Quite a few issues of safety, in the yachting world, come down to the preferences of the skipper and crew. There will never be universal agreement on how (or if) to use tethers, or on where a life raft should be kept, or on whether an extra EPIRB is a better investment than an AIS-B transponder upgrade.

We can, however, apply some general principles of risk analysis and risk mitigation at the design stage. The maritime world already has some ways of figuring this out, but for today, I think I'll shake things up a bit with some principles from a different field: ionizing radiation.

Since we have a lower gear case in pieces anyway, I may as well write about how the bottom end of your outboard engine is put together. This is one of those clever mechanisms that we boaters usually just take for granted, and trust the shop to deal with when it fails. It's kind of cool to see how it all works.

In the news this week, we have a case of life imitating Hollywood.

In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond's nemesis-of-the-week spoofed a GPS signal to send a British warship into Chinese waters, while its captain and crew thought it was still on the right side of the border. Now, a University of Texas team has (with the skipper's permission) done exactly the same thing to a superyacht cruising the Med.