From: brian case
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2006 11:34 AM
To: John Curry; David Sloggit
Subject: its fitted

Hi John. Well, my dear old Rival now sports a nice new Hydrovane, to the envy of my nearest neighbour!! The actual assembly of the unit was just as straight forward as you told me at Southampton (have to confess, I didn’t really believe you!!). Actually, it was a piece of cake! Making the wooden pads to compensate for the angle of the transom was another matter. What a pain in the a**! I tried to get too clever, I think, using templates and a protractor to measure the angle, and then trying to translate that to the pad. Failed miserably!! In the end I just did it by eye, taking the old view that if it looks right, it is right. Worked perfectly. Don’t know why I didn’t do it that way in the first place. Would have saved me a few hours of work. All that is left now is to go out to play!!

By the way. You guys certainly now how to package your product. The first (in truth, the only) difficulty I encountered was getting the parts out of the boxes! The ‘fragile’ stickers are definitely a euphemism. Now I have seen the Hydrovane up close and personal, I can see it is about as fragile as my Landrover!

I’ll let you know how I get on with the new ‘crew’ when I get a chance to take ‘Ocean Sunrise’ out to sea, but that may be a few months yet. I don’t think I will have any problems though. The product just looks right. Looks good on the boat too. The only drawback with my new ‘crew’ that I can foresee is that it wont stand its round in the pub!!!!!! Hey Ho, its an imperfect world!

Cheers, and all the best to all.

Brian.