REDUNDANCY REDUNDANCY

I hate head seas. But there we were in a single-engine boat, headed straight into one, making a rather salty crossing of the Florida Straits and infamous Gulf Stream. There was repeated pitching into the close, steep waves, with the bow moving up, then smacking down.

What captain, faced with those conditions, wouldn’t wonder whether all of that motion might stir up junk in the fuel tanks? It was as if the thought made it happen: The engine started to lose rpm. I throttled down and checked the fuel filter vacuum gauge. Even at idle, it showed high vacuum pressure, which most often means a clogged filter. Fortunately, the boat was equipped with twin primary filters, and I moved the valve over to feed the fuel through the second filter. I returned to the bridge and the engine was back to normal. Saved.

That event made me think about other areas where parallel, redundant systems are valuable. Smart cruisers have a good spare-parts inventory; the farther offshore they venture, the better that inventory should be.

But having spare parts overlooks another approach to reliability: creating independent, side-by-side systems to avoid single-point failure.

Which of your boat’s systems would give you some kind of immediate backup, especially if the loss of that system would put