Crew laugh when asked if they have a MacGyver moment to share. Their automatic response: “Which one?”
Give yourself a lift: Ask Joshua Bekker, 30, chief engineer on M/Y Latitude, a 47-meter Vripack yacht, what tool he reached for when he had to improvise.“Brain power. I used a pulley system to lift a shaft back onto the gearbox. I put a pulley onto the engine room ceiling, and I tied a line around the shaft and then up onto the ceiling’s pulley. Then I hoisted up the shaft so that it could meet the gearbox again.”
From temp to permanent: Alex Pujol, 52, chief engineer of the 140-foot Pershing M/Y Cabo, recalls one of his. “Before I was an engineer, I was a shore-based contractor, and I had to go to a boat in a place where there weren’t very many parts and resources available. I had to MacGyver a whole battery bank from just an assortment of different batteries to make things work. I’m like, look, this is just temporary until you get back to Fort Lauderdale so you can fix it properly. Well, I ran into them four years later and they were still running on that MacGyver.”
A bespoke gadget: Oben Desir, 32, bosun on M/Y Cabo ended up inventing a tool. “On some steps, the teak started coming up with some still stuck down. I had to find a way to go between the wood and metal to cut the rubber from underneath the teak without damaging the wood. I bought a small metal cable that you use for brakes on a bike to use as a spar. Because it’s metal, if you rub it against the rubber back and forth like a saw, it cuts through, and that’s how I fixed it.”
Anchor’s away: Drew Ralphs, 25, bosun on the 194-foot Amels expedition yacht Just B, recalls the day the anchor ran off. “We have this big commercial anchor setup, and the anchor jumped out of the roller and started free running at quite a speed. It was just going and going. Then it hit the bitter end, and we had the anchor dangling. We used Spectra line — which has 10 times the tensile strength of steel — and dragged it up to our anchor winch to pull two tons of anchor up to make enough slack and then we used our crane to put it back in its place. I don’t know what tool you could create to sort such a unique experience.”
Stuff happens: “We had our main engine strainer basket fall into the water,” said Collin Edds, 22, mate engineer aboard an 86-foot Sunseeker. “We had to make a strainer basket out of something like chicken wire until we could get a new one shipped to us. We just bent the wire up and then we were able to Zip-Tie it and we also put part of a rubber hose on the bottom to make (something) like a gasket to seal it. A Zip Tie is a best friend on a boat.”
Staying ahead of the curveball: Jake Cooke, 33, land-based engineering project manager on the 133-foot M/Y Serenity, describes his software invention. “I was a chief engineer on board from 2016 to 2019, so I know the boat like the back of my hand. When I rejoined the boat in 2023, it was in dire shape; none of the (intervening) engineers had kept any records or logs.
“I started writing stuff manually on an Excel spreadsheet, and then my captain, Dean McInnis, and I teamed up and created our own AI-integrated maintenance scheduling software. We’re now in the process of marketing and selling it. It’s called YachtCmart.
