McGyver

On the bridge there is a small coffee corner: a cupboard, a sink, the coffee machine and a stand-alone water dispenser perched beside them. It looks ordinary enough until you notice what is wedged tightly in the gap. A large roll of tape. Its sole purpose is to stop the water dispenser from vibrating whenever the engines are running. Practical, effective, and not remotely elegant.

Seeing that roll of tape instantly reminded me of my father, Dave. He was not one for careful preparation before a trip. In fact, he was often downright forgetful. But once you were out on the water, there was no one more inventive at fixing whatever broke. He was a kind of McGyver of the seas.

There were three items he always carried. First, electrical tape. He used it on everything: broken cables, leaking pipes, even holes in a muffler. Second, a spindle of waxed marine twine. Hard to describe, but it was a flat, tightly woven black thread, coated in wax to make it flexible and unbelievably strong. With it, he could lash together wood, plastic, or metal and keep it from rattling apart.

Third, cable binders. He kept them in every length and used them for their intended purpose, but also for hanging curtains, mending sandals, or improvising a dozen other fixes. He claimed cable binders were one of the eternal examples of perfect design. Like sharks, they had reached a point where no further evolution was necessary.

Dave did not always pack the obvious essentials, but somehow he always had just what was needed. Those three items lived at the bottom of every duffel bag he owned, alongside a Ziploc bag of important documents, a handful of coins, and the occasional rusted bolt. On the surface it was chaos. Underneath, there was a quiet kind of order.

Looking at that roll of tape stuffed beside the coffee machine, I realised again that there is genius in this sort of craft. Not the kind you find in patents or inventions, but the kind that makes life work in the moment. A practical genius that values results over appearance. Chaos on the outside, yes—but there was a kind of order tucked deep inside.