Have you ever tried to fence in a bored dog? He or she will worry away at one piece of fence (wood, wire, dense hedge – it doesn’t matter what it’s made of), not exerting that much force, but always in the same place. Sometimes it takes hours, sometimes it takes days, but eventually a hole will appear. Then it will grow and grow until the dog can get through it.
Even in a fairly calm sea, a boat pitches and rolls. Ropes and sails chafe wherever they touch something else – that’s why ocean-going skippers sacrifice downwind performance by over-sheeting the main and over-tightening the boom vang to keep the sail off the rigging.
Electrical cables running to the masthead are often victims – a day or so ago, Jonny Malbon spotted a problem just in time to prevent a cable being sliced through where it entered at the foot of the mast. I’m sure there would have been a grommet designed to prevent that happening, but there are many ways of failing to seat a grommet properly. Been there, done that, too embarrassed to accept the tee-shirt… Be honest: how many times have you forgotten to thread a cable through a grommet, and solved the problem by slicing the grommet and fitting it round a cable that’s already in the hole? You might get away with it wiring a house, but don’t do it anywhere on a boat.
Fiddly things that take heavy loads are notorious for failing under repeated ‘worrying’. More than one Vendée skipper has had troubles with the mast carriages that position halyards and battens. I wonder if they were very slightly damaged or misaligned when they were installed?
Preparing a boat for successful ocean sailing is a zero-defects quality control challenge. Ideally, one or more observant and hypercritical inspectors should use a written list to inspect all potential failure points – and never accept a ‘good enough for government work’ situation. There will be enough failures of properly-installed equipment without adding preventable ones to the list.
