With the exception of JP going out sooner than needed, "dinging" the cat, and then hitting Boatie up for more
money (really inappropriate since the owner hired him, not Boatie), I think everyone did just as they should have here. First, why should any of us have any great concern about the owners pocketbook, other than the owner and maybe not even him? He's (presumably) a big boy and he made the decision to have HIS
boat towed in, something he's entitled to do......and pay for. All Atoll did was put him in touch with someone he could (or not) hire and he even recommended that IF a tow were to occur, that it should wait until Boatie was much closer to the harbor. That seems to me to have been the best possible course of action. It's not his fault that JP chose to not follow his
advice to the letter. Also, if Boatie REALLY didn't want a tow in, he could have refused. It might have pissed off the owner and I personally think that once offered, it would have been silly and even irresponsible to refuse it as he was approaching an area likely to have other boats around and with no nav lights in the condition the boat and his stores of water were in, but the bottom line is that he DID (properly, in my view) accept the tow.
This was NOT anything close to an
emergency and of course Boatie could have made it to at least spitting distance of terra firma Horta without a tow, but with no
engine, and having never before docked this cat, if I were the owner I wouldn't really want his first attempt at
docking to be under sail, so he would have needed either a tow or a jump start anyway. I also would have been dying of curiosity to know exactly what was wrong with my boat ASAP.
Now that the port
captain is involved, there's a small downside in that Boatie will have to wait a while longer for proper
repairs to be made than jury rigged
repairs would have taken. But based on the way the boat was moving over the past week, Boatie isn't in a huge hurry anyway, and if he does need to be somewhere else soon, he can always quit and let somebody else finish the
delivery once the boat is once again shipshape, or come back and pick it up later. So, for now he gets to hang out at Cafe Sport by night and tinker with the boat by day and otherwise enjoy life while the owner makes arrangements and writes some checks that will get the boat into the condition it should have been in before this trans Atlantic
delivery was ever contemplated. Either now or sometime soon the owner would have needed to have the repairs done anyway so he's only out the difference in costs between
Europe and
Azores prices. It seems to me that it was he who was in a big hurry to have his boat delivered when he knew about the "dubious" condition of the alternators. Hopefully there's a lesson to be learned here about the long term costs involved in deferring
maintenance on critical systems, especially before attempting an
ocean crossing. I think most of us would have fixed everything we had any doubts about before we either allowed someone else to deliver it across the Atlantic or delivered it ourselves. But, his boat is getting delivered and no real harm done except to his wallet and of course none of the rest of us have ever taken a surprise hit to the bank account due to our boats, right?