Spares stock
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Spares stock
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CONSUMABLE AND SPARE PARTS STOCK: The possibility to buy spares or new equipment during the
voyage is very limited, and furthermore there are a lot of equipment that's
desirable to be able to keep in working order during the actual sailing, which
requires spare parts or even whole new devices to be carried onboard.
The small-spares locker aboard Shaula3 - ENGINE OIL AND FILTERS: as already pointed out elsewhere, finding oil is not a problem, but it is strongly advisable to have on-board at least enough to perform a complete replacement and a few top-ups; the same applies for filters, which are much harder to find, and therefore should be always kept in quantity! - WATERMAKER FILTERS AND CLEANING PRODUCTS: this is highly specialised stuff, nearly impossible to find, carry it from home! - SAILS: we carried a new mainsail and a new genoa, but decided to keep them as spares and set sail with the old ones (refurbished by the sailmaker). The idea was to switch sails somewhere halfway-through, but we didn't have to, and finished the voyage with the old, albeit well worn, sails. Other boats were less lucky, and had to resort to local sailmakers where one could be found (and you can imagine how busy these sailmaker shops were, with 30-odd boats simultaneously in port!). - ROPES: we did not carry a lot of spare ropes, and those were mostly already rigged; we used up a lot of mooring lines (carry many, strong and long ones!) while sheets and halyards fared quite well and were still in good shape at the end of the voyage. - GROUND TACKLE: we carried 3 bower anchors plus a kedge, each ready for use with its own rode: heavy, bulky, but anchors are a critical items, and one can be lost or cast off (it happened to quite a few boats!). - ELECTRONICS: we had two identical chartplotters, one in the cockpit and one
below decks, which were backing-up one another, and carried a spare of their GPS
receiver (we did not need it, but was lent to another boat!). We carried a fixed VHF and two handhelds, of which one was killed in the capsize, and we carried a spare fixed station which was not used. We had 2 PC's on board (although one was really old and slow), anyway they
were not used for essential purposes (main use was e-mail), but we overlooked to
carry the disks to allow reinstalling all our Sw when we had to buy a new
computer in Panama. We broke 2 cameras, and the rewritable CD's we used to backup photos were destroyed by seawater, while the second backup on USB keys survived to the plunge. - ENGINE SPARES: we carried a long list of spares, as suggested by our
mechanic; to my great despair, the mechanic decided to install all spares on the
engine, keeping the used parts as spares! His logic was "this way you will
probably not have failures, and even if you do, the used spares are good enough
to carry you home"; I was unconvinced, but I must say that it worked, we had NO
engine failures throughout the voyage, unlike most of the other Rally boats! - DINGHY: we carried a spare dinghy and outboard, and both turned out to be useful, the outboard to ourselves when our main outboard took the plunge in the Caribbean capsize, and the dinghy to another boat, when theirs went AOL...
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Webmaster: Gianfranco Balducci - email: gfbalduc@tin.it Last Update: 11/11/2014
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Shaula4 website (text and images) by Gianfranco Balducci is licensed under a |
