You Thought That Hole Was for Your Finger?

You’re about to check your oil and coolant levels before you fire up your engine for the day’s voyage because you always do that (you do always do that, right… during your pre-departure checks?). You slide the small latches to the unlocked position, and there is a little swinging door, sort of a teardrop, that covers the hole that you put your finger in to take to engine cover off. You put your finger in there and pull the cover off and set it aside. That was so smart of them to put that hole there, it makes it easy to get the cover off… but why is that swinging door over the hole?

That hole was not put there for your finger, it was put there for the fire extinguisher. Mind blown? Mine was when I first learned about it several years ago and I recently was reminded how many people don’t know it’s safe purpose. It’s rather simple actually… as you know, adding oxygen to a fire feeds that fire, and you never want to feed a fire on board your vessel, so if your engine compartment is on fire, take the extinguisher nozzle and put it in that hole and discharge it into the engine compartment. It’s much safer than taking the door off… and now you know!
Fair Winds
Captain Jeff Vegas

 

After I posted this to my blog, it told me there were not enough words to be relevant to the search engines. Is it cheesy for me to add these extra words just to get to a word count over 300?

Probably, but why does a good idea have to have a minimum number of words to be worth finding? Confucius didn’t use a lot of words, so why should I? Alright, this is 301 words exactly.