I worry about gear breaking...in particular anything that would leave me unable to sail back to shore, and expecially anything that might separate me from my board (perhaps you caught my rant about two bolt bases.) I've been fairly lucky in regards to uni breakage (it's only happened to me once...my safety line held, and I didn't trash the deck sailing back to shore) and I inspect my uni's regularly, but after reading a post by Andreas Macke about how he found quite the crack in a tendon, I need to improve my inspection technique.
Check out his story and see for yourself.
(Photo of Andreas' torn UJ swiped from his blog, G-42.)
It's easy to find the cracks like this. The first thing I do when I pull my board out is put on my universal joint and bend it around. Yes every time I sail. If you look by the screws holding the joint in, both top and bottom screws, you'll easily see if one is cracked. I found a few bad joints by using this technique and saved myself many swims to shore.
Posted by: Mike Burns | June 18, 2008 at 11:03 AM
Swims to shore???
Just replace the regular safety line with a spectra one and make sure you don't use a UJ that has the ends on the top and bottom of the tendon in plastic (like the Chinook american double pin one... bad!) and you'll never have to swim again.
Posted by: giampaolo | June 18, 2008 at 01:16 PM