"If you can't repair it, maybe it shouldn't be on board."
- Lin and Larry Pardey
Doing stuff yourself has a whole bunch of advantages for those of us who are into the sailing gig far and above simply saving money...
Doing repairs or projects on a boat is mostly a happy making experience on "So It Goes" and the only repairs and projects that were not happy making involved the gladly departed internal combustion engine. Since the Atomic 4 is now ancient history being replaced by an electric drive, life is good doing the DIY thing.
Being able to do stuff yourself also gives one the sort of confidence to ...well... DO STUFF! Seriously knowing you can do stuff and fix things puts a person into a completely different head space that really can not be explained but has to be experienced. In essence it is the difference between "CAN DO" and "CAN'T DO" and that. brothers and sisters, is POWER!
Once you have the power you begin to look at things differently. The idea of building a watermaker instead of buying one becomes a simple plumbing problem (because that's really all a watermaker is, a bunch of plumbing). Redoing your rigging becomes no more problematic than measuring and cutting some wire or dynex and putting it together. The point is, once you know that there is nothing really hard or difficult about boat work, it all becomes doable providing you have an IQ higher than room temperature.
Of course, there really is a money element to the DIY thing as well, and while it is not the primal core of it all, it IS a BIGGIE as it will save you seriously scary amounts of money over time once you cut the umbilical to the $75 (or more) an hour charges that even simple tasks in the marine trades go for and that is no bad thing...
