"Beare's Law of Accumulating Catastrophe at Sea - BLAC"

This is a personal law inspired by my accident-prone experiences at sea. It is stated as such:

"At sea a minor problem can cause another problem and accumulate into a crisis at a rate proportional to the conditions."

For example, imagine you are at sea and sailing along nicely a few miles off the coast of Corsica.  You have the Genoa poled out and are running downwind.  You are single handed.  You pop down below to make yourself a cup of tea.  Everything is fine.  All of a sudden the wind shifts and you gybe. The pole is under extreme pressure as the genoa is backed. As the boat lurches you are scolded with coffee.  You rush on deck to see the wind picking up and the boat wallowing.

You are confident you will soon bring things under control.  However, the wind is gusting alarmingly. A squawl from the hills. You cannot get the whisker pole off the genny sheet. You try to furl the genny and the furler conrol line parts. You know you should have replaced it but never got around to it.  You look up and in horror you see a ship coming at you dead ahead. The wind gusts and the boat is knocked down. You slip and land hard on deck bruising your arm.  In a panic you start the engine and get the broken furler line around the prop.

And so it accumulates...  

At sea things rarely seem to go wrong in isolation.  This leads onto Beare's second law of the sea.

"At sea, things go wrong in batches."

And very often they cause eachother. Sometimes they all seem to happen at once. Regardless of the cause and nature of the problem the work involved in solving them is related to the weather.  It goes without saying that it's easier to replace a halyard when the boat is lashed to a pontoon in a marina on a nice calm day.