Welcome to REPAIR & REFIT Report

Many thanks to all who have responded to the online launch of REPAIR & REFIT Report. It’s gratifying and encouraging to know how some of the field’s thought-leaders, influencers, and change-makers see the potential of this initiative to help bring a greater awareness and a more professionally-oriented networking mechanism to this uniquely interesting facet of the marine industry.

It’s exciting to build a new forum for illuminating the experience, ingenuity, and imagination that permeates Repair and Refit shipyards around the country and the world; especially to call attention to the work of the countless talented individuals who continue unassailably to achieve the amazing results they do. We’re slowly coming up to speed, as we reach out to those who matter in our industry, and we look forward to creating, aggregating, and sharing more of the kinds of stories we all want to see, and featuring those whose work deserves acknowledgement.

What this means, of course, is that we need you. We’re actively seeking examples of the work you’re doing, whether on the back of a napkin or in the middle of the shop floor, because yours are the experiences we can all learn from. REPAIR & REFIT Report is the place where successful – and even unsuccessful – ideas and innovations should be shared, because inspiration and innovation come from successes and failures. Nothing is unimportant, and any innovation or initiative has meaning and value for the industry and its future.

What is distinctly different about REPAIR & REFIT Report is that our mission is sharply focused on sharing and showcasing efforts and achievements across the vast arc of Repair and Refit work – from first Survey to final Sea Trials – in a way that helps bring greater professionalism, consistency, reliability, and – above all – trust, to an industry where rigorously experienced professionals continue to find themselves encountering the sometimes-failed results of other self-styled “experts” whose work, in the end, did not measure up to the promises that preceded it.

This is what REPAIR & REFIT Report can bring to that challenge: examples of innovation and achievement as a way of advancing the conversation for readers at a professional level – because the stakes are high. It is not alarmist to remind ourselves that, as a number of forward-thinkers at Refit shipyards have noted, if we don’t work hard to clearly define the foreseeable and predictable (as well as the predictably unpredictable) parameters of experienced and professional Refit Planning and Implementation, the major yacht and vessel Refit industry in this country – with all of its vast potential – could one day end up dramatically diminishing in capacity and scope.

There are experienced professionals working hard to avert that outcome, and their voices will continue to be part of REPAIR & REFIT Report, going forward. If you’re proud of what you or your yard are achieving, please share some of it with us, and tell your colleagues to do the same. That’s the best way we can work to advance the Refit industry’s extraordinary potential.

Jon Wilson, Editor
[email protected]