As it turns out, I ended up using one of the wooden bungs that we have for plugging throughulls and it worked perfectly but it made me think once again about all of the little pieces of stuff that we have on ZTC that we do not yet have on One Love.

The new O-rings to be installed.

When I was shopping at Budget Marine in St. Maarten, doing our initial huge buying spree for boat gear, I filled several bags with misc. screws, bolts, nuts, etc., just in case. One of the salesmen there thought that I was silly for doing it in that way and that I would have been better off finding out what screws I might need and then purchasing only them. The thing is, how can you know? You can decide whether most of the stuff on your boat is metric or imperial and then focus your purchases there but beyond that, you really just need to have a bunch of random stuff. At least it seems that way to me.

As we continue to live aboard One Love, and operator her, I’m sure our stash of stuff will continue to grow. Guaranteed this will make all the yet-to-occur issues a tiny bit easier to solve, or at least I hope it will.

Today we’ll be taking at least a part of the day off to do a bit of an island tour with a couple of our cruising friends who are based here. Not to the tourist spots, mind you, but to all of the vital shopping places like Home Depot, Cost-U-Less, Budget Marine, etc. Just to look, of course. 🙂