Kim Hollamby | The anchor swallowed » Formanda

Formanda: Cherbourg via Shanklin

Kim Hollamby — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 22:02:07 +0000

After more than three years of hard refit work on our Beecham Searider 45 Formanda, we deemed her ready for a first cross-Channel adventure, with a passage to Cherbourg via an overnight anchorage in Shanklin where we had our first encouter with pistol shrimp.

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Gale break

Kim Hollamby — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:34:06 +0000

As I write the wind is blowing around 33-40 knots more or less onto the aft end of the boat and we're watching rainwater being bullied in troubled furrows uphill along the reverse sheer of Formanda's decks. A good time to be sat alongside a bit of wood with several bits of string secured to it.

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Formanda gets some finesse

Kim Hollamby — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:04:55 +0000

The woodwork surrounding Formanda's Blue Sea shorepower panel has been completed. It's not perfect, but it brings a smile every time I see it.

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(En)sign of progress

Kim — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:38:36 +0000

I have to say that it has always felt that something was missing. And then I realised what it was. In all of the time we have been busy rebuilding Formanda, our Beecham Searider 45, the ensign was tucked away in one of a myriad number of boxes and the staff socket was removed from the rail. Well, all of that is in the past now.

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Marine customer service heroes and zeroes

Kim — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:38:11 +0000

What a difference a good customer experience can make. I've often said you can eat an average meal at a restaurant accompanied by well-judged attention from the staff and it will far outweigh Michelin-standard fare accompanied by care-less or haughty delivery. It's also a well-known fact that faulty goods put right by service above expectation will engender greater customer loyalty than a product that works right out of the box. So what prompts this blog? Well we've been buying rather too much kit for our boat over the past few months and the experiences have often been polarised between extremely good and disappointingly poor.

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