A vacumn guage monitors engine performance. You can see all sorts of things, poor compression, bad ignition parts, etc. Don't run it under 7 lbs vacumn and save your valves. This is surprisingly tricky without a vac guage and is the cause of a lot of ruined engines. Look up Bushwackers posts on vacumn guages. He is the expert, ex Pratt and Whitney aircraft enginer.
Raw water pressure guage allows you to immediately see crap on the intake, leaks in the water hoses and especially aging impellors, long before they become a serious problem and long before increasing engine water temp will suggest the same isssue. By that time the impellor can be coming apart. Saves getting impellor pieces stuck in the engine and creating hot spots and other nasty issues.
One gadgit I find very useful is a Satelite tracker, Spot or Inreach, They both allow tracking of your boat offshore in almost real time and have an emergency SOS function that runs through a satelite, just like an EPIRB, good backup. Also, the Inreach allows sending and recieving text messages. My wife loves it for keeping track of me in the Bahamas and I don't have to waste diving time looking for a phone after every long passage.
I carry a huge inventory of spare parts and the tools and manuals to use them. If you are doing day trips, thats not necessary, but car engines have lots of small parts that can fail. Consider going through the engine and carrying all the little stuff, ignition parts, water pumps, other pumps, belts, various fluids, etc. Eventually you will need some of that stuff and it feels a lot better to do it yourself rather than come in on one engine or wait for a tow.
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