Those of you whose favorite TV program is “Hoarders”, take heart.
In 1978, I heard a cute girl say she wanted to learn how to sail. I ran right out and bought an old Mirror dinghy and told her I would teach her. She said, “In your dreams.”
I gave the boat to my family where it sailed on a lake until rotting out and taking a last ride to the dump. The spinnaker pole has followed me around for decades like a lost kitten. Countless times as I’ve sorted, cleaned shops, downsized, and moved, I’ve held it in my hands and almost sent it off to a new life as beer cans but always kept it.
The builders of my mast took the crazy shortcut of drilling the upper mast tang hole to the size of the compression tube so it could just be inserted from the outside like a bushing instead of acting like a proper compression tube. I just went down to measure the tube so as to order a larger tube to take the compression. I looked over, saw the spinnaker pole in the junk pile, pulled the end off, and what do you know? It is an almost perfect fit. About 30 bucks saved just by carrying this spinnaker pole around for 32 years and a half dozen moves.
In 1978, I heard a cute girl say she wanted to learn how to sail. I ran right out and bought an old Mirror dinghy and told her I would teach her. She said, “In your dreams.”
I gave the boat to my family where it sailed on a lake until rotting out and taking a last ride to the dump. The spinnaker pole has followed me around for decades like a lost kitten. Countless times as I’ve sorted, cleaned shops, downsized, and moved, I’ve held it in my hands and almost sent it off to a new life as beer cans but always kept it.
The builders of my mast took the crazy shortcut of drilling the upper mast tang hole to the size of the compression tube so it could just be inserted from the outside like a bushing instead of acting like a proper compression tube. I just went down to measure the tube so as to order a larger tube to take the compression. I looked over, saw the spinnaker pole in the junk pile, pulled the end off, and what do you know? It is an almost perfect fit. About 30 bucks saved just by carrying this spinnaker pole around for 32 years and a half dozen moves.
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