One of the great truths of blogging is no one cares why you haven’t been posting*. So, unlike the great Jim Anchower, I won’t apologize for my absence.
I’ll explain a bit, though.
There come (multiple) times in a boater’s life when they just get sick of it. It’s where that stupid aphorism comes from. I just got sick of it. I was spending more time on routine maintenance than enjoying cruising, and I started to get behind. For every one thing I fixed, two more seemed to break.
I eventually gave in and tried to hire help. But, that just made me disillusioned at the state of the marine maintenance industry. Businesses not calling back is now the norm. For every ten people I call, one calls back and then says they are too busy. When you do get work done, it’s often slipshod. Ultimately, if you can’t do it yourself, you’re at the mercy of an industry who sees you as an invoice at best or a mark at worse.
So, I took a few months off.
We continued to cruise, making our annual summer trip and doing the weekend thing, but I just focused on keeping up with the routine maintenance and put off the bigger stuff.
Eventually, I had the boat hauled and we got the bottom serviced, replaced a faulty main-engine through hull, and upgraded to lithium. We just got back in the water after two months on the hard over Christmas, so we didn’t make the annual Alderbrook trip. I’ll document all of that here, eventually.
But, I wanted to make a note about the weird state of the marine industry. There seems to be a bit of cold war between different factions. The builders, owners, and boat yards all have misaligned incentives – and trust is low between them. I’m an owner / operator / maintainer. There are enough lifestyle blogs out there. My goal for this one has always been to show what owning a boat like Turtle really entails – and to share my experience and learnings with the community. Boats are a lot of work. They require maintenance and even the best ones have defects. While these posts have never been intended to air grievances or exact revenge, simply documenting things can feel like an attack to the on builders and technicians.
As an owner, the sea is systematically tearing the boat apart. The components are all from different manufacturers who blame each other when things go wrong. Items with one year warranties fail after two years, and some build defects don’t surface until hundreds of hours on the water. Technicians and manufacturers don’t answer emails or return phone calls and the forum posts have very low signal-to-noise. You’re on your own.
As a builder, you’re at the whims of global trade and distant supply chains. You’re running tight financing loops, where you’re funding builds with down payments and sometimes get stuck with inventory that you can’t move for years. Layoffs across the high-income industries make your potential customers dry up overnight. The boats are first integrated during commissioning, with the owner doing the break-in and seeing all of the issues. Addressing defects means coordinating across the same technicians and manufacturers that the owners are trying to work with. Anything that pierces the dreams associated with a $1MM boat can feel hostile.
As a boat yard, you can’t find anyone who wants to work. There are fewer apprentices and your top technicians are aging out. The best of them are spread too thin and want more money. Demand for repair far outstrips your ability to serve it, and customers are quick to write a bad yelp review at the first complication. Half of them are ignorant know-it-alls who hang the vague threat of lawsuits over your head. The costs and revenue columns on your spreadsheet are neck-and-neck.
Lifestyle people – I don’t have much good to say about people selling the dream of boating. This is just demand generation for the builders, and the dreams they sell have to be big enough to justify the price tag. There’s a lot that’s truly wonderful about cruising. But, there’s a lot of pain too. Don’t believe much of what you hear at boat shows.
The lack of trust between these factions is a self-fulfilling cycle and I’m not sure how to break out of it. I’ve always been a fan of the “generous tit-for-tat” approach, (but apparently that’s no longer optimum).
So, in lieu of any better ideas, I will continue to try and tell the truth as well as I understand it. I will continue to post my learnings here and weather the slings and arrows of resentful builders and MIA technicians. When someone demonstrates integrity and competence, I will make a point of calling it out. If someone is particularly incompetent or dishonest, I’ll mention it but move on.
Meanwhile. Here’s the new electrical system. It’s not actually what I specced out and they changed the design without consulting me. But, it’s a solid design and the work was well-done. More on this in a future post.
* Except for people like me. What the hell happened to MV Cassidy? They just disappeared.