Friends

If you’ve read my previous blog you’ll know we were up to boat stuff yesterday. Helen did a great job on some cosmetic sealing as some of the seals around the boat were looking a little grubby. You have an idea of what I was up to. One thing I spent time on was testing the AIS transceiver. When we were out, about the only thing I was disappointed in was not seeing Dignity on www.marinetraffic.com. When I got down to testing, I noticed that just in the harbor here there were seven vessels putting out an AIS position but only one showed on the website. I managed to get a quick positive test from Anthem who could see us loud and clear. The most likely reason is something to do with the port receiver here which is either not receiving and/or communicating positions of all the vessels out here. Oh well – no geeky fun to be had. At least I know the transponder works.

In the afternoon we had a visit from Peter Cronk who bought Lagoon 420 hull #26 around the same time we bought Dignity. We’ve been in touch with him over the last 7 years and met him for the first time yesterday. He was one of the folks giving Helen tremendous support while I was seriously ill. He’d even offered to sail the boat over from Fiji but was understandably glad he hadn’t. It was great to finally meet him and thank him in person for everything he’s done.

Shortly after Peter left, Ed and Cornelia from A Cappella arrived to take us out to dinner. We went back the nearby Chinese restaurant and had a very pleasant evening together.

Back to my rant from yesterday. Have I calmed down? Yes. Am I more sympathetic? No. Calling out faults that simply don’t exist is deceitful. Completely misidentifying parts of the boat is simply incompetent. Just one error like this implies the surveyor had, at best, a broken/faulty process which exposes everyone involved to harm. Bad, bad, bad.

What’s done is done. Moving forward we can learn some lessons. For our next trial we will have someone aboard who will make sure the surveyor points out all the faults they are going to list in their report and to make notes of each issue. If the surveyor later adds anything we simply won’t accept it. I’ve wasted too much time on this. If I were the previous potential buyers I would want my money back. If I were the surveyor I would be ashamed and either improving the way I work or looking for a different profession.