LandfallVoyages

Gill Foulies

It really was a dark and stormy night, some fourteen years past and I guess it must have been around 2 in the morning when a storm rolled in and engulfed our little anchorage off the oyster shell beach. It was our first winter living aboard our trimaran Night Heron.

I slipped out of bed and shrugged my way into the hardware store rain gear we’d bought several months back, snagged a Petzel on my way up the companionway and went out on deck to make the rounds. The wind generator was screaming up in the rigging–in fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what woke me in the first place–and as I brought my arms overhead to release the wind generator’s line and haul it down, icy rainwater sluiced its way down both sides of my body, from the tips of my fingers all the way down to my toes.

15 minutes later, having downed the wind generator, lashed it to the cabintop, and bailed out the skiff, I ducked back inside and shucked myself out of said hardware store raingear. “Next year,” I promised myself, “next year, we’ll get proper foulies, even if it means we have to eat Ramen all summer long.”

And so, it was, that when the following year’s winter storms marched through, we were happily decked out in Gill’s entry-level foul weather gear. We used and abused them for the next fourteen years and they never complained, never failed to be up for the task–with one tiny exception…little bits of the waterproof coating on the inner cuff seals started sloughing off the cuffs and welding themselves to the skin of our wrists.

When I finally picked up the phone and contacted Gill, the woman on the other end of the line seemed a mite too casual about the whole thing. I expected we’d have to produce receipts, fill out reams of paperwork, possibly submit to blood tests, and maybe install a couple of RFID tracking tags on our jackets. But no…all she wanted to know was where we lived, so she’d be able to give us the address we needed to ship our foulies off to.

We shipped them off. No tracking chips, not even an RF number or anything. It was like dropping our foul weather gear into a black hole. And Gill maintained complete radio silence–no email confirming that they got our package. No letter telling us if they could fix the cuffs,…nothing.

One month passed. And then another. By the third month, I’d pretty much resigned myself to the prospect of just replacing our jackets. And then, suddenly, with no fanfare or announcement…Gill sent our jackets back.

They hadn’t fixed the cuffs at all. In fact, the jackets they sent back weren’t even ours. At least, they weren’t our original jackets. Instead of repairing the old jackets, they simply replaced them with updated models.

Really nice ones, too–our old ones weren’t breathable at all. I don’t know which is better; the fact that they replaced our old jackets with nicer ones or the part where they don’t run you through a labyrinth of bureaucracy. Blindfolded.