I have a friend, James, who bought a yacht in the States, sailed it to the Lebanon where he lives with his wife and kids. He gutted the yacht and eventually rebuilt it to the most amazingly high standard. He replaced all the fittings and equipment and very generously donated some of the bits and bobs to my project.

So at 07.00 one morning, I had a call from the customs handling agents at Heathrow.
'Miss Adams, can you tell us whats in the package from Beirut please'

They had obviously scanned the box and seen a mass of wires, guages and god knows what else. All James told me was he was sending his old intrument and breaker panel, plus a few other things.
I explained it was all a gift with no commercial value but was very important to me, and I hoped they would believe me and not call bomb disposal!!

I had a whole bunch of duty, handling and delivery to pay and wait 5 days for it to arrive. Well, it was like christmas in July when I opened the box. I couldnt risk lifting the box as it was so heavy, so I took out the carefully wrapped items one by one.

Dear James, you are such a sweetie, its as though you knew just what I needed. Thank you
To top it off was a book on boat electrics, my weak subject. At least I can try and understand watts, amps, amphours volts, ohms, AC and DC, not to mention the confusing variety of batteries, chargers, inverters, combi inverters, inverter chargers, trickle chargers,............Now do you see how complex it is?