Dude Where's my Boat?

5-11-12 Alameda, CA

"Where's my boat?"

I suppose this is yet another installment of "how the world of boats works."  Apparently, this world is not the same as the outside world where customer service is paramount and when promises are made they are kept.  That may seem a bit harsh and it really is, to some degree.  On the other hand there seems to be a lot of "just go with it" and "don't worry, we'll get it done" attitude when dealing with boating related industries.  Being an obsessively punctual person who believes you should never promise something you can't deliver this sometimes frustrates me.  Thankfully I'm getting over this little by little as our departure date nears.
For instance:  We had contacted a local boatyard to replace our standing rigging. (That's the wires that hold up the mast for non-sailboat folks)  They told me they would retrieve our boat and take it to their yard, remove the mast and return the boat to our slip.  Sounds easy enough to me.  Understand that this is equivalent to giving the Cable guy your keys and asking him to fix your TV while you are not home and will not be home for a couple of weeks.  This whole operation entails quite a bit of trust.
Thursday night we arrive at 10:30 after a day of work and a 3 hour drive, unload our stuff and cart it down the dock to our boat.  Mind you at this point I really only gave it a 50/50 Chance that our boat would be there.   Even in the dark of the night I could tell there was not 9 tons of boat sitting in our slip.  You feel sort of silly staring at an empty slip with all of your stuff at you feet.  Knowing that the boat was probably at the marina next door we head back to the car and re-load our stuff and drive next door.  We must have looked trust worthy when trying to get through the gate because the security guard let us in as long as we signed his paper work.  No problem, now all we needed to do was find our boat somewhere in the marina of about 400 boats.  Elizabeth keenly spotted it after checking out only a couple of docks.  This was a nice relief as we didn't have a place to sleep at this point.  Autumn Wind looked naked without any of her rigging or mast.  She also looked really big with clean decks.  I guess this is what it's like to be a power boater.  We hopped aboard and headed to sleep knowing the yard guys would be working on the boats around us early in the morning. 
So I guess it all worked out.  We decided it was a good lesson in "Just going with It".  I am sure there will be many more to come and we might as well get used to it.
All this being said, we met the rigging foreman early the next day and he was nothing but helpful and a great guy.  He even helped us not be a "Barney" when we were deciding on line colours for our halyards. 
So that's the story of how we lost and found our boat all in one night.