Sweet spots and sailing

I'm taking a beginning sailing class, and that has me scheming about ways to continue sailing after the class is over, namely buying a sailboat. Last time I was at the library I stumbled across Jerry Cardwell's Sailing Big on a Small Sailboat, which is a real gem.

This blog isn't about sailing, so I'll skip to the part about living a deliberate life. Cardwell's thesis is that sailing is most enjoyable on sailboats that are just large enough to have an enclosed cabin, yet light and small enough to be towed by a regular passenger vehicle. He writes,

...many people who are tired of the complexity, equipment and maintenance costs, crew requirements, and limited sailing time on their big boats are downsizing in order to continue sailing, and to actually do more of it...For many of us, life is in great need of a heavy dose of the simplicity these smaller sailboats offer.

Caldwell argues that this size is the sweet spot: just large enough to have all the amenities of a large yacht, but small enough to keep things simple. Larger boats need a place to dock, a large piston engine, maneuvering thrusters, multiple sailors, trailering permits, specialized repair and launching facilities, and can cost more than a house. Trailerable sailboats cost about as much as an economy car and depreciate rapidly. The set-up and tear-down process is inherently quicker, making you more likely to actually sail.

This kind of analysis is key in any resource-intensive activity. It takes a certain minimum expenditure to to get fully running, to get to the "real deal." Spending more on top of that provides diminishing returns; the marginal reward of each additional dollar or hour is less and less.

In sailing, the sweet spot seems to be 22-24' trailerable sloops. In video games, you need a complete system and a large television, but don't need the latest technology. In carpentry you do need a large, stable workspace, but only need a few well-chosen tools. In cooking you need one great knife, a few good pots and pans, and a few other implements, but you don't need gadgets or gizmos. In amateur drag racing you need 300-400 horsepower to make driving a challenge, but beyond that parts costs escalate rapidly. And so on.

I don't think there's any point in pursuing an activity if you can't afford to get to the sweet spot, and it's rare that spending past the sweet spot is really worth it. I'll be reviewing my hobbies to verify that I'm in each one's sweet spot.

Dead car battery

Amanda and I both own cars. My commute is a walk, and Amanda's car works better for routine errands, so my car is relegated to "backup" duty. A couple weekends ago we tried to use it while taking her car to the shop for some maintenance, and found that the battery had drained out and my car wouldn't start.

The car was boxed in on an incline in a busy parking lot, so jumping it was impossible and moving it would be a risky feat of strength. According to my Hank Hill-approved maintenance file, the battery is 5 years old; young enough to be salvageable. After some analysis I decided the most prudent solution was to order a battery charger online, wait for it to arrive, then recharge the battery outside the car.

Right now we're on the "charging" step. The charger registered a fault at the fastest charge rate, so I'm trying the slowest charge rate. The battery might be toast -- which would be unsurprising for a 5 year old battery that's been deep-cycled -- but hopefully I can nurse it back.

This whole thing reinforces several rules of thumb:

1. Keeping (comically) detailed maintenance records has a concrete benefit.
2. Modern cars are outrageously complex. They are full of limitations (need electricity to start) and patchwork fixes (rechargeable batteries) that may fail (drain out after a month of non-use).
3. If you can afford to be patient, you save money. The charger took a week to come from Amazon via free shipping, but was a lot cheaper than buying a charger or new battery locally.
4. Every "thing" in your life has the potential to cost time and money, even seemingly-inert things like parked cars.
5. Keeping an old car running feels expensive because it amounts to occasional out of pocket expenses, but in reality it's usually cheap. A $31 charger is a lot less than a single monthly payment on a new car.
6. If my car were parked in my own garage this would have been easier to solve. Houses offer a lot of little miscellaneous benefits.

Free Online Magazines

I just discovered The Winding Road, an online-only magazine about cars rather like Car & Driver. Like a traditional print magazine, it's published monthly and typeset into a page-based layout. Subscribers can access an in-browser viewer application that simulates reading a paper magazine two pages at a time. Subscription is free; the magazine is supported by advertisements embedded in the magazines.

I'm pretty happy that something like this exists, and frankly surprised I didn't find out about it earlier.

I've replaced nearly all of my magazine and newspaper consumption with blogs, because blogs:

• are free
• don't create the clutter of old issues
• don't involve the waste of printing and shipping
• are upfront about their viewpoint/bias
• are written by enthusiastic volunteers or entrepreneurs
• don't pester me with misleading renewal ads
  

However, blogs fall short in a small number of areas. Blog posts tend to be limited to the equivalent of a printed page or so, and sometimes I appreciate an article that goes into more depth. I also appreciate professional-grade writing, and frankly this is rare among blogs. And there are some kinds of articles -- testing very expensive equipment, for example -- that require resources and connections that individual bloggers can't muster.

So I'm happy to see this compromise of a professionally-written periodical that's still free and supported by ads. This combines several of the "pros" of blogs I listed above, with the "pros" of print magazines. I read somewhere that magazines get nearly all of their revenue from advertising, not sales, so this business model should be sustainable.

Hopefully more magazines like this will crop up, covering a variety of topics. Then I could finally ax my last couple magazine subscriptions.