My call to the airline in the morning wasn’t successful (“We have no record of a such a claim on our system, Sir. Please call the Houston central number… oh, wait, we do have it on our system and the bag is no longer here, it is on the truck and our agent in the BVI will call you when it is delivered. No, we don’t know when that will be…”
So I took a cab to the West End ferry dock at 07:30 and asked the customs agents if there was a bag with my name on it and, lo-and-behold, there it was! I was overjoyed and taxied back to the docks and dropped off the parts at the shop and things were looking up. I went into the office and paid for my haul out and extra storage, then had some breakfast and went to the boat in order to release the backstays for the impending haul.
Then one of the guys from the shop doing the repair work came over and gave me the bad news – the parts delivered from the factory were the wrong size.
One of the parts was the right one, but it didn’t fit correctly, and the main part (lower rudder bearing) hadn’t been delivered; the emergency tiller bearing had. In addition, the correct part was missing an important sleeve.
Oh, and later on that night someone from the airline called the hotel to announce that the bag had been delivered to the ferry terminal building.
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