| Every
once in a while you come across a really exceptional piece of gear —
one that actually does what it's supposed to, and keeps doing it,
season after season. It's the kind of thing you'd go out of your way to
recommend to a friend. In the last issue, I wrote about four of them: a
shock-absorbing deck mat, an non-skid cleaning solution, an aluminum
anchor and an outstanding rod-rigger. Here are three more. As with the
products mentioned last time, I don't have any affiliation with any of
the manufacturers, nor anything to gain by plugging any of them. Bomb-proof Trim Tabs My hull, a 1999 Kencraft 206 (now sold as the Sea King 210), is one of those designs that absolutely requires trim tabs. I bought the boat used in early 2003, and it took just a single trip from Mission Bay to the La Jolla kelp in a short, three-foot swell to figure out that adding trim tabs would be my first project. Mainly because they were the most affordable option available at the time, I settled on a pair of Bennett M-120 Sport Tabs, which feature an unusual "batwing" design. I installed them myself in an afternoon, and the difference in performance was remarkable. But that's not why I'm including them here. For relatively slow fishing boats at least, a trim tab is a trim tab. In my experience, there's little variation in performance. The "batwing" design may or may not create more lift, as advertised, but if it does the difference is negligible. Instead, the reason I'd go out of my way to recommend them is their toughness. I've towed my boat a lot in Baja, not only on the notoriously rough pavement, but over literally hundreds of miles of punishing washboard. The bilge-mounted hydraulic pump, which I was worried might not take the vibration well, has never even hiccupped. Moreover, in 5-1/2 years, I haven't added so much as a drop of hydraulic fluid to the system, nor done any other maintenance whatsoever to the pump, the planes, the wiring or the switches. The tabs just work, day after day and year after year. The same is true of the regular Bennett tabs on my father's 1997 Dusky, which has lived full-time in remote Baja since 1999 in unspeakable conditions — used hard and left on a mooring for one or two weeks at a time and then left to sit for months on end in a three-sided shed open to the heat and dust and hurricanes. Like mine, those tabs have never needed a drop of fluid. It should be said here that I have no long-term experience with other trim tab brands, which may well be just as dependable. I'm not saying that Bennett's are necessarily better, just that in my experience they're extremely dependable. Superior Customer Service In the case of my Poly Planar WC-400 gimbal-mounted stereo enclosure, it's not the product itself that's exceptional, but rather the manufacturer's customer service. The enclosure is perfectly good, but I have managed to break mine twice now. When I first bought it, back in 2003, it came with a plastic mounting bracket obviously not designed to withstand weekly runs to the outer banks in the upper electronics box of a 20-foot skiff. It took about three trips before the combined weight of the stereo and the enclosure broke both legs of the bracket. I called the company and immediately got a live human being, who said, "We just switched to a steel bracket. I'll mail you one today." No proof of purchase required, no paperwork and no charge. Three days later, I had a new bracket. That one stood up to four years of hard use in Baja and the states, but the metal finally fatigued and broke last fall, somewhere on the 40 painful miles of washboard road leading out to Bahía de Tortugas. I called the company and again got a live, knowledgeable person immediately. This time she was a little more incredulous. Since going to the steel bracket, she said, they hadn't had a single reported failure. Still, three days later, I had another new bracket on my porch — no hassle and no charge. As I said, the enclosure itself is perfectly good but nothing extraordinary. But it's incredibly refreshing to find a company that's readily accessible to consumers and stands behind its products unequivocally. Poly Planar also makes speakers, stereos and amplifiers, and next time I buy any of those things, I'll go with one of theirs. Simple, Affordable T-top Enclosure The first time I had Murphy's Marine Canvas in Point Loma do some canvas work for me, it was because I didn't want to wait the two to three weeks that other places told me it would be before they could even start the job. Murphy's not only turned out a T-top cover, a three-sided enclosure and a storage cover for a forward conestoga top in four days, but they did for substantially less than I was quoted elsewhere. The quality of the work was so good that when it came time to replace the T-top canvas and have an enclosure made for current boat, I went straight o Murphy's. Again, they completed the job in a few days and with exceptional quality. Other boaters regularly ask me where I had it done. The neat thing about the enclosure is its simplicity. Most three-sided T-top enclosures are made in three pieces, with vertical zippers running along the forward legs of the T-top. But the zippers get blasted with spray, which invariably leaks through and gets trapped between the canvas and the aluminum. Plus, you have to keep the zippers lubricated, and the canvas on either side of the zippers reduces visibility. The enclosure Murphy's made me is a single piece with no zippers. In fact, it doesn't have canvas strips running along the forward T-top legs. Instead, it's window all the way around for maximum visibility. I was concerned the "glass" couldn't stand up to wearing against the aluminum legs, but that hasn't been a problem at all. I use the enclosure 90% of the time I'm on the water and only take it off for long road-trips. The whole thing is simple, low-maintenance, durable, dry and easy to put on and off. The only drawback is that when I roll it up for storage, the roll is a little bulkier than the three small rolls you get with a traditional three-piece enclosure. Frankly, though, that's a minor concern compared to the advantages. |