There are a lot of elements to learning someone else’s systems. Electrical, water, gas, communications (comms), navigation (navs), and the list goes on. We’re learning so much about our boat and the former owner’s systems.
One of those systems is maintenance. The former owner, Steve, left this boat in great condition. Crescendo is 17 years old, but she doesn’t look it, thanks to Steve’s diligence. That said, she continues to need maintenance. Yesterday I (Nan) took an inventory of the different cleaning products already on the vessel. At first, I started to list the names of the products, but then I had a brilliant idea (if I do say so myself) to take pictures of all the products and add them to our Crescendo OneNote folder.
Why is this brilliant, you ask? One thing that has been super frustrating, for Ted in particular, though I don’t exactly love it, is that everything boat related seems to take at least twice as long as it should, if not four or ten times longer. Both of us liken solving boat issues to figuring out life in the jungle of Papua, Indonesia. Over there, people would talk about “jam karet” (jam=time, and karet=rubber) aka time elasticity. It often seemed that, the more pressing the issue, or the longer the list of tasks needing to be accomplished on any given day, the amount of time it took to solve any given issue expanded to take way more time than could possibly be reasonable. We’ve already run into plenty of ‘jam karet’ moments even in our first month of working on our long list of items.
So, my idea was brilliant because it might cut down on how much time we need to get at least this one thing, supply shopping, done. I thought, if I put the pictures on OneNote, which we both have on our phones, then when we’re out running around, we have an easy visual of all the things Steve has used to keep this boat in such great shape. Even if we go a different direction in how we care for it, the reference point is helpful.
This morning, our delightful son Willem was out removing rust and polishing chrome. Ted was out getting one of our LPG tanks recertified when Willem ran out of the rust remover. Ted reports that it was easier to find the replacement bottle at West Marine because he had a photo of it. Now, to figure out where to store all of these products. If you look closely at those pictures, you can tell that I’m taking those pictures in several locations inside and outside the boat. For now, those pictures help because I can look at the background of the picture to figure out which of the many little cubbies it might be in. I can’t fault Steve for his organizational system. Everybody works differently, and his system clearly worked for him. The trick now will be, as we figure out where we want to keep things, remembering where those new locations are when we need the items again!