{"id":649,"date":"2001-03-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-03-09T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/?p=649"},"modified":"2012-03-07T21:03:21","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T02:03:21","slug":"s_logs-dashew-dashew92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/s_logs-dashew-dashew92\/","title":{"rendered":"Spare Parts to Carry On Board"},"content":{"rendered":"
How to decide what spare parts to carry aboard. Also, an interview with the co-skippers of Club Med, the Maxi Cat that just won the ’round-the-world "Race", about how ingenuity can help when spare parts are lacking.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

We often get queries about what sorts of spares inventory to carry – and of course we wrestle with this issue all the time ourselves. <\/p>\n

When we first started cruising in the 1970s, there was no such think as FedEx or DHL – and the cruising infrastructure was nonexistent in most of the pleasant areas around the world. As a result one was forced to carry a lot of heavy, expensive, space-consuming spare parts.<\/p>\n

When we returned to the States aboard Intermezzo the vast majority of of our spares lay unused – and some of it was unusable due to the ravages of living aboard a boat for all those years. <\/p>\n

Fast forward to the 21st century and we have courier service in just about every nook and cranny of the cruising world – not to mention a highly developed infrastructure. So it is less important to carry gobs of stuff. We think that in most cases it is better to assume you might get stuck for a week waiting for some parts to be couriered down, than to pay for and carry a ton (literally) of gear that probably won’t get used.<\/p>\n

Still, there are specific decisions to be made. Without going into detail, we consider the following general guidelines:<\/p>\n

1-How long are we going to be away from easily accessible courier service?<\/p>\n

2-How important is the gear for which we are considering spares? Can we do without until we get to where we can buy spares? <\/p>\n

3-Is there something aboard which can be substituted until we get the right stuff?<\/p>\n

Sometimes you do need to consider the age of the gear in question. The outboard we have is a 14-year-old Mariner – still runs fine. But when the water pump impeller went out in Bequia, there wasn’t an impeller to be found and we were anchored a long way from shore. We’d carried an overhaul set of gaskets and a pump kit for the past 70,000 or so miles on our last two boats. And we finally got to use it! Of course, the impeller, being that old, tends to be a little brittle, but then it did get us by until we could find a new one in the States. <\/p>\n

Over the years, we’ve pared down what we carry, until today our total spares inventory is probably a quarter of what it was 25 years ago. And we’ve still not found it necessary to use a courier…yet.<\/p>\n

A key factor in all of this is the resourcefulness of the crew. The following information is from an interview with Grant Dalton and Frank Proffitt, Co-skippers of the Around-the-World race-winning maxi cat Club Med.<\/p>\n

Trouble aboard Club Med<\/h3>\n

Wednesday 7th March 2001. The giant blue Club Med catamaran that sailed to Marseilles and victory in The Race on Saturday evening didn’t have as trouble-free a passage around the world as the crew would have liked. During the high-speed battle around the planet, sailed at a record-setting pace of 18.3 knots average, the advanced composite 32-meter-long racing boat had several breakdowns.<\/p>\n

They ranged from simple deck fittings to a broken canopy, torn netting, failed ballast pumps and fractured battens, all on top of the normal wear and tear that comes from sailing over 25,000 miles nonstop.<\/p>\n

And just days from the finish line a routine rig inspection yielded reason for the mast to fall over, Co-skipper Frank Proffit explained: <\/p>\n

“Just three days from Marseilles, because of a lower shroud failure, we nearly lost the rig. Just near the terminal where the Kevlar shroud joins the mast a lot of extra wear had taken place, we added extra lashing and connections to keep it together to the finish.”<\/p>\n

But by far the most alarming problem was a primary structural failure resulting in an area of delamination around one of the main crossbeam roots, the area where the crossbeam that supports the mast joins the hull. Skipper Grant Dalton explained:<\/p>\n

“We were fine until about 5000 miles from the finish, which is 75% of the distance around the world, when we suffered some nasty structural core shear, or delamination under one of our beams, exactly where the front beam joins the starboard hull.”<\/p>\n

“Before we left Barcelona we had to decide what to take in the way of spares. We had to think carefully because you don’t want to weigh the boat down with unnecessary equipment. It is important to take universal things, things that can do a lot of jobs.”<\/p>\n

“Apart from a few spare parts we also took three amazing guys – our Three-Man Army, Neal MacDonald, Ed Danby and Jan Dekker – they could fix anything, with hardly any parts. And when we found the de-lamination problem they just got inventive.”<\/p>\n

“The core between skins disintegrated over a patch of about 2 square meters in area in a really important structural part of the boat. The Three-Man Army took the watertight bulkhead doors from inside and bolted them on to the inside and the outside of the suspect area. We had to steal parts from other areas in the boat, for example the bolts we used we ‘borrowed’ from the base of each winch, we took two from each winch, and we took a few from the generator…” <\/p>\n

“We didn’t talk about it at the time, we just dealt with it and anyway big boys don’t cry – we fixed the problem and got over it. Importantly we didn’t want the opposition behind us buoyed by the fact that they could smell blood.”<\/p>\n

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How to decide what spare parts to carry aboard. Also, an interview with the co-skippers of Club Med, the Maxi …Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beowulf-logs","category-dashew-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setsail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}