The carnage of the current Salty Dawg rally has given me a lot to think about the last couple of days...
For instance, the various boating media coverage seems to think it is sorta/kinda normal for masts to fall down, rudders to fall off or break, and the fact that there are heroic Coast Guard men and women just waiting around to save yachties collective asses when needed.
Maybe it's just me but none of that is normal and it's something we should all give some serious thought to...
Sure masts do fall down from time to time and, I have some up-close-and-personal experience with such things. It's not because the wind blows too hard but because there is something wrong with the mast or any number of small fittings that can fail. In the case of my mast falling down and going BOOM, it was a single little weld that failed on a chainplate (a chainplate, I might add that I intended to replace at my earliest convenience and boy was that ever a big mistake!).
Pretty much the same goes for rudders... Rudders fail because they have something wrong with them and, as rudders take a lot of abuse over their lives, it is something that anyone going to sea further than they care to swim back from should factor into their plans and have some sort of backup system that works that you have actually tried...
I mention this because even in a world of cell phones and EPIRBs there is a very good chance that when the shit hits the fan you won't be anywhere near heroic Coasties or other means of timely rescue and you will, at least temporarily, need to take care of yourself and hopefully make port.
The problem is that most modern boats are badly designed, too complicated, and have too many systems to be easily sorted out when TSHTF scenario becomes a reality. Seriously, how are you going to sort out a problem when you cannot even access half your thru-hulls?
Lucky for us the VolksCruiser by its very nature has minimal systems and the ones it has are simple...
But, more about that later.
