… and below and – well, everywhere! Butterfly’s launch date is this coming Monday (12th May) – just two short days away. Still so much to be done, and the rush to get her ready has become a little frantic. While there are certain finishing jobs that can be done once she’s moored in Durban marina (her nesting place for a few weeks to come), other work must be completed before she leaves the factory – hence the urgency. Ideally, we’d far rather she stayed at the factory until she was absolutely perfect, but Gideon and Steven (factory manager, Gideon’s right-hand man, and a veritable treasure) need to ship her out so that they can move everything else to their new factory. At the moment, Butterfly sits on her jacks right inside the old factory’s gates, tall and wide and long, blocking the main entrance and exit, so that hull no. 5 and large equipment cannot be shunted past before transportation. Moving Butterfly to the new factory to finish her is not practicable either. Too many problems and possible hazards settling her into the new place. This new factory (far larger and better designed than the old, and with its nicer location and purpose-built fitments far more pleasant to work in) will allow for faster, smoother production and a greater number of boats to be produced at any given time. Soooo – needs must and to the marina Butterfly - finished or not – must go.
Steven has assured us, however, that work at the marina will be supervised – possibly by Ken, Steven’s father (we now know why Steven is such a great guy – like father, like son!) – so it’s all cool. Without supervision, the delightful (if occasionally vexing) ‘relaxed’ African approach to work makes for very s-l-o-w progress! That said, from the get-go we’ve deliberately kept our plans as loose as possible, knowing that the boat was never likely to be finished anything like on time, whatever dates were optimistically bandied about. We’re not home and dry just yet, but we’ve certainly saved ourselves a huge degree of frustration and angst adopting the “don’t worry about time, just make sure the boat itself is good” approach.
And getting a new boat good sometimes takes several efforts. The FastCat is a new design, and ours is only the fourth Gideon and his team have built. Moreover, with each boat, in the drive for perfection, many, many changes and improvements have been made, all of which means the staff must learn new ways of doing things, using new equipment, new methods: it is not a recipe for slick, speedy production, however you look at it. But – and it is a very big BUT – our confidence in Gideon and Steven to make our boat a strong, safe vessel that is a joy to sail and to live on, grows by the day. That they are heart-and-soul committed to getting things right is absolutely beyond doubt; O would that every boat builder felt the same!
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