Radio Free Darryl and Captain Thirsty have been on a rant again.....if you recall they were introduced to you all in the ZOSHAS WAKE entry of October 6, 2011.. you might remember that they had some interesting thoughts on how the Russians are controlling the world's weather with Nikola Tesla's secret weather machine that he developed for the Nazi's as a secret weapon in WWII and was confiscated by the Russians at the end of the War when they took control of Berlin. Anyways, RFD and CT are ranting because the weather here of late has been horrible, rainy, cold, wet.....not conducive to boat work....or any other activity especially for liveaboards ......we hole up down below till it blows thru....often going a little "stir crazy"....as a result there is nothing new to report on ZOSHA'S deck re-non-skid project so I thought that maybe you guys would appreciate some comments on junk drawers. As long as I can remember, in every place that I have ever lived as a child, adolescent, or adult we, my family, or I always had a junk drawer. This drawer served as the repository for all matter of stuff....old screws, rubber bands, batteries, miscellaneous tools, gizmo's, whatchamacallits, doohickeys, thingamajigs, brackets, magnets, fishhooks, old candy, broken things, church keys, marbles, holy cards, springs, nails, pocketknives, etc., etc, etc. It was always jammed full of goodies and packed to the very brim. More often than not it was hard to get open and shut because there was always so much stuff crammed in there. If you were like me, you never really remembered where all this stuff came from. Sometimes in a moment of well intentioned orderliness you, we, decide to organize the junk drawer and get rid of all the crap that we don't need.....RIGHT!! So we start out by making little piles of stuff: pile #1 is the good stuff that is going back into the drawer, pile #2 is the kinda good stuff that we might want to keep, pile #3 is the stuff we are not sure about yet as to what we are going to do with, and pile #4 is the stuff we are tossing away. As we work through our treasures more and more stuff is taken out of pile #4 and put back into either #1, #2, or #3.....so after about an hour of screwing with all this stuff, we just say....."Aah, I'll do this later" and dig down into the trash to recover those valuables that we did toss away and throw everything back into the junk drawer push it shut and grab a brew. Does this sound familiar to you?? Man!! those big junk drawers are nice.....but now we are liveaboards and you all know that even quite large boats usually have little drawers and little boats like ZOSHA have minuscule drawers!!.... so what do we do for our sacred junk drawer? Its a dilemma all right!
In a house these junk drawers are often very useful and handy but on a boat a proper junk drawer can often mean the difference between life and death.....survival or not.....WHAT??? you say??? yes....listen to me .....boats are very complicated creations....some are engineering marvels....they are full of all kinds of paraphernalia that require specialized emblements to operate effectively. What happens when one of these things break and we don't know where to turn? Where do we go ....you know it....eventually we end up at the junk drawer....looking for that odd piece of whatever that will fix our problem. My premise is that Junk Drawers are a critical piece of safety equipment for all boaters. It is impossible to try and purchase one of everything and keep it tucked away in the event that you might need it one day....most of us don't have the dinero to pull this off.....so we randomly replenish our junk drawers when the opportunity presents itself. Nothing wrong with that.
On ZOSHA there is no junk drawer........"Oh the hypocrisy" you say!!! No ,No wait a second.......
What I do have is even better than a drawer.....I have a super dooper professional throw down Official Bassmaster Approved tackle box that serves as my vessel's junk drawer. You could live outta this thing. Its got drawers and bins and boxes and sliding compartments and trays and secret niches..... its a portable junk drawer on steroids. This thing is terrific; however, it does have an inherent dilemma attached......"how in the heck do you fill it up?" When a little 1", #6, ss self-tapping flat head is twenty cents and a tiny ss hose clamp is over a buck at West Marine.....a person could spend untold amounts of the green stuff to properly stock a junk receptacle of this magnitude! My answer is to become a scrounger.......my huny-bunny and I visit the local boatyards on Sundays or on Special Days like her birthday or today, Valentine's Day and walk the yard looking down scrutinizing..... we find all kinds of treasures.....perfectly good stainless screws, lock nuts, fender washers, bolts, bronze screws and nuts and fittings, perfectly good hose clamps, all kinds of stuff.....we pick all this good stuff up and it disappears into the junk drawer/Official Bassmaster Tacklebox to await the day when this obscure little item will save the day and complete the cycle and fulfill its manifest destiny.
Take care my friends..........Happy Valentine's Day........seeya
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