The Problem After two days going to windward on the same tack, returning from Svalbard (Spitsbergen) to Norway, our bilge gas alarm went off. We searched everywhere for the source to no avail until I opened the gas bottle locker to a very strong smell of propane.
Gear Failures & Fixes
- Anchoring/Mooring (1 posts)
- Electronics/Software (3 posts)
- Mechanical (8 posts)
- Rigging/Sails (1 posts)
- Self-Steering (1 posts)
One of the largest contributors to a successful cruise is a reliable boat with gear that works. Sadly, attaining that goal can be hard, sometimes really hard. The old saw, ‘The definition of cruising is working on your boat in exotic places’, is distressingly true.
It would be easy to just blame the manufacturers of the many pieces of gear that have let us down over the years, to rant and to rave. After all, in our experience of about 100,000 miles of offshore sailing and 35 years of boat maintenance, less than half of the gear we have installed has operated reliably without substantial work on our part and, in some cases, substantial modification—less than half.
In retrospect, we can see that these problems occurred for many different reasons, not all of which were the fault of the manufacturers. And yes, in some cases the problems were of our own making.
In this section we pick a piece of gear that failed, try to understand why, document the manufacturer’s response and the fix, and most importantly, try to learn what all of the parties—us, the dealer, the manufacturer—could have done better.
We should make clear that just because a product is featured here, that does not mean it is junk; in fact, you may notice that some of the gear on this page also shows up on our Stuff That Works page, it just had to be modified or fixed before it got there!
If you are a manufacturer whose product appears here and you wish to make a comment or rebuttal, we will be happy to post it as long as it is reasonably short and contributes to our and our readers’ knowledge.
