TOOLED UP

When my wife, Christina, and I set off for fulltime cruising, we sold our house and got rid of a generation’s worth of stuff. It was tough, but we got it done.

The hardest part was letting go of the tools I had gathered and used over a lifetime of building and repairing boats. Table saws, a bandsaw, planers and a drill press would not fit in a 40ft boat. As painful as it was, we finally pared the tool collection down to the minimum. It all fits into a five-drawer toolbox and three extraneous tackleboxes. Plus, we have a few odds and ends in critical places—the tools for routine generator service, for example, are in a box near the generator, while tools for routine dinghy