Business ProfileforFirst Watch Marine LLC

This review should be Zero stars for FWM but they did convince me to spend a lot of money and for awhile I believed they had my best interests in mind. That was my biggest mistake. The main proprietor, ****, seems extremely knowledgeable but it doesn't matter if he's not doing the job and there is no ***************** of the work performed. Each time I received my boat back from FWM, it was a mess with oil and fluids everywhere and additional problems to follow shortly after. I repeatedly tried to trust this outfit but it was in vain. Before you use FWM, ask who is doing the work and how they will ensure quality control of the work they do. A technician sent alone to my vessel was a fluid tech from automotive field with little knowledge of the boat he was working on. Service writer is extremely nice and friendly but also a transplant from automotive. Business partner is a hot head and was incapable of reinstalling a sea water impeller which I had to do for them while they present and were being paid to work on my vessel.After performing two major services to my vessel, requiring haul-out and lengthy down-time, FWM failed to properly secure an exhaust bypass hose connected to a through-hull and the result was an engine room filled with diesel exhaust that shut off power the the turbo and rendered my vessel nearly limp in open seas under rough conditions. The culprit was two hose clamps left open after their removal of transmission for a service that *** have caused additional and larger issues. The soot alone coated every inch of the engine room and ruined the fresh air intakes for two engines. Leaving the boat a mess after service is bad enough. Having additional mechanical issues on the same component after two very expensive and connected repairs is extremely coincidental. But, creating potentially catastrophic damage to a vessel off-shore and underway is negligence and should be criminal.

First Watch Marine's policy and action has always been to stand behind our work, and we have built an excellent reputation because of this. That being said, we do not take responsibility for or pay for problems we did not cause. This is the fundamental basis for this disagreement with this former customer.Without getting bogged down in details, the situation is that we performed maintenance on **************************** 13-year-old Mercury Zeus pods. He later experienced two failures. He unilaterally determined the cause of the failures was due to our work. We met with him on board and proved to his satisfaction that our maintenance work was completely unrelated to the failures he had experienced. He agreed with that fact both verbally at the time, and later in writing. We then moved forward and repaired these two problems. One of the problems was replacement of a hydraulic seal. We flushed the hydraulic system of which this seal is a part but there are several components that cannot be flushed and are not serviceable. The vessel was returned to the customer for delivery back to the slip, and it was known and agreed that we would be returning to the yacht to perform final cleanup work, which we did. It is important to note that by this point, ************************ had displayed his hot temper twice, using abusive and foul language directed at our personnel while on the phone. Both our service writer and my business partner would no longer work with him. After the repairs and cleanup was done, and after some hours of operation, the customer reported faults that were related to the non-serviceable components in his hydraulic system. I offered to come to the boat to confirm my remote diagnosis and then to provide an estimate for repair, but he refused. Instead, he blamed us and reversed his position from before, deciding the cause of all of his issues was our previous maintenance, which had already been proven and accepted as a false correlation. He was unwilling to pay for any further service, instead demanding that we continue to work on his vessel at no cost to him. It was at this point that I realized that no matter how well I explained to ************************ that it is a fallacy to insist that since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X, and because his communications had become combative and he had played the "I will *** you" card, we determined that our best course of action to protect the company from this person was to terminate our business relationship. At this point all work as described on our repair orders was completed and the symptoms these repairs addressed were solved. ************************ then used the credit card system to run chargebacks on pretty much every payment transaction that had been done over the year. His statements to his credit card provider in support of the chargebacks were distortions, misleading, or outright wrong. We disputed the chargebacks by submitting to our acceptance provider a detailed response including copies of email correspondence in which ************************ was contradicting statements he had made to his credit card company. After hearing our side of this story, our credit card acceptance vendor has reversed the chargeback transactions and has restored the funds taken from our account. Foiled, ************************ is now using the BBB as a weapon against us. Regarding several other statements made by this former customer:-the boat came to us the ****************** time with oil and salt spillage around the Zeus pods. Our annual maintenance service does not include detailing the pods, but we normally would have done so anyway. The location where the oil and salt were found was hard to see. ************************ notified us and we went to the boat and at no charge cleaned up the oil and salt. There was one other event regarding oil leakage and ************************ was advised that some cleanup had been done but more was needed and that we would complete the cleanup in his slip. We did complete that cleanup as described and when we said we would. -the customer's statement about my business partner being unable to install an impeller is missing some basic info. We had pulled the impellers to prove to the customer that our maintenance work had not created an overheat by damaging his impellers. They were in used but normal condition. We had brought new impellers since it is not normal to re-install used ones. The customer insisted on re-using the old impellers. We got one in, but the other was awkwardly positioned and my 65 year old business partner was having a little difficulty but I am sure he would have eventually succeeded. ************************, a much younger person, volunteered and was able to get it started. We thanked him for the assistance. -************************ fails to mention that while the boat was at the boatyard, the yard's equipment damaged an outrigger on his vessel. As a courtesy, I spent many hours working with the yard, the yacht manufacturer, and to determine the cause of the damage to **************************** outrigger and assisting the yard in sourcing a replacement. This effort went unappreciated. -One of our technicians has automotive background, as do many marine mechanics, including me. This technician's involvement with **************************** boat was only basic fluid changing and cleanup work. He was not involved in diagnostics or repairs. He made no errors while working on this vessel. -Our service writer has been in the marine industry for nearly 30+ years. He worked for an automotive dealership for 1 year. -**************************** report of an exhaust bypass hose coming adrift is new to us. The funny thing is that we did not remove this hose during any of the work we did. In fact, we noted during our initial inspection in the engine room that the transom through hull fitting that this hose connects to was leaking and corroding. We put ************************ in touch with another vendor who later replaced the fitting when the part became available. As per the pattern described above, ************************, without discussion and without giving First Watch Marine any opportunity to examine the problem and determine the cause, has unilaterally determined that we are at fault. Again, we are not. We did not touch the clamps on the hose described.We try our best to work with our customers with an honest, professional approach. Yacht maintenance and repair requires a partnership between the yacht owner and the mechanics. If the customer does not trust the mechanics, or if the mechanics do not trust the customer, it is best to move on.