I've taken over the dining room table.

You build a boat these days, you spend a certain amount of time cruising the interwebs for stuff on the cheap. Me, I've been looking for line, and a few other odds & ends needed to make the boat work like a real sailboat. It turns out that when you buy a boat kit, it includes everything you need to make it a boat--but not the boat on the brochure cover. Those marketing people! They should be dealt with.

Us boat nerd types sooner or later run into Duckworks, a retail site based somewhere in Texas (huh?), catering to amateur boat builders. They have a good selection of supplies, reasonably priced, and a helpful website. If you're going to build a boat, or just want to research Texan e-commerce, I recommend them.

One of the most puzzling things a person could do is shop for line ("rope" for you landlubbers). Twenty years ago it was a little easier, in a way. You just strolled into West Marine and said "I'm not at my credit limit yet" and whether you needed dock line, halyards or sheets, and they would rig you up and send you out the door hundreds of dollars poorer. And that was if you had a LITTLE boat.

But at least it wasn't too confusing. There were just so many kinds of line that were practical for sailing. But that was then.

Now there are scores of choices for each line applications. You want a halyard (the lines used to raise and lower sails)? Well, how much stretch is okay in that halyard? And what sort of UV exposure will it have? And ...

The same goes for sheets (the lines used to trim the sails) and dock lines and painters and all the rest. It's dizzying. At my age I just can't take it (and, yikes, I don't have time for it either).

Duckworks made it simple. They just figured out which lines are good ones to have for each major application, and they didn't confuse me by giving me any more choices than were really useful. Thanks Duckworks!

Here, on the dining room table, which is now mine (hey, it's summer, we can eat on the deck!), please be amazed by some 3/8" nylon double braid sheet line (the white stuff), some 1/4" Dyneema super technorama .0000000003% stretch halyard line (the stuff with the stripy things), some 5/32" nylon braid (the skinny white stuff, for various lashing and stretching uses), and some hardware stuff in the plastic bag, which has to do with attaching the shrouds to the knees and the yard throat to the mast.

Don't you love all these terms? Sure you do.

On more thing. Three of the hardware thingies from the Duckworks people are turnbuckles. But only two arrived -- the third is back-ordered. Just so you know, Duckworks. I'm waiting.