By Rich
While trapped in limbo by a crazy diesel mechanic who seems to be taking some unknown personal issues out on us and the rest of the marine services community, we’ve taken to filling the void with any vanity projects we can think of. Here’s a sampling:
We pulled off the bow pulpit so it could be straightened. The former owners rammed something with it, and the boat’s fat lip has been bugging us for two years now.
We took the opportunity to replace a flaky forward running light with a new LED unit while the pulpit was out:
Much better:
The old teak “eye brow” strip on the cabin top was looking very sorry for itself, so we had a replacement fabricated and varnished.
And while we were waiting, we decided to clean, sand down, and oil the toe rails.
Much better:
The steps on our swim ladder were thoroughly perished. We are going to need the ladder over the winter in Florida and the Bahamas, so it needs to look good!
We had new ones fabricated and varnished.
We also made a run at having a vendor re finish our cabin sole, but, alas, ran into another set of dramas with that vendor. We’ll cover that saga in another post.
Rover's Blog 
This is very much an industry wide issue. Coming out of the Medical Technology industry where customer service is, literally, a matter of life or death … this cottage industry attitude of “we will get to you when we have time” is extremely frustrating. We are very fortunate to be in a full service marina where most of this work is done by a very competent and qualified staff. But every now and then we have to get a third party vendor (like for new canvas on the old boat) and it has been a nightmare working with them.