A warranty claim, a season's passage away

Twelve months after redelivery a fault does not arrive labelled as a warranty claim. It arrives as a stain on a deckhead in Antigua, or a breaker that trips on the second start of the morning, and somebody has to decide who to call.

A yacht refit warranty is the machinery for answering that at distance. Ours runs twelve months from redelivery with a named contact, and the terms sit with the rest of a refit here in who employs the welder. What to ask before signing is in seven questions for a Mediterranean refit yard. This is the other end: the year she is somewhere else.

What a yacht refit warranty covers, and what it does not

A pump fails in month four. The unit belongs to whoever sold it; the installation belongs to us. If it failed on a bracket we made, on a bulkhead that moves, it is ours. The same boundary holds on a coating: the stack we applied, not a scheme somebody else laid down.

Three headings, then. Workmanship is ours, and a seam or a weld failing in the way it was fitted sits inside the twelve months and is not arguable. Owner-supplied equipment splits along the line above. Equipment bought through the yard sits with its manufacturer, administered here but not underwritten here.

Wear, consumables and damage in service are covered by no warranty, ours or anyone's, and that is better heard in week one than in month ten.

Whose clock is running, and did it start when you think?

Ours runs from redelivery. Equipment we bought and fitted also carries the manufacturer's warranty, on its own clock, and that clock catches people out: its start date is frequently not redelivery. Some run from the day the unit was invoiced to the yard, months before it was fitted; a generator that sat in bonded storage over a winter comes aboard with part of its cover already spent. Some run from commissioning, which is better. Some are conditional on a service interval a yacht passes in her first season without noticing.

Those dates belong in the handover pack, worked out, not in a box of manuals for the crew to find later. A yard can administer a manufacturer's claim. It cannot extend a manufacturer's clock.

Can the claim be proved, or only remembered?

A refit record is usually read from the handover end. The test of it runs the other way, with a fault in front of you and a year of salt water in between. Read backwards, a claim asks narrow questions. What film thickness and adhesion figure were recorded at this location on the day, and can the same measurement be taken there now? To which procedure was this weld laid, and was that welder's certificate current that week?

Where the file answers, the argument takes an afternoon. Where it is silent, the claim is two recollections of the same fortnight, and those do not agree. Zima was measured two seasons out at the same points, against the figures recorded on the day she left, in that inspection. A claim is the same comparison in worse temper.

Who takes the call, and what has to travel with it

The call goes to the foreman who ran the hull, with the project manager who carried her from assessment to redelivery behind him. Both were on the job.

The most expensive thing a crew can do in that first hour is take the fitting off to have a look. Once the bedding is out, the only account of how it failed is a memory.

Measure it instead. A leak at a deck fitting is proved with a hose: one area at a time for a fixed number of minutes, somebody inside calling the moment it wets, written down as it goes. That turns a leak into a located leak.

Then send it. The yard is a season's passage away and acts only on what the crew supply: photographs with something in frame for scale, the compartment reference the work record uses, and any reading taken without a specialist. A described fault is a conversation; a measured fault is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis decides which fitter and which part get on an aeroplane.

The first thing to establish is that the fault is new: some items left the yard deliberately, on a register row with a route and a date already agreed against them.

Somebody then places the fault under one of those three headings, and in the first instance that is usually the yard that did the work. Where an owner disagrees the referee is the record; where it is silent, neither side wins on merit, which is why the pack is worth more than the wording. A warranty is not an insurance policy either, a boundary drawn in yacht refit insurance and liability.

The check at the end of the first season

At the end of the first season the yard looks at her at its own cost, whether or not anything has gone wrong. It is the cheapest moment to find the fault that has not declared itself yet: inside the twelve months rather than after them, and small items close on the spot.

Fly a fitter, authorise a local yard, or wait for the next lift?

Three routes, and underneath all three is who ends up owning the workmanship. Sending our own people is the ordinary case, and the only route on which the cover continues unbroken. What sets the date is the visa, the part and the diagnosis rather than the flight.

Having the work done where she lies is quickest when she is in commission and the job is small, provided the rate and scope are agreed in writing before that yard starts. The price of that speed: the remedial work is then somebody else's workmanship, and no yard warrants work it did not do.

Carrying it to the next yard period is right when the fault is static and going nowhere. It is wrong when the fault is doing something — a weep wetting core, a coating edge undercutting — because the damage compounds before the lift. A lift a year out is also a year in which the twelve months has run, so if the fault is ours, raise it now.

What if the yard is not there in a year?

A warranty is a promise made by a company, and companies change hands, change name and stop trading. Owners ask this least and are most entitled to it: any yard, this one included, can be asked how long it has traded and who owns it.

What does not depend on that answer is the record. As-built drawings, the coating record with its hourly dew point log and film thickness readings, the certificates and the signed trials programme let another yard price the fault without opening structure to see what is behind it. That decides whether the repair is a known job or an exploration.

Goodwill closes a great many small faults. It cannot be relied on, and it cannot be priced.

Written at the yard in Tuzla. The twelve-month period described here is the one written into our own contracts, and the handover record described is the one written on the job and handed over with the vessel.