a good book...

Just maybe, the most influential book I've read relating to boats, boatbuilding, and cruising is not a book about boats or sailing at all...

John Muir was a smart guy, a man who understood the importance of breaking things down to basic elements, and someone who never let someone else telling him something was simply not an option slow him down.

He's also one of my personal heroes...

But, you say, what does a book about repairing a VW have to do with boats?

Well, for me, it was my introduction to the fact that I could actually do things like troubleshoot and work on cars by breaking the job at hand into simple, easy to understand segments.

Something of a eureka moment as it happens...

All of a sudden I realized that not only could I rebuild my VW's motor on the side of the road when needful but by extending the basic premise I could do almost anything from rigging a mast to learning that guitar solo that had seemed unapproachable and make it my own.

"How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive" is not just a book about fixing cars but a book of power.

Whenever I've hit the proverbial brick wall on boat building projects I always ask myself how John Muir would have approached the problem and it always seems to work.

Nuff said...