In my case, there was no way for Willie to know when he estimated the job that we would have to deal with old fairing compound that had failed. He could have simply not mentioned that there were problems, finished the paint job, and I would have left happy, and then been unhappy years down the track when the underlying problem caused the new paint to fail early.

So, to Willie’s credit, he was careful, observant, keen to do a great job, and brought the issue to my attention.

Renegotiating the price at that point is also not easy. The owner (me) is pretty much over a barrel – it’s not like I could go shopping for another contractor now that the boat is all torn apart and has no paint! And a big initial price tag is now even bigger. And the contractor (Willie & Brian) doesn’t want to take it in the shorts either. In my case, I had asked for an ‘accurate’ quote, not one that was fully inflated to take into account every possible contingency.

The re-negotiation had its moments of excitement and wallet pain but we worked it out.

At the end of the day, I give Willie a ton of credit for sticking in out, putting his heart into it and doing a beautiful job.

As you will see in part three of the story, at the end I created a special graphic combining elements of Baobab’s logo and the signatures of every guy on the crew and put it on the transom of ‘Learjet’. I was, and still am, proud of the work they did. And that graphic is a testament to that fact.