For those in the know, the Defender yearly sale is always a good time to load up on the needful, and being a cheapseats sailor I don't buy any major purchases until I check the Defender sale...
This saves a lot of money for a variety of reasons and has little to do with the sale price.
Another advantage of putting major purchases off by up to a year is a lot can happen in the months that you find yourself waiting... Those rapturous initial reviews (cobbled from press releases) in the yachting press which hail the new bit of gear you lust after as a "game changer", "revolutionary", and "sexy" are now a hazy memory and being replaced with real word-of-mouth reviews by folks who may not be quite so enraptured with yet another same old same product with various issues of a funky sort and crappy after sales service... Reality, if you will.
Also, as time goes on you realize that the VHF you have works just fine as does the AIS receiver you have and thoughts of "do I really need to spend $279 on something to replace something that works?" filter in to the equation.
So, in my case the list grows and shrinks over the course of a year until you find yourself sitting looking at the Defender site and doing your order (I did mine yesterday) and find the list of 'must gets' has dwindled to a bit of rope (Amsteel) and a killer deal on a handheld VHF. The VHF/AIS unit, new liferaft, the radar and stereo all deemed so important months ago, no longer needed or surplus to requirements... So, if you look at it in the long view, the Defender sale saved me nearly four thousand dollars.
Listening to The Flying Lizards
So it goes...
