You know when you’re at a bus stop and the bus is running late or you’re at a laundry and the machine is acting up, or someone has a cool dog or someone with a cute kid at the grocery store or someone comes up while you are working on something or eighty thousand other scenarios where, momentarily, you cross paths with a stranger and have a little impromptu chat? I like that. My impression is that people are so god damned crazy it’s refreshing and redeeming to just touch base with someone sane and realize that world isn’t, at least in that moment, as berserk as it seems. But here’s the rub: affability does not necessarily a smooth transaction make.

So, the boat had a major refrigeration system on board. It was state of the art in 2002, water-cooled, pump, condenser unit in the stern, copper lines, plates that were 14” x 14” and 4” thick. It was a project just to get all the non-functioning old stuff out. And so the project began. I wanted a real fridge with a freezer that could keep ice cream solid and I was ready to foot the bill to get what I wanted. So, did some research online and went with Seafrost, a company that many cruisers had recommended and yes, they answered their phones and everyone at the outfit was affable. Their local installer was a little odd but he too was affable and of course I learned a little bit about his life as he had to come to my boat a dozen times over the course of two years because the bloody hell fridge kept on flaking.

Please listen. This unit did not take the standard refrigerant. It took another type that got colder but the problem was that it had to be re-charged with a scale and the tank and hoses and gauges and where the hell does one find all this shit or this oddball refrigerant in the middle of nowhere… Jesus it is now coming back to me PTSD that I was actually shopping for the hoses, scale and tank of spare refrigerant … Just to dig that financial hole deeper. The installer (I should say connector & charger because I installed the system myself) would come, charge, recharge, get on the phone to the manufacturer … and the best result we ever had was one of the plates froze properly, the other never was more than cool. Only way down in one corner did anything get icy. So time went on and when we were down to a year before departure, I finally said, “No.”  That system just was not going to work. It was a spill over so I put in a separate system in the fridge side, Technautics. I put it in myself. It worked better than the costly freezer and when it had a leaky valve, they sent me another and I replaced it and re-charged the whole system successfully by myself. I then went full bore and tore out all of the initial system. $4500 down the drain. Was able to get $450 for the condenser unit. Dumped the whole thing. Put in another Technautics in the freezer. It actually froze things. And, when one of the plates imploded, they sent me a new one and I actually installed replacement plate and got it running again—myself. It has to be that way. There is no way one is going to find a refrigeration tech anywhere outside the US. They might exist, but are they in your vicinity in the window that you are there?  Good luck on that. Unless you are super salty, like Thor Heyerdahl salty, like you can live on a raft made of reeds and eat canned food for eternity, refrigeration is very important. And, though I appreciate affability, it was, for me, not a wise determiner for key kit transactions.