I must start this post with the confession that I had no ambition in high school, especially during my much misguided junior year. If I had any goal then, it might have been to be a car mechanic. I had acquired, for free, a 1960 Rambler, that did not run but I was determined to restore. My parents suffered this mechanical monstrosity in the carport for many months while I ostensibly worked on restoring it. Bear in mind this was 1970; if a Rambler American has ever been a vintage car, it certainly was not a scant ten years after its first manufacture. But, it was free, so I did not care.
I did not know what I was doing and I had no affinity for mechanics, even then, but my friends were keen on this sort of thing, so I tried to join in.
But, eventually, my parents ordered me to get rid of it. How, I asked? I had no idea what to do with a derelict car. My friend Bill and I eventually concluded that we could tow it somewhere and abandon it. I had never taken title to it, so no one would know it was mine. So, in the middle of a summer night, we towed it to the University of Virginia polo field and abandoned it. The polo field was out of town, not really U.Va. property and evidently was owned by a judge. I heard the judge was furious to find a derelict 1960 Rambler in the middle of his polo field, but he never found me out.
This experience forever purged me of any desire to be a mechanic. While I did not yet know my aptitudes or skills, it was clear they did not lie in that direction.
In fact, I was pretty aimless at that point and certainly did not aspire to be a lawyer. That was an accident, borne out of my father’s frustration that, upon graduating from college, I had no direction or plan. He suggested law school and I agreed to apply. What the hell. I had never taken an undergraduate law class, never even considered it. And I was hardly committed to going to law school, if I was even accepted, but I did agree to apply and in fact took the LSAT at the English Speaking Union in London, while I was traveling. As a side note, I had a devil of a time finding #2 pencils in London right before the exam.
My first day of law school was nearly my last. I bought the contracts book for my class that afternoon, after my first morning of classes, and I was appalled to see that the whole book was devoted to the law of contracts. I could care less. But I had been to a constitutional law class and that was fascinating to me, so I stuck it out. At length, I realized that becoming a lawyer would mean that I would have a sufficient income that I would never again have to work on a car. That seemed a pretty good reason to gut it out.
And that brings us to the subject of this blog. Pretty much against my will, I am acquiring some mechanical and IT skills. Unless you are Captain Kirk, and can have a full time engineer aboard, it is unavoidable. Mechanical shit happens on a boat all the f%^&*ng time. You may think you have read all about it on Sirius, but I assure you have not heard the whole story. There is more to it than I have shared. Just today, I have puzzled about why one the battery chargers was not working, why the toilet kept pumping when it should shut off and the generator power switch keeps tripping. The forward shower pump is now inoperable because the breaker keeps tripping. Need I go on?
At the risk of being laughed at, I will say that there is not much new under the sun in terms of mechanical stuff. It is really pretty basic and if it is not, then us mortals should not touch it. I have learned this the hard way as a lawyer. My whole career has pretty much been devoted to cases that involve scientific, engineering or health science issues. I am an English major without a technical bone in my body. In the many years that I have done patent cases, they have been mainly in the electrical engineering field. I know less about that than I do about 1960 Ramblers, so now you know the extent of my true skill set. My colleagues on these cases are all engineers with terrific technical skills who readily understand the concepts expressed in the patents, but most of them can’t explain to anyone other than other electrical engineer. That does not work in a courtroom too well.
I tried a case involving semiconductor engineering years ago. It was incredibly technical. I took the patents with me on vacation with Jae. Foolishly, I thought I might read them around the pool in Palm Springs. I gave up after a few minutes. Jae asked to read them and she started reading the first sentence, which is referred to as the abstract and summarizes the invention. She quickly gave them back to me with a look that I will never forget and went back to her novel. I have survived in this field by demanding that the concepts in these patents be pared down to understandable concepts. And so far, that has always worked, albeit sometimes after a great deal of effort to find the right way to express it. In the semiconductor case, we got it down to an analogy about how a bathtub drains. It worked and we won the case with that simple explanation.
So, with this experience in mind, I know that the finite limits of this boat are knowable and reducible to relatively knowable. Under our bed, we have drawers that the manufacturer of our boat intended to be used for keeping socks, underwear and other things one might keep in a bedroom. On our boat, those drawers are full of notebooks of technical manuals that act as a security blanket for me, even if I can’t understand all of them. Want to know anything about a Yanmar 4LH-DTE diesel engine? I got the book for you.
Jae, in her typical careful and methodical fashion, has labeled each notebook spine with a catchy phrase like “Electrical” and once you open this fascinating notebook, you can discover the manual for every electrical system on the boat. They are in these drawers because we need them in a readily accessible place.
Elsewhere on the boat, we have schematics that depict every feature of the fresh water plumbing system, the electrical system, the through-hulls (every hole in the hull), the waste system, and two or three other things I don’t even recall now. They are fairly detailed and each has a legend to explain all the icons on them. I have a grudging understanding of them. As a final hedge, we have many additional manuals on the Ipad. We also have the phone numbers of almost all manufacturers of equipment on our boat and we are not afraid to use them. Perhaps our favorite phone number is Furuno West Coast, posted prominently in the navigation station. We don’t call the East Coast number because we have learned they don’t know anything, whereas the West Coast folks are very knowledgeable and helpful. Let me know if you want the number. Furuno, by the way, made our chartplotter, autopilot, radar, weather scanner and a few other things. It is pretty important for us that Furuno stuff work.
But the real point of this post is that I don’t want to be a mechanic. Jae is cooking dinner right now and can’t get one of the stove burners to work. Really? I have to be a gas mechanic now too? We can’t eat out every night, especially here in Sag Harbor where everything is so expensive, so the stove has to work and I know we are not out of gas because the gas oven is working just fine. So it is somewhere between the gas bottle and burner. How do gas stoves work? I have no idea and have never thought about it, but I would assume from my experience with propane tanks that pressure from the tank pushes the gas out and if all the valves are open, it will reach the burner. So what is going on here? Did a valve just fail? Where? Surely in some ridiculously inaccessible place. She just used that burner a few minutes ago without problem, so why is there a problem now. It is happy hour and I am happily writing away on my old Apple computer that never fails me. I don’t want to read the manual for a Force 10 gas stove, which is stowed under my bed. I wonder if there is pizza delivery in the harbor.
Over on the nav station, I can see the Surface computer we bought for navigation software because there is no Furuno compatible Apple version of the program. Today, Jae told me that Consumer Reports has yanked the Surface off their recommended buy list because it shuts down unexpectedly, freezes and does all sort of other undesirable things. And all the time I thought it was me. Above my navigation station, I have posted every method known to the Internet to awaken, revive, or restart a Surface. They don’t always work. Thank God we still have paper charts and know how to use them.
But back to the basic conundrum – how to travel on a boat without having to be an engineer? And not just one type of engineer, but someone who could figure out a variety of systems. On these big powerboats we see around us, they have very little to consider above decks, except to worry about where to place the umbrellas on the deck to shade the owners from the sun, or how many water toys to put out for the kids.
We have real gear on our deck. If we want to use the staysail, I have to rig running backstays; if we want to go downwind fast, I have to get out the spinnaker furler and hoist it before using the spinnaker; if we want to sail downwind with the mainsail, we have to rig the boom brake so the boom does not come swinging around unexpectedly and destroy the rig or kill someone. And then sails have to be trimmed for the tack, which involves various controls that must be adjusted if the wind shifts or we change course. It is not like driving a car.
Then, when you wander below decks, you must consider engineering for a variety of systems, some of which I do understand and for some of which I am clueless. It appears, however, that I am headed toward learning about charging refrigeration systems, bleeding a diesel engine if it runs out of fuel, working on the sewage system of the boat (thankfully not yet) and IT/electronic issues I cannot even dream of.
That 1960 Rambler seems so simple now.
I am hoping that Mr. Scott can beam down and help me from time to time.