September 19 – 23, 2013
While we were very much enjoying our time in Vanua Balavu’s Bay of Islands, there was one fly in the punch bowl: our Torqeedo electric outboard engine.
It started being problematic the previous year during our trip across the pacific, to the point we’d tried to send it back to Torqeedo to be serviced. We’d bought it less then a year before and had only been using it a short time. We were prepared to pay for shipping it to Australia where a service center was located, but their customer service effectively shot us down by saying if we wanted it serviced, it must be returned in its original box. Original box?? They had to be kidding! Even if we still had our place on land, we wouldn’t keep a box for something like this, much less cart it across the ocean on a small boat! (Of course they must have known this—the original box requirement is a known business tactic used to prevent customers from sending their products back.)
Since they weren’t kidding, this ended any chance of us getting our outboard fixed. Luckily Rich is an electronics and computer guy and was able to nurse it along through the season, but the problems had worsened now to the point it was circling the drain. It was very hard to get it started, and once it was going we didn’t dare put it in reverse, stop it or even slow it down until we were within rowing distance of the boat. We could only hope to keep it going until we got back to Savusavu.
Of course, this affected our time in the Bay of Islands. We were headed out to explore a neat-looking area up the way when our engine quit quite a long way from the boat. Rich managed to start it for a short time, but it quit again. With that, we had to turn around and row back towards the boat. Luckily Rich got it going one more time so we were able to motor back, but that was the end of us taking our dinghy more than rowing distance from the boat. Meanwhile, we planned to visit a couple more places before heading back to Savusavu, and I could only hope we’d keep the outboard going long enough to do so.
Was there any possible way, given our predicament, to take lemons and make lemonade? No, not lemonade, but we could make something. And so we did: a video demonstrating our struggles with this outboard. It used to be when you gave a customer an impossible hurdle to clear in order to get any service, that would be the end of that. But now there’s something called the internet; so while the company may not have to talk to you, the customers can, in fact, talk to other customers and more importantly, potential customers.
And so was born our infamous Torqeedo video. I call it infamous because we put it on YouTube and had thousands of views in the months to follow, and I’ll wager it cost them some business. We posted it after returning to Savusavu; meanwhile ordering a Suzuki outboard from New Zealand and giving up on the whole electric outboard engine idea. An employee from Torqeedo saw our post and promptly wrote and accused us of working for Suzuki.
Working for Suzuki? Do they have jobs that entail dismantling your land life, sailing across the south pacific on a small boat while using someone else’s outboard, only to have it quit so they could mention ordering a Suzuki to replace it their blog? That would be quite a conspiracy! And not much of one since the Suzuki arrived broken (although this was actually the fault of the courier and not Suzuki) and we didn’t have much to say about it since we hadn’t used it yet. In a nutshell: we weren’t promoting Suzuki, we were just choosing a reasonable option for a gas-powered engine as we didn’t want anything too heavy.
Here’s where I’d normally put the initial rough version of the video Rich made, but last year we decided to remove it from the internet completely, and I think I’ll adhere to that decision. Why? Because last year (2017) we happened to meet one of the current distributors for the company. We told him about the problems we had, and we were impressed enough with what he had to say about their current way of doing things that we decided to take down the YouTube video and the blog post Rich did in our information pages. Companies and their products can change, after all, and we felt it’s been long enough now that we can’t really comment on the Torqeedo of today. Is it better? We have no idea, but we hope so. We won’t be trying one again!
So instead, I’ll post some photos of Legacy sitting in her picturesque anchorage as we bravely strayed far from the boat with our iffy outboard. (Click to enlarge and scroll)–Cyndi
