So far I’ve only been in possession of Ordu for about 3 weeks, but an awful lot has happened.  I knew that the nautical world had its own way of working, but I didn’t think that I’d become immersed in it so quickly. Everything I’ve told you so far happened some years ago now and I’m sufficiently scarred by the experience that I don’t see it objectively, so I thought I’d piece together the timeline from the invoices I received to judge whether or not I’m being unfair to Linden Lewis (LL):

• 04/01/2006: Ordu arrives at Shepperton
• 20/01/2006: I purchase a Parsons gearbox from Will Carter in Southampton
• 24/01/2006: LL informs me that my Parsons gearbox will not fit
• 27/01/2006: I purchase a Borg Warner gearbox from D-Ray marine in Bournemouth
• 01/02/2006: LL provides a quote for removing the existing Paragon gearbox and installing the new Borg Warner gearbox
• 23/02/2006: LL installs the Borg Warner gearbox and finds it doesn’t fit.  Hang on, there’s 3 weeks between quoting for the work and actually doing it.  Should I be worried about that?  No, LL is a professional outfit, I’m sure it was an anomoly.
• 27/02/2006: LL provides a quote for raising the prop shaft by 2 inches.  4 days later – That’s more like it.  We’re back on track
• 22/03/2006: A brand new ZF gearbox is delivered to LL at Shepperton.  A month has gone by but that is my fault.  This time, I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing
• 05/07/2006: Ordu arrives in the marina of my choice having been transported by road from Shepperton

Looking at this list you might be bemused as to why I am so exasperated by LL.  The reason that Ordu arrived in the marina of my choice when she did was that I had become so fed up with chasing Nigel at LL to find out when my ZF gearbox would be fitted that I had decided to take the matter into my own hands.  Every time I called I was presented with another  ‘reason’ why the gearbox had not yet been fitted.  To be fair to Nigel, I could tell from his responses that he wasn’t entirely happy about the situation himself.  Some time towards the end of June – 3 months after it had been delivered – LL finally fitted the gearbox and I asked for an estimate of the bill I had run up so far.  The result shocked me to the core.

Somehow, the simple act of fitting a gearbox had caused me to run up a bill of over £4,000.  Yes, I said £4,000.  That doesn’t include the marina’s mooring fees!  Not only had I apparently dropped to the bottom of LL’s maintenance list but I was paying a king’s ransom for the privelege.  To add insult to injury, they hadn’t even finished the job.  They couldn’t balance the prop shaft because they couldn’t start the engine, and they couldn’t work out why.  I went straight to Shepperton (so as not to run up any more bills) with my excellent guide to marine electronics and worked out for myself in half an hour that the reason the engine wouldn’t start was because the ignition ground return was missing (this is the wire that completes the circuit which operates the solenoid – the solenoid, in turn, connects the batteries to the starter motor).  Why this cable was missing is another story which, sadly, I do not know.  However, despite having no experience in marine electronics whatsoever I had diagnosed the problem in 30 minutes.  Why, then, could LL not work it out when they were experts?

The Neighbours

Whether it’s true or not, the answer seemed pretty clear to me – they didn’t care.  If that’s how I felt then it was time to get the hell out of there.  We found the telephone number of our marina of choice and made a call.  We wanted to know if we could put her on hard standing.  Fortunately, we were pretty confident that we would be able to because we had called in January to ask the same question (ah, the beauty of innocence) and had been told that spaces were available.  This is why, in an earlier post, I stated that in order to get a mooring you have to have a boat.  We were prepared to keep moving Ordu until we found a permanent mooring (which, fortunately, we didn’t have to do) but we took the risk of buying her without a mooring arranged.  Whereas, with no boat, we were told the waiting list was 20 years when we had a boat we were told that hard standing was immediately available.  True, hard standing is not a permanent mooring but we figured that we could get to that if we could just get a foot in the door.

There was a place available for us in our destination of choice and we took it immediately.  I’m not accusing anybody of anything here -  LL may have acted completely professionally in all their dealings with me and probably had very good reasons for doing what they did.  All I can say for sure is that they did a poor job of communicating this to me and justifying the enormous bill I had to pay.  In my humble opinion if you want happy customers it would be a good idea not to continually feed them excuses as to why you haven’t yet done what they asked then charge them a fortune when you finally get around to it.  But then again, what do I know?

Background, Gearbox