February 12, 2003
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PRIDE GOES BEFORE YOUR MAST FALLS
I think it’s important, when sailing, to accede when you are wrong. One of the guys in our sailing club once scoffed at me for the idea of using a keychain ring as a ring-ding for securing a pin for a stay. He said he only trusted ring-dings that came from West Marine. Well, once we were out sailing, and the mast on our boat came crashing down. The ring-ding securing the pin for the starboard-side shroud had somehow warped and opened up. Well, someone had a paperclip in their backpack, so we stepped the mast back up and secured it with a paperclip. It’s still there actually. I suggested to this guy that we should replace this paperclip sometime with a real ring-ding because it is now rusty. He said, “Well the paperclip is doing the job.” The same guy who said, “I wouldn’t trust a keychain” which mind you is usually stainless steel, is telling me that a paperclip which is rusty is “doing its job”. Well, sometime this winter, I plan to go over the boat storage space and change that paperclip, cuz I would not want that mast to come crashing down on someone’s head (and it almost did, because the above-mentioned guy was swimming in the water at the time the mast came down), all because some guy thinks a rusty paperclip can do what a stainless steel keychain ring could do better.
