Maintenance Fatigue: Cruising’s Silent Killer
01-05-03
“It is finished. It is the mercy.”
Woody re-aligning the engine after fixing the c-drive in the boat
If your house or car broke down as often as a boat, you’d torch it for the insurance. Yes, cruising gets you turquoise bays and smug Instagram posts, but boats are also temperamental, expensive, demanding and forever teetering on the brink of a breakdown. A bit like some of my past relationships.
At first, “fixing things in exotic places” feels like a badge of honour. You tell yourself, this is the real shit right here. A rite of passage. The salt-stained skipper, tools out, wrestling with a heat exchanger while palm trees sway overhead. You even take a selfie or two for the authenticity of it all. Just to prove you’re not just another gin-and-tonic sailor.
At first, “fixing things in exotic places” feels like a badge of honour. But your boat never pays or gives you a weekend off.
But the romance doesn’t last. Because when the kids are snorkelling over a coral reef and you’re yet again elbow-deep in gearbox oil or trying to rebuild a pump with mismatched screws, you realise this isn’t a holiday. It’s a full-time job. And the boss, your boat, never pays or gives you a weekend off.
When Fun Turns to Grind
Nobody casts off imagining they’ll spend their dream rummaging for O-rings in the sweaty backstreets at the arse end of nowhere, or anchored in some fetid bay while customs “process” an essential spare part at glacial speed. Yet sooner or later, that’s the reality of cruising - the point where the honeymoon ends, the grind begins, and you start asking if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Nobody casts off imagining they’ll spend their dream rummaging for spares in the sweaty backstreets at the arse end of nowhere
We’ve had our share. Colombia: a full battery meltdown that left us powerless for weeks. The Maldives: steering rack failure, right as a storm rolled in. The shaft replacement saga: over a year, two continents, and more invoices than I care to count. New Zealand: weeks trapped in a rain-soaked marina, waiting for a part the mechanic never actually ordered. Venezuela: the autopilot died, exactly where you’d least want to hand-steer. Sudan: the water pump failed just as armed men were chasing us down the coast.
Boats don’t stop. They just keep breaking. And it’s not storms or pirates that wear you down — it’s the fatigue. The endless loop of fixing, bodging, waiting, and fixing again until every locker seems to hide another greasy component with your name on it. That slow drip of breakdowns grinds people down far more ruthlessly than any gale.
The endless grind of repairs slowly drags you down and sometimes the boat just demands more than you have left to give.
Every boatyard tells the tale. Hulls lined up on the hard, not sunk in storms or abandoned to fear, but simply worn out. Along with their owners. Most adventures don’t end with drama. They end with a sigh or a spanner hurled at the bulkhead for the last time.
Dip or Dead End?
A dip can be survived with a night’s kip, a strong brew or beer (obviously), or a courier finally turning up with the right paperwork and part. A dead end is when the boat takes more than you can give. Emotionally, physically, or financially. That’s when people quit. Not mid-ocean in a storm, but behind a panel, staring at corroded wiring, leaky pipes or wondering if they’ve just overpaid €400 for another botched weld.
Our journey was littered with buddy boats that couldn’t carry on. Rudder failures. Dismastings. Rotten keel bolts. Severe osmosis. They weren’t beaten by weather or fear, but by the slow attrition of maintenance. The sunsets and snorkelling are real, but so are the bruised knuckles, sleepless nights, and the erosion of joy. In the end, it’s rarely the sea that kills the dream. It’s the gremlins in the mast and the bilge.
A dead end is when the boat takes more than you can give, emotionally, physically, or financially
Fixing Things in Exotic Places
The phrase has become a cliché among sailors, but it’s painfully accurate. “Exotic” loses its shine when you’re sweating through your oil-stained T-shirt in a boatyard while mosquitoes chew your face off.
Still, these disasters do become the stories you tell later. No one wants to hear about the easy sails. They want the drama: the time the engine quit in a busy shipping lane and you drifted past an oil tanker. The time you rebuilt a windlass with chewing gum and blind faith. The time your bow thruster fell off in New Zealand and you had to send the kids down to recover it while the harbour master debated whether to call a diver or social services. Or both. Maintenance is misery in the moment, but occasionally comic gold in hindsight.
The Gold Rush Parallel
Cruising often feels less like a lifestyle choice and more like a Gold Rush. Most days you’re not striking nuggets. You’re knee-deep in mud, sweating in a mosquito pit of an anchorage, or wrist-deep in diesel trying to coax life out of a sulking engine. Every now and then, though, you swirl the pan and something sparkles: a perfect sail, a quiet anchorage, whales off the starboard bow. Those moments are the gold. Rare and fleeting but real. And they’re what keep you churning away.
Most days you’re knee-deep in mud, sweating in a mosquito pit of an anchorage, or wrist-deep in diesel
“There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.”
— Robert W. Service, The Men That Don’t Fit In
Robert W. Service wrote those lines about Klondike prospectors, but he might as well have been describing cruisers. His subjects were misfits. Men who left steady jobs and safe houses to chase fortune in the wilderness. Most found only mud, cold, and misery. But Service admired them anyway, because they couldn’t settle for comfort; they had to chase something wilder, even if it broke them.
Cruisers are cut from the same cloth. We’re the ones who don’t quite fit in, who trade nine-to-five lives for a glittering horizon. Sometimes with gold. Sometimes with rust flakes. Most of the time it’s just bilge water, busted gear, invoices, and customs officials. But every so often, like those Yukon dreamers, we strike a little gold. And for a moment, it all makes sense. Just before the pump fails again to drag us back down to reality.
Cruisers are the ones who don’t quite fit in, who trade nine-to-five lives for bilge water, busted gear and invoices
Davy Jones’ Toolbox
In the end, it isn’t storms, pirates, or even the sea itself that finish most cruising dreams. It’s the toolbox. One or two breakdowns you can laugh off. Years of them will drain the wallet and the willpower of even the most resolute wanderer. Until eventually, even your famed bloody minded stubbornness won’t keep that spanners moving anymore.
But there’s no shame in that. Stepping off doesn’t mean the adventure was wasted. It means you’ve had your share of sunsets and saltwater, and you’ve earned the right to a break. Maintenance may kill the momentum, but it never kills the memories. If anything, the failures make the stories sharper.
That’s the legacy of cruising: long stretches of bilges and bills, punctuated by flashes of pure gold.
“They never have counted the cost of a thing,
And never have weighed the worth;
But they’ll go to the ends of the earth for a dream,
And they’ll die with their dream uncursed.”
— Robert W. Service, The Men That Don’t Fit In
And if that isn’t the cruising life summed up in four lines, I don’t know what is.
If you want more straight-talking tales from life afloat, and information about how maintenance fatigue can kill the cruising dream, then you’ll love our upcoming book. We're inviting early readers to join the pre-launch crew and get behind-the-scenes access as we wrestle it into shape. It’s honest, unfiltered, and occasionally useful. Sign up here to get involved, give feedback, and be part of something that’ll either be a bestseller or a brilliant cautionary tale.
