When it comes to gear, there are a few must-have items that make life much easier for liveaboards, no matter where you are currently staying.

1. A portable gas generator: If you have gasoline on board anyway, a little generator fills in the need for portable power. It can be used for everything from supplying power on the beach to filling in when the lights go out. Even if you have a "house" generator, a portable is cheap insurance.

2. Navigation tools: So you have a chartplotter and three back up GPS units. It is still good seamanship to make sure you can still find your way home if everything else fails. A lightning strike, a fire in your electronics, a glitch in the government's satellites and, all of a sudden, you are lost. Having a hand-bearing compass, a pair of binoculars, a chart, parallel rules and dividers will get you home, or at least let you tell people where to look for you, provided you know how to use them. The Coast Guard Auxiliary can teach you how.

3. An electric trolling motor for your dinghy: They are cheap, safe and reliable. They won't go as fast or as far as a four stroke outboard, but they don't require oil or gas, they always start and, even counting the weight of a couple of batteries in your inflatable, they generally weigh less than a gasoline outboard and fuel tank.

4. A window air conditioner: For the price of a "marine" hatch-top air conditioner, you can buy three or four window units – not that you'd need to. You can buy an off-the-shelf hood for your air conditioner that fits over your unit and seals it to the hatch, but a little engineering will get you a custom-built unit that works just as well and fits your particular installation.

5. A collapsible dock cart: Some marinas have really nice dock carts for carrying your supplies from the parking lot to the boat. However, as soon as you start counting on them, they disappear, or the "next" marina doesn't have them. Having a way to transfer stuff from a car trunk or taxi to the boat can be back saving and, in the case of groceries in a hot climate, can mean the difference between having ice cream and just having a box of mush. Larger, air-filled wheels roll better but, as with everything marine, trade-offs between convenience and storage mean you'll never get perfection.