Feb 13 2007
So Much To Learn
So as I sit here, still waiting to hear back from Kim the Finance Goddess, I’m trying to fill my time with other things. You know, distract my hampstering mind from the endless string of “what-ifs” it keeps trying to hop onto…
Thanks to Toast, I signed up for the LagoonOwners yahoogroup. Where they’re having an ugly row over someone’s 33,000-mile catastrophic delamination, and whether or not you can pull an engine straight off its mounts just by wrapping a line in the prop. It’s a heated, ugly, and intimidating discussion.
I love yahoogroups, don’t get me wrong; some of my best friends are yahoogroup addicts, and I myself have a group membership of way way way too many lists. In fact, I’m having as much fun picking apart the bad netiquette as I am actually trying to follow the discussion (since engine mounts are far from being my personal yachting specialty). But what the discussion is doing (besides reminding me that yahoogroups, while an excellent repository of collective wisdom that would otherwise not exist due to geographic, cultural, and timezone restraints), is reminding me how much I still have to learn.
We got the hard copy of the boat survey back yesterday. Mr. Joseph Barlia, at Azimuth did a fantastic job, it’s a really professional package (and I say that with my Editorial hat on. For a report by someone who is a marine surveyor and not a desktop publisher, it’s really well done). Included in the package is a CD with every photo of the boat he took.
Jason and I could identify roughly half of what was in there. The rest is a complete mystery.
I mean… it’s a pump. But which pump? It’s a through-hull fitting… but which one? It’s a tube, it’s a line, it’s a bolt, it’s a clamp… we can identify the pieces, but it was quite humbling to realize how far we are from being able to independently put the puzzle together, should we at some point be confronted with, well, pieces.
Jason and I handle facing our own ignorance differently. I lunge for a book. He lunges for his garage. After about two hours to decompress, we reconvened in the kitchen, where I informed him about the lovely discussions of engine bits in Chapman’s, and he informed me that he’d equipped one of his industrial toolbags with “boat tools” for the journey back down to reclaim our boat.
We’re on the road to find out.