That feeling when you have a two-week vacation ahead. The sun is shining from a cloudless sky for the next few weeks. You've stocked up on treats from the store and loaded everything necessary onto the boat, so soy is oozing from every pore. Engine starts, lines untied, and off you go!

But there's not a sound from the engine. The old trick of tapping the starter motor with a hammer produces no signs of life in the 39-year-old Yanmar. Is this the end of its journey just on the first morning of the vacation? Yes, right now. It's so infuriating that blood isn't circulating properly.

The starter costs €1200 at the Yanmar dealer, with a delivery time of a week or two. Neither piece of information is appealing. A quick Google search finds a dealer in Turku with the same, albeit non-original, spare part for a couple of hundred euros. A call there, and they need to know if the current starter has 11 or 15 teeth. Apparently, all the replacement starters they've sold for this engine model have had 11 teeth. So, let's go with that. Delivery time: one week.

A sailboat doesn't leave or come into the dock without a functioning engine. The exception is those captains who, as soon as they learned to crawl, were put on an Optimist dinghy. They know how to handle everything with sails. I wasn't about to start learning the ropes with an 11 m / 7-ton boat.

A week goes by, and the starter arrives. I remove the old starter and encounter a snag: it has 15 teeth, not 11 as the seller claimed. Murphy truly pees right into your pocket, even though he insisted it was just rain.

So, the second week of the vacation is spent waiting for another starter with 15 teeth, not 11.

Capt. Simma

Dictated but not read.