I don’t think we’re ultimately going to get this coast.
We drove out to our boat yesterday with our daily list of things to work on, one of which was to spray that anti-corosion stuff on our mast step, which is down a hole in the cabin floor where the mast usually sits. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at our boat and found that our mast had been put back on yesterday with NO FUCKING NOTICE! Sure, we’d sent some email to New England Boatworks last Friday telling them that Rig Pro might be able to get to it this Thursday (tomorrow), but given that we’d received no reply to that email nor any voicemail or phone calls, we just assumed it had gone into the same black hole that apparently engulfs most of the subcontractors we’ve been dealing with. Things do get done, but no one seems capable of coughing up something as ludicrous as a schedule or actually keeping you apprised on their progress. They just show up on some random day and at some later point announce, ‘it’s already done’, usually in response to you calling them to see where they’re at. In fact, they often tend to combine this last point with mock ridicule, as if you were too stupid to notice that the project has already been completed.
I guess if you like being surprised all the time this system works very well. Or maybe it’s just that most of the people who own boats that are serviced where we’re at don’t really live on them and don’t really care about how they’re put together beyond a cursory check-box level: watermaker, check. Got one. Maybe it’s like that.
It does help to see your mast back on your sailboat. Perhaps we will actually be back on the water one of these days. Hopefully we’ll even get to see the launch, but I’m not betting on it. More likely we’ll just find that it’s been launched one day when we show up to work on it. Hopefully someone will tie it off.
