Sealed up for all time

It ostensibly was an easy install. Stick a weather receiver on the hardtop, a quick and easy pull into the console and plug the little beastie in. The mechanics of the job are simple. Remove four nuts along with the collection of assorted washers used as shims for the cap nuts and some threaded bolts that hold the antenna mount to the plate. Right under the plate is a commodious pull to the console. So far so good and less than fifteen minutes have been expended and then everything went to hell in a hand basket.

This should be a piece of cake job. It's not like I haven't encountered this scenario before but it begs two points. First when you install something on a boat you should anticipate that someday you will have to remove it. Secondly although not intuitive you can do things too damn well and this is a case in point.

If you can imagine it, it's already happening

How quickly is technology advancing? The answer is exponentially. I used Gorp as an example paddling across a river on a floating log around 10,000BC. The bolt of mental lightning had struck. Gorp no float. Log float. Gorp sit on log and float. It would be another couple thousand years, and many toes lost to piranha before the log was hollowed out by Urp to make a canoe. The reality is an early man was probably using crude boats made from reeds and bamboo much earlier than this, they just didn't survive through the ages to prove it.

The point of the diagram is to show the relative rate of technological change. In my graph, it took Gorp about 5000 years to evolve from paddling to figuring out you could use the wind and save the calories. Looking back from today's perspective it seems it should have been obvious, but it was a long hard slog to get there. Gorp only had stone tools and they weren't exactly precision devices. The weaving of fabrics is still over 5000 years away in Gorp's far future when the first sailboats will finally appear. Crikey, we didn't have the practical tools to make boats out of wood planks until the Bronze age when the rocket scientists of the day started producing tools out of metal. This was 7000 years later in Gorp's future to come. Things started to move much faster when we learned to write things down saving the information we have learned. The printing press sped things up too.