Arild, It's not that I distrust electronics through inexperience. I was a radio hacker when the term referred to building vacuum tube circuits on a breadboard with hand wound coils and was a computer nerd when computers were primarily collections of Nixie gas tubes and memory consisted of mercury delay lines. I also was a senior member of the technical staff at both RCA and Bell Labs and was responsible for much of the systems analysis that went into the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space craft. And, as a Canadian you should appreciate this, I was responsible for the cockpit instrumentation of the late lamented Avro CF 105. In all those years I learned two important lessions. One is that electronics do not degrade gracefully, the second is that the more things you have series connected in a system, the greater the liklihood of something going wrong. After the burn in period, electronic devices fail catastrophically with a random periodicity. They work perfectly and then they stop, usually with no warning. MTBF estimates are a statistical concept based on the performance of a sample of devices. They cannot be used to predict the lifetime of a specific unit. In contrast, most mechanical devices fail gracefully. Performance degrades from an optimum level until it is no longer acceptable. Mechanical failures usually give ample warning and the opportunity to take corrective action. Thus a fuel blockage in a trawler rarely stops an engine cold. As the filter clogs the engine runs slower and/or rougher. A bad gearbox makes noise. A bent shaft vibrates, etc. Steering becomes loose and sloppy. Few mechanical failures stop the boat entirely Now an electrically controlled engine compounds the problem. We add the spectre of unpredictable electronic failure to the inevitable wear and tear of the mechanical components. The new compound failure probability is the electronic failure rate TIMES the mechanical failure rate. Adding components in series ALWAYS increases the probability of failure. You must put components in parallel to decrease systerm failure. Finally about the problem of risk. It is true that when my wife and I travel together we increase the risk of total family catastrophe. In fact I know husbands and wives who never travel together for fear of leaving children orphans. Some pretty convincing evidence shows that people are willing to tolerate participative risks 1000 times greater than non-participative risks where they have no feeling of control. I live about 4 miles from the Indian Point atomic energy plant. Nearby residents approve of the plant because it's assessed valuation pays a substantial part of their household taxes. Obviously they are in a participative risk situation. Every Spring, at Earth Day, there is a protest at the gates of the plant by hundreds of residents of more distant areas who fear the potential of a Three Mile Island disaster. A number of the protesters arrive by motorcycle, apparently ignoring the fact that the ride to the plant exposes them to a risk of death or dismemberment hundreds of times greater than living next to the plant their entire lives. My wife and I feel that the benefit of togetherness on a cruise outweighs the potential risk. Besides our children are now self supporting and out of the house. But we generally cruise to places out of easy reach of most towboat and repair services so we try to minimize our personal risk by having the most reliable boat we can. I even have sails to get me home if the engine fails. Why subject ourselves to the added potential failure of electronically controlled systems. Regards, Larry Z