With the return of an actual, floating, functioning vessel to my life, I have also once again subjected myself to the tyranny of the dreaded lists. You know the ones of which I speak. Not the cutesy, idle “honey-do” lists that landlubbers tack up on their refrigerators next to elementary school art exhibits and snipped Garfield cartoons; no, these are serious lists, lists with heft and import, lists that have big dollar figures attached and real consequences wrapped up in them. These are boat lists.
The first one started during the survey and amounted to about a page of items I wanted to check particularly myself while we had her apart or out of the water, or which I wanted to be sure to ask the surveyor about, or made sure that he checked, or that he mentioned in passing but which I wanted to follow up on later. That’s the most crumpled and stained of the bunch but even now, two months later, I find myself consulting it regularly, largely in terms of its contribution to longer, much grander lists which have since followed with greater focus and more intimidating price tags attached.
The grand-daddy of those I have come to think of simply as “the Boat list.” It’s about two pages, double-columned, single-spaced, right now. There are a disturbing number of items on it with no check mark next to them, mostly because they are annotated “buy” which attaches an outlay of some major or minor amount in connection with their completion. But there are plenty of free things on the list to do as well, which remain undone through sloth or circumstance, little things like “Check head heat vent hose connection with heater on (because it looks cracked and I don’t want to set the toilet paper in the locker on fire)” which is waiting for it to get cold enough for me to fire the forced-air diesel heater up for the first time.
The most frightening thing about the Boat list is that, apart from some easy single-serving items such as the heat vent, it actually represents more of a meta-list, a list of lists, many of which have yet to be created but nonetheless menace me by implication from the innocuous lines on the page that say things like “Size, buy, and install solar panels.” That’s a whopper in six words, an item that is probably going to require two or three full-page lists on its own, not to mention a thousand bucks and two months of Sundays to complete. I haven’t even started making those lists yet, but they are out there, circling, biding their time.
I tend to breeze past lines like that when I look at the boat list these days in favor of relatively easier items like Run out anchor rode, check and mark if necessary and Disassemble, clean, and lube winches I’m not saying that’s going to be a breeze, but it looks appealing compared to the solar panel project or the dread Size, buy, and install new holding tank and manual pump. I’m thinking of creating a new list, one with my wife’s name at the top, and moving that one over there. She can have Purchase dinghy and Sew telltales on jib and mainsail too.
But the boat list isn’t exactly a master list representing all other lists, either. It’s just projects or stock items. There are also the checklists, that special sub-set of lists that my feeble brain relies on to avoid sinking or blowing up or simply spectacularly damaging this expensive boat we have barely moved aboard. The scary thing about the checklists is that I haven’t actually gotten around to writing them all down yet, so I am forced to refer to an incomplete and inchoate mental representation that goes something like:
- Check transmission disengage
- Check battery switch on #2 (start)
- Advance throttle to 1/4
- Key on, press start button
- Check exhaust for water
- My god, open the coolant seacock you fool, the engine is running already!
I won’t even trouble you with the propane fueling checklist that I haven’t written yet. But you probably want to be at another dock on the first run-through.
But the great thing about lists is that they make you feel like you are getting somewhere, even when you aren’t. If ever I need a little boost to morale, I can just think about something I haven’t done yet, and write it down, and it makes it seem like I have actually done something, even though nothing at all practical has been accomplished.
That’s not to say that the lists aren’t useful. Sometimes, they help you realize or remember things that otherwise would never come to mind. One morning a couple weeks ago, while we were on shore up in Port Hadlock, I was having some coffee and admiring our shiny new boat as she lay to her mooring in the soft morning light. As I watched, the local clan of otters swam by on their daily constitutional across the bay.
Now, otters are a bit like aquatic cats, only a lot more smelly, and if there is mischief to be had, they will be into it. I had previously neglected to consider this factor in my thoughts on anchorages, because Insegrevious had a relatively high freeboard and a swim ladder that we religiously stowed on leaving the boat for any period of time. We continued this habit reflexively with Rosie but neglected to consider the easy access to the ladder offered by the swim steps at the transom.
The otters weren’t so dim, and sensing potential capers available in their home waters, they quickly mounted the swim steps and started sniffing around. I got a sinking feeling as I began to envision buckets of otter poop clogging up our voluminous cockpit, and set down my coffee to start searching for my lifejacket so I could go launch the row-boat and chase the little beggars off.
But before I could get that far, one of the otters found the ladder, and naturally decided to climb it. As he put his weight on it, though, the folded-up lower section slowly and majestically unfolded out away from the hull, slowly at first and then with sudden acceleration. I could see the look of surprise on his face as it went over past the tipping point with him still clinging hopefully to the rungs. The splash as he went back into the water scared the rest of them off, even though the ladder was now down, but I had two new items for the boat list: otter-proof swim steps and secure boarding ladder in upright position.
Those put me onto page three of the Boat list.
The thing that keeps me from being driven into utter despondency by three pages of stuff that will probably never get done is knowing that, despite all that, we actually have very little to do on Rosie. We bought a boat that, in boat terms, needed next to nothing done with it to live and sail on. When I think about some of the boats we might have bought, and the lists that would have accompanied them, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling looking at my paltry three pages and change. There are folks out there facing a lot worse!