SIZE FIVE ENGINE
COMPARTMENT - SIZE TEN BODY
If I had to make one complaint about Exit Only, it would be the
size of the engine compartments. I have size five engine
compartments and a size ten body. It's extremely hard to
work on my engines because I have to shoehorn my six foot one inch
frame into the engine room to do maintenance and make repairs.
I shouldn't complain. After all, it's possible they built
the engine compartments for midgets. If that's true, they
should have told me before I purchased the yacht. But now
it's too late. On the positive side, they say that as you
grow older, your spine compresses, and you shrink in size.
Somewhere on the far horizon, I may end up five feet nine inches
tall, and I will fit into the engine compartments quite nicely.
I suspect that by the time that happens I will be around 110 years
old. I hope I still like sailing when I'm that old.
When I was half way though my circumnavigation, I broke both my
legs in a car accident. For six months I couldn't bend my
right knee more than ninety degrees. That made engine work
an even greater challenge. But where there's a will, there's
a way. I continued doing physical therapy until I could get
down into the engine room, and when that happened, I knew it was
time to resume the sailing trip around the world.
In Thailand, we did some touring in long tail boats at Phi Phi
Island. When I saw the engines mounted on the back of those
long tails, I immediately fell in love with those boats.
Finally I found a boat engine that was easy to work on.
Their engine room was a big as the great outdoors, and when they
worked on their engine, spectacular vistas surrounded them in
every direction. Now that's what I call a good engine room.
When I look at the major challenges in my life, I always try to
think big, except when I think about working on my engines.
Then, I think small. I coil my tall body into its smallest
survivable position in the engine compartment, and I start
working. It's probably a character building experience going
through all that pain without saying any four letter words.
Fortunately, I have extremely reliable Yanmar engines that require
infrequent maintenance, and my torture trips into the engine
compartments are few and far between. When I add
up the pluses of sailing on the ocean of my dreams to the minuses
of working in nightmarish engine compartments, the dreams
win by a ratio of a million to one.
Life is good.
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