Our boat ownership experience has been quite adventurous and insightful. Social media often makes owning a boat seem very glamorous and sometimes even easy, and depending on your attitude in life, this can be true.
We have worked through two medium-sized boat projects so far, and this is the biggest lesson we learned and want to share with you:
Hire and forget is not a thing!
Either you need to be hands-on with everything, or you need to be incredibly wealthy.
There have only been a handful of companies that we have worked with, that did a great job, without requiring close supervision and rework.
- Village Marine for our water maker service. Thanks, John.
- JetThrusters US for bow and stern thrusters. Thanks, Andrew.
- Aigean for our WiFi booster. Thanks, Richard.
- Nance & Underwood for standing and running rigging. Thanks, Roger, Rick and Dustin.
- Beard Marine for air conditioning and refrigeration. Thanks, Eric and Jason.
A Recent Example
Here is an example of something we had to discover after work was completed, something that could have ended quite badly.
The picture above is of a high-pressure water hose. The hose was installed as part of our thruster system. Note that the hose rests on the pulley of the engine. We discovered this a few weeks after the installation. If we hadn’t found this, it could have been quite catastrophic.
In Closing
Our background, working with technology, has given us a solid foundation in problem-solving — a skill that has been very helpful in our boat ownership journey so far.
We have been using an easy-to-use online project management tool to create visual overviews of the work done on the boat. The tool is called Preceden.
Below is an example from the tool, outlining our recent warranty project.