Subj: Alpha autopilot

Date: 3/20/01 6:04:23 PM Mountain Standard Time

From: joemaverick@hotmail.com (Joe Parks)

To: sailgemini@aol.com

Hola amigos, As I was saying...there I was under way into La Paz, Mexico in May 1998 when my Alpha Autopilot went sideways on me and stopped. Once in port I called the company. The rep told me to just send it to them. They stated they had shipped their pilots all over the world with no problems. Of course I didn’t do that as I was going back to Seattle a week from then. I took the unit with me, all of it. I had to ship it to them in Seattle to Seattle via UPS as they “were´t set up to receive deliveries¨ from individuals. How odd I thought. In any event, my drive unit had failed to live again after 15 years. I bought a new drive unit and upon returning to La Paz in June of 98 I reinstalled it for a trip back to San Diego that month. As it turned out I got 13 hrs use from the new drive unit and it also died on me. This of course was while I was beating into a southerly front, the remains of a hurricane farther south in Tehuanatepec, 6-8 foot seas and 25-30 knots of wind from Muertos to Frailes on the way to Cabo San Lucas. It was not fun single-handing to Cabo San Lucas without and I was a bit unhappy upon my arrival. I of course called Alpha and got the usual, just send it to us for repair and we’ll send it back again, my expense of course. This made me a bit more unhappy. THEY didn’t understand that items are not simply shipped out of and back into Mexico!

I hired a crewmember and we hand steered to San Diego... There I took the entire unit out and flew back to Seattle. I was going to anyway. The phone call there from me to them was to the effect that I would deliver it to their door personally. I heard the fear come out in the reps voice again. The same person that you and I discussed and whose name escapes me now. In any event I sent it via UPS again! I drove by their business address on Mercer Island, a private home which the UPS man simply walked up to the door and rang the bell to deliver packages. I am confused by this tactic of misrepresentation of facts to customers wanting to save money in delivering packages.

I had the drive unit repaired at no cost and it was sent back to me in Seattle at no cost, bueno! The rep had checked it out and found that his pre-sales check did not meet the standard for the unit to have been sent out because the check had not been complete.

While I’ve always liked the unit, I thought the customer public relations could-can be improved A LOT. Thanx for letting me vent and I hope it saves someone else the aggravation that I experienced un-necessarily. Joe Parks, S.V. Maverick from Mazatlan, Mexico

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