New Hanse Experience

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   I have been looking for a new boat since 2009. I had different choices in mind. The usual French brands were the first ones that comes up at every boat show you go. But, I wanted something with a flush deck. Hanse was the perfect design. The design was good, but now, I had to check the quality of the construction, and the after sales service. So, I decided to enroll to "myHanse.com" and created to topics in which I posted few questions. Many repplied. Some, even gave their phone numbers for me to contact them and get more from their experience. I would like to thank all the contributors. 

Quality: After many research, and test sails, I concluded that, Hanse's quality is not so much different than the closest competitors. In fact slightly better than the other French and German production boats. But, it is a production boat built on land. So, I knew things would move, settle and I could have few leaks and small problems. The real deal was to choose the right Dealership to handle the problems smootlhy. 

The Dealer: That was a bit of a hassle. Especialy reading the blogs, one get easily discouraged by how many owners are let in the wild, with very bad after sales service. A boat is not like a car. Many would travel long distances with it. So, one has to choose very carefully who to buy from... For example, being French, Turkish and British national, I am planning to keep the boat few years in Turkey, and then travel back to Europe, and hopefuly participate in to the ARC, crossing the atlantic. Who would be the best dealer? 
First of all, Hanse has a strange way of dealing with its dealers. Hanse let their dealers to compete with each other. So, when you call the one in Turkey, UK, Malta etc, they all try to break prices to win the business. They all explain how well their after sales service is good. At this stage, I urge you to take few days and look a bit to history... Who are the big sailing nations? France, Spain, England... Not any of the enclosed med countries... Most of them were great rowers. Turks for example, never really sailed in history. Ottoman navy rarely used sails in their galleys. Barbarossa who defeated Andrea Doria in 16th century had very small sails and massive lines of rowers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Barbarossa_galley_in_France_1543.jpg). These rowers were great in close seas but were not able to cross the oceans. Hence, whilst Ottoman empire ruled the Med, the French, Spanish and Brits were conquering the oceans.... Than tradition has never reallly changed. Now, in Turkey sailing remains a small minority occupation. The rowers were exchanged for power boats. There are only couple of Turkish sailors you could find out side the Med. 
The Turkish dealer was a nice and very motivated company. However, in my inquiries, I realised that many of their customers were very un-happy with the rigging, and after sales. Indeed, they do not know how to sail. One of their customer, even told me that, the boat had never sailed from Slovenia (where it had been commissioned) to Bodrum. It motored. That the tradition in Turkey. Motoring... 
Another problem with the Turkish dealer would be that, as much as they can be motivated, just due to the fact that there are very little Turkish sailors that travel around the globe, the servicing ex-Turkey would never be as great and the experience that they would get could take years.... So.... I dropped the Turkish dealers....
What could I do?
Well.... I am British, I live in England. English people are great sailors. All around the world. I could buy my boat from Inspiration Marine, that has win the dealership of the year few times. But then, in Turkey, who could be urgent help? 
The next step was to find a person in Bodrum that could be the relay for Inspiration Marine in the UK, so that I could sleep well.... Simon Phillips from Aura Yachting is a great british sailor that owns a growing charter and private boat servicing company in Yalikavak-Bodrum. His team has been helping me and my friends in the past years for either servicing or chartering. I had full confidence in his experience. 
I proposed Inspiration Marine to have Simon Phillips on board for the warranty servicing. They accepted. Voila. I had my deal. A great solution. Phil from Inspiration Marine and Simon from Aura were great help to put the whole thing together. 

The boat was comissioned last weekend. I am just back from Portoroz to London. The boat has left now Portoroz to Bodrum with a proffessional sailing team from PYD. All british sailors of great quality.

I was afraid of the comissioning. The rigging and other problems that could be a headach. Well, Phil organised the boat to be ready few days before I went to Portoroz. Inspiration Marine sent an engineer, Andy. Andy, went 3-4 days before I went down to check that every system on the boat was working all fine. Andy, is a very experienced sailor/engineer that knows every little thing that could go wrong on these boats. A great asset to Inspiration Marine. Simon, went there a day earlier than my arrival and went over small things with Andy. I arrived on Thursday night. On Friday morning, when I went to see the boat, every thing was done. The sea trials had no problems to report. The sails openned well, the engine, and electronics were working...
Of course, there were some very minor problems... Like the Volvo engine had a wrong software that will need to be re-set in Turkey. Or, few small repairs here and there, for example the TV was supposed to be conected to the chart plotter and it wasn't, or the sheets for the bed came with wrong measurements . But nothing that should prevent it to sail well down to Bodrum... It seemed that none of the little problems were Inspiration Marine problems, but mostly Hanse's mistakes. Inspiration Marine (Andy and Phil) took great care so far and I am hoping that the choice I have done will be the right one in future as well....



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