Jan. 27, 2005--TOO MUCH JUNK!
(Things accumulate to fill the space available)
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

	The shelves are full--Ferreting for fastenings in our treasure trove.

The danger of large stowage capacity on a yacht is that it is tempting to accumulate too much. Some cruisers have the ability to keep their boats light and tidy. On multihulls it is a must to keep weight down and performance up. We have met people who are amazing the way they can limit their needs to a minimum. However for packrats of our variety, ample space simply encourages more gear to creep aboard.

It may all have started early in our married life when we kept a little run-about on a mooring at Locarno Beach on Vancouver's Spanish Banks. In the summer it was easy to reach her at high tide with bare legs. But the cold winter water called for hip wader boots. I bought a new pair when the first ones started to leak. Jane, keen to keep our apartment neat, put the old ones out with the garbage. I discovered that I was left with two right foot hip waders. Ever since we have been hesitant to throw anything away.

For extended cruises, stowing provisions, spares and all the personal effects that you may want to have along takes plenty of space. There never seems to be enough room. Before we built MAGIC DRAGON we had seen many yachts with bunks for six or eight but no stowage to speak of. So we limited ourselves to fewer bunks, but we designed plenty of stowage into the equation. With 21 drawers, 72 feet of shelves behind doors, 27 feet of open shelves, 21 feet of bookshelves, 6 feet of hanging lockers, a four foot oilskin locker, lockers under two double bunks and under seats, as well as some 30 feet of shallow dry bilge space under the floor boards and a six by four foot motorcycle hold five feet deep, MAGIC DRAGON is not short of stowage space. But nevertheless it did not take long before we found things to fill most everything up.

The hold is full--As seen from the stern cabin.

The single bunk in the stern passageway was intended to be our sail stowage in pre-roller furling days, and after stowing the various spinnakers, storm sails and headsails (we never know if one of those may be needed even today, God forbid) we still found enough room for spare sheets, spare blocks, a bosun's chair--and countless other treasures too numerous to list, too precious to get rid of.

Since we have a big hold (also known as 'The Garage') we keep a gaggle of fenders, even a big tire just in case. We soon discovered it to be a good place to keep 5-gallon cans of engine oil, as well as outboard oil, dive tanks, water hoses, some tools such as an axe, a sledgehammer, a shovel, a big crow bar, a pipe bender, a bushman's bow saw, as well as a trolley wagon, a wringer roller for laundry, the dinghy's rudder and centerboard and extra oars. The 4-inch work vise makes a good bracket for the outboard when under way. And of course the Honda 90 trail bike has its support brackets in there and is a long-term inhabitant. I won't, for space restrictions, list the rest.

As time went by, various drawers and shelves adopted their own special purposes: His and Hers clothes drawers, shelves for food stowage and for boxes of spare parts. (The former is gradually encroached upon by the latter) We made holders for fishing rods, and shelves for reference books as well as special homes for other precious items. All important things eventually found their own safe locations, from extra anchors and ground tackle in readily accessible bilge spaces, to tools in their boxes, to all the bits and pieces like sextant, binoculars, cameras, pens, pencils and paper in designated bins and drawers and nooks and crannies. For many years we knew fairly well where we kept what.

	Drawers are full too.

But over time, thanks to ample stowage space, we could always find room for more things and goodies that might come in handy. Why dispose of anything that may be useful one day when there is somewhere where it can be kept? So, little by little, things grew out of control.

In our current list of Things to Do, one item reads 'TOSS OUT JUNK'. We've been 39 years afloat. We've been together nearly 50 years. We own far too much of most everything, and almost all of it is on the boat. We carry all our slides and photographs, decades' worth of logs and journals. We have too many hats, too many books, far too many outdated files. We admire organized people, those with more will. We know boat dwellers who bring absolutely nothing aboard unless something else is removed. But both of us are hoarders, squirellers away, loath to part with anything since that dreadful day two left hip waders went away with the rubbish.

We even keep graded bags of lines and strings in various lengths and diameters, too short to be of any use you might say. But often we find we need one or several of them for tying up loose ends, for securing this or that. We never know. We carry bits of wood, plywood and dowelling; pipes and tubes in various lengths and of various materials; plumbing fittings--plastic, bronze and galvanized; SS and alu bar, sheet, rod; fastenings galore. We frequently ferret through the collections to find the exact piece of material to build some new gizmo, or to repair something. We'd never dream of going anywhere without inner tubes, increasingly hard to find. We often use patches and strips of them. Among many other uses, we make inner tube pump diaphragms backed with sailcloth for our various water pumps. It has served to make waterproof mast boots on several of our friends' yachts. We patch our gumboots with it.

Book shelves are full. Our reference books are heavy on trees, shrubs, birds, shells, dictionaries.

We have spares for most everything, even for things we no longer have. Someone breaks down in a remote place. I can go to our treasure trove and pick out something we've been carrying round for years, something we ourselves will never need--a pump or just an impeller, a filter, a fastener or a sail. Whatever. We just bought a set of valve guides, and a head gasket for our Isuzu engine. "Got to have spares. You never know. It's best to have them on hand," we tell each other. After all, we have nearly 17000 hours on the 75hp workhorse.

We still have our Royal manual typewriter hidden away. "Just in case. Who knows what may happen?" We also have the last three laptops and a Kodak printer on board, a number of cameras, a couple of tape recorders. "Too good to toss." Cans of paints and varnish are kept for the next paint jobs. Old clothes are kept for rags. Old plexiglass portlights and rigging wires are stowed for spare. Trouble is, we forget what we have or where it's stashed. We have been known to buy new things in desperation because we simply couldn't find the elusive ...whatever. But the usual ploy is--don't panic. Don't waste time searching. It will surface. It usually does--when we are looking for something else.

If we could change ourselves we would. Perhaps it's too ingrained? Perhaps it's too late? Just today, I examined our recently replaced old gas sniffer, grown too sensitive. "I can't throw this away. Look at the switches, the LCD lights. See the wee speaker. Bits of it may come in handy." Then a dead Uniden VHF microphone turned out to be fixable so we now have a spare one of those to stow. Things accumulate to fill the space available...