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To Buy or Not to Buy
What is need? I start to look at all the possible things I could buy online and I 
quickly lose track of what I need and what I want takes over.
I went to the Intensity Sails site to take a look at their prices on a few pieces of hardware we needed down at the club. Our project this spring is to rig one of our four club Lasers so that prospective Laser sailors get a chance to see how a good Laser feels; right now I can’t even tell you exactly what I was looking for.
I know that I clicked on Laser gear and I saw a picture of bailer springs and I began to wonder if my bailer really worked that well. It seemed that the best way to figure out what I would really buy was just to put anything I thought I might want into the shopping cart and then make my final choices when I was ready to checkout.
They had Fast Pins! It seemed time to stop fussing with the split ring that holds the vang on. I use to have Fast Pins on my bigger boats, but I don’t switch out to the radial rig that often on the Laser, so I’ve held off changing out the split ring. I have three Lasers so I decided that I should try the pin on one and see whether it had any drawbacks. I was truly gone My anchor point was now to add whatever I wanted to the cart and if I only got one I was saving money – at this rate I could save enough to go broke.
The real question was whether to buy new control lines or not? It’s been four years, but I keep the boat covered and I don’t sail in all that much heavy air. I saw the Maffioli Swift Cord and I could quite literally feel the softness of the new line in my hand. I love the feel before the dirt and sun do their thing to it. But I don’t remember any wear at all on my lines. Should I go look under the cover and check? I decided to just put the line in my cart and figure it out latter.
After I had added nine or ten items to the cart I started the checkout process and was floored at the accumulation of little expensive things I’d bought. I clearly wasn’t going to spend that much. So I started through and after dropping a half a dozen items I had the price down to a point I could breathe. Of course, it was still higher than I had imagined when I got started and very little of the stuff was for the club boat, but it was a lot less than the full cart had been.
So I stopped and considered whether I would continue with the purchase or not. Do I really need to finish this? I bought; the line feels great. I’ll skip a couple of lunches and balance it out that way. Soon I’ll look under the cover to see whether I really did need the line – better yet maybe I’ll give my old line to the club. To give or not to give?
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