Years ago, when my wife and I were young and our motorsailer Nonesuch was too young, we were visited aboard her by and older friend who cruised innumerable times from Connecticut to the end of Maine and back in a venerable sloop. Nonesuch carried a minimum of electronic gear, but I was particularly pleased with the deep-water fathometer because of its usefulness in navigation (telling you, for example, when you were over the deep midline of eastern Long Island Sound), and I asked our friend what sort of fathometer he had. None. I was amazed. I spoke at length on the virtues of the instrument. Our friend said simply that he had never felt the need.

I didn't understand. It was only later that I began to see. I came to imagine him and his wife, and perhaps a salty guest or two, making their way eastward through fog and haze and sometimes dark and storm, along compass courses long remembered, past buoys familiar from years of passing close by, with overnight anchorage in harbors and coves inscribed in memory. He hardly needed charts; why would he need a fathometer?

That same year, as a flattered guest on a gorgeous ocean racer, I watched a brand new Decca Navigator flash numbers on its screen that showed exactly where we were, in a little corner of Cape Cod harbor. Astonished, I yearned for such a device. How marvelous always to know exactly where you were. Or so I exclaimed.

But further experience has made me doubt both that it is marvelous always to know precisely where you are and that such a machine will always tell you. In our catboat Farthing I have learned that the joy of cruising depends in some degree on not always knowing just where you are, on having to strain eyes and ears for the next seamark, on having to guess from the assumed courses of boats invisible but audible where they may think the mark is, on having to divine your position from signs like the flight of a tern to or from a nesting colony. That is the lesson, I have no doubt, that our friend who "did not need" a fathometer had learned long before.

In arguing the case for simplicity, I am conscious of hypocrisy. I am pretty keen to have an engine in a sailboat for those times when the breeze is truly dead, or when it is nearly so and harbor lies uptide. And I do want a fathometer. I like a nice, big compass accurately compensated. And it is gratifying to have electricity to read by at night. All these things are nonsimple. So I am a fraud. But even a fraud may have a few worthwhile things to say, and what I am saying is: Be wary of complication, and keep things as simple as you can. Here's why:

1. Elaborate and sophisticated equipment for performing ship's work both reduces physical effort—the quest for which is one of the chief reasons the sailor will tell you he is out there—and sunders the crew from the fabric of their vessel. Does the bilge need pumping? If the pump is automatic, you may never know. If it is electric—even if not automatic—you flick a switch, and that is that. But with an old-fashioned hand bilge pump, you take hold of a plunger or a lever and you put your back into it. You gain an immediate expression of the depth of the bilge water—information that could be a crucial indicator of the state of your vessel.

Refrigeration will save you from the regular search for block ice in strange harbors, but will you benefit from that? The search for ice provides occasion for conversations from which you will learn much and enables you to row the dinghy back from the shore with your bare feet in icy melt water.

Two-speed winches? They enable the sailor to throw the most extraordinary stress on his rigging without the least personal exertion. The sailor who does without them knows much better what tensions do and do not exist in the pattern of spars, stays, sheets, and canvas on which his progress depends.

2. The more complicated equipment gets, the more likely it is to fail just when you have allowed yourself to rely on it. Salt air and salt water are implacable enemies of: electricity; electronic circuits; delicately poised needles; anything that will not work just as well when covered with verdigris or rust; all coatings and sealants; and most metals. The sailor who has installed elaborate equipment on his boat had better have other ways of doing what he bought it to do.

Whatever happened to the ancient conservatism of the mariner? It took the British navy a generation or more to adapt the lime ad a scurvy preventive. Today, a new gadget is bought by thousands of eager boatmen in the very season of its introduction—without the least proof of durability, we are all too ready to credit the efficacy of the new.

3. Elaborate and sophisticated navigating equipment tends to supplant the sailor's senses. This point is not without difficulty, because we tend to think that information is an obsolete good, and the modern devices do, when they work, supply more information with greater precision than the ordinary sailor ever has had before. To a racer, tuning his boat, it may be truly important to be told instrumentally of a tenth-of-a-knot difference in speed. Does it matter to a cruising sailor? Most of us would agree that it does not. What is the effect of having such information always before him? Answer: He watches the dials. He falls unavoidably into the habit of "remote sensing." The pointer on a relative-wind indicator will replace the brush of the breeze on the check—or was it more on the ear?

Moreover, the instrumental information will be more exact , from instant to instant, than any sailor can use except those few who seek once more to prevent the Australians from carrying off the America's Cup.

Instruments have a tendency both to supersaturate the mind of the sailor and to convert the good, healthy, traditional uncertainties of cruising into uncertainties of a more gnawing kind. The worst uncertainty of all is what you feel when you suspect that your instruments may be lying to you. There you are, with all that information. You're preoccupied by it both because there is such a lot of it and because you have learned to rely on it. And you suspect it may all be bunk.

What is most important is that all devices be avoided that tend to obscure or dull that quality of experience in which the joys of cruising truly lie. What the sailor seeks, if he gives thought to the matter, is the direct sense of wind, spray, and wave, of the tide's run and the tiller's tug, of the buoy's moan, whistle or clang, of the surf's hiss on a rock concealed by fog, of the darkness of a night filled with faint harbor sounds, of the weight of a block of ice and the sharp scent of stove alcohol. It is the remembrance of these that will sustain him in the winter evenings through the years. At such times, he is unlikely to draw much joy from the recollection of Loran numbers or the digital readout of a knotmeter.

Mr. Smith, a retired executive, is reachable through Context.