Somewhere on the Boat

The previous owners of my sailboat were, thankfully, very meticulous about her upkeep and documentation and left behind a white three-ring binder with various manuals and information in it.

It continues to share space in the nav desk with a bosun's whistle, the rules of the road cheat sheet, a sharpie, scissors, Florida paper charts, a pipe, and some tobacco old enough to have been packed in the early Obama administration.

The old white binder is still useful, Thomas and Lisa were thorough, but it's no longer the whole story, because the boat now has radar, auto helm, and a chart plotter that's as much Wi-Fi router as navigational aid, all of which have various manuals distributed around the vessel, or in storage, or somewhere.

And so I've started my own white three-ring binder, but despite the optimistic label of Boat Bible, it's still very much a minimum viable product.

The idea is for me to keep revising it on the computer and printing out the latest sections as I add to it.

So the inevitable happens and something breaks, and I sure could use the part number and what the thingamabob is that just broke.

but I'm not sure whether I have that part number in a paper manual somewhere, or if it's in my new boat Bible, which has all of five pages in it, or whether it was just in my head, in which case it may have been displaced by things that seemed more important at the time, like whether I remembered to buy beer.