The early morning alarm call went off this morning with a heart stopping sense of urgency. "Tiiiiiiiiim!!!!!" was the yelp that Heather made from the deck above our cabin. Quick as a flash the rest of us were on deck in varying states of undress.
Heather, on her way to the fisherman's hostel, was climbing from Shimshal on to the monster green, steel fishing boat we were tied up against when something had gone wrong. At the exact moment she had her hands on the trawler and her feet on Shimshal the two boats started moving apart leaving Heather straddled between the two as a human gang plank. Luckily the shriek was not followed by a splash and she held on long enough for the boats to come back together with a tug on the stern line.
So began our second day in Sisimiut. Another warm and sunny one. The morning's weather forecast indicated a start the following day for the last leg of a voyage. We thus had all of Saturday to relax and enjoy in Sisimiut now that the first drama of the day was over with no damage done and no clothes to dry.
Top of my list for the day's activities was an Internet fix which saw me cruising the website of Andersen winches. The day before we had removed the electric motor and discovered that the drive train had broken. On the face of it the whole assembly looked in perfect condition and hewn out of solid bronze but it had definitely died after 11 years of very light use. We will take it home and send it back to Andersen to see if they can repair it. The website allowed me to post a support query but didn't enlighten me as to why such a premium marine product had died without warning.
Maritime premium product failures are a recurring theme of Shimshal's voyages. Last year it was the throttle system and now thruster. The throttle cost a fortune to replace. The year before it was an alternator, the autohelm and the Whitlock steerer. All quality products, lightly used and well maintained that had failed suddenly, completely and without warning.
Our last car died after 210,000 miles with little more than an annual service. My current car is 17 years old and goes like a bomb. So why is it that anything designed for a boat, even safety critical items such as throttle and steering, seem to have a license to fail suddenly and catastrophically in away that no car owner would tolerate?
I suppose the production volumes aren't huge so things don't get snagged by millions of users but there does seem to be an element of industry denial at work. When we reported the autohelm failure to the manufacturer their help desk said they had never heard of any such issue. Yet the internet is alive with similar reports. Are they just deaf to trouble or is it they don't train their staff? Maybe they just don't care? One high end navigation light manufacturer faithfully replaced our lights under warranty five times when, year after year, they failed during the season. Despite their obvious, and widely reported, failure the manufacturer still advertises these lights as being, "indestructible, maintenance free and so waterproof they could be used on a submarine"!
Then there's the marine environment. I concede that salt water presents lots of challenges but none of our recent failures have been subjected to salt or showed any sign of corrosion, overuse or abuse.
Some say that intermittent use and, in particular long periods of no use, presents real challenges for engineers. But why should a drive train on an expensive electric motor be more vulnerable because it is used 2 months of the year rather than when in continuous use?
Sailing would be so much more fun and less expensive if the guys that make this things refined their designs and manufacturing processes when their products fail. "Built in obsolescence" was killed off in the motor trade 30 years ago so why do we tolerate it on boats and keep shedding out the dollars?
One of these days things will go legal when a boat's throttle fails off a lea shore and folk die because of it. In my trade we would be prosecuted for man slaughter if we could be shown to have negligently turned a deaf ear to previous reported failures. So why is it different in the marine trade?
Let all us Boaties unite and demand better from those who seek to fleece us.
