Why Should I Care About The OSA¶

There are many practical, as well as philosophical reasons, why you should care and they are all selfish.

If you find yourself in a far away port with no where to hide from a hurricane or cyclone bearing down on you, and there is a guy on the beach with a stick welder, and you can find some steel plate, and you have a set of OSA prints in your ships papers, then you would at least have the option of making a decent anchor which is larger than your largest and which would otherwise be unavailable to you.

A more everyday example might be the fact that the guy dragging down on you right now, with the undersized plough that came with the boat when he bought it, might not be dragging down on you if an inexpensive but reliable OSAP anchor were available to him.

Beyond the practical, there are philosophical reasons as well. A freely available anchor design which more efficiently uses materials and resources to create a better quality anchor will have a direct economic impact on the individual who needs it most as well as on the planet as a whole.

The notion that one should discard some steel, have it shipped to Asia to be recycled into an anchor shaped piece of steel, shipped back to the the States or Europe where it is bent, so that it can be shipped back to the "manufacturer" in Australia or New Zealand, where it is either repaired or shipped back to Asia, to be recycled again, and then shipped back, using a transportation system entirely dependent on the use of oil, a non-renewable resource, and a production infrastructure likely fueled by coal in a country that doesn't give a crap about air pollution, is completely insane.

All for a lump of steel or aluminium.

The ideal would be the option of going to meet a real live person, who lives in locally to your current position, hiring him to personally manufacture an essential piece of safety equipment from materials he has on hand, and who you could in turn trust with confidence to repair.

You as a cruising sailor can embrace the concept of production by the masses as opposed to mass production as described in EF Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful