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I look
forward to going up to Wisconsin to test drive and examine the new Carvers.
Maybe it’s because I like Pulaski, the small town where Carver’s
located. It’s a few miles from Green Bay and reminds me of the little
upstate New York town I grew up in. Back when just about everybody I knew
owned a boat, most every adult male, upon encountering another adult male
in a public spot like Corbin’s lumber yard, Vrooman’s General
Store, or Finn’s Bait & Tackle, opened a conversation by asking,
“Done any good lately?” Which was a question that sounded
pretty darn general but wasn’t, having to do instead with discovering
specifically where an interlocutor’s last fishing trip had taken
him and exactly what sort of fish he’d prized from the breast of
Mother Nature.
For
some reason my most recent trip to Pulaski, to test Carver’s new
346 Motor Yacht, engendered just a tad more nostalgia than usual. Maybe
the tour of the Carver plant that preceded the actual sea trial in Green
Bay had something to do with this. Indeed, some of the Carver folks that
marketing manager Tim Schmitt introduced me to seemed to have stepped
straight out of a long-gone era that was not only scrupulously hardworking
and detail-oriented, but also just a tad kinder and gentler than the current
milieu.
Consider,
for example, Bob Holewinski, the tall, bespectacled, barrel-chested foreman
of Carver’s woodshop. While a more citified journalist than myself
might have cursorily concluded that Holewinski’s cheery artisanal
aura comes mostly from working at Carver for 44 years, I spotted a more
fundamental factor right away. It manifested shortly after we all shook
hands, well before the big guy began extolling the virtues of the mortised,
doweled, and epoxy-glued joints of the raised-panel doors he’d been
critiquing when Schmitt and I walked in. Holewinski asked two simple questions:
Where had Schmitt been fishing lately, and exactly what sort of fish had
he caught? The man might just as well have asked, “Done any good
lately, Tim?”
Of course,
the 346 helped put me in a pretty good mood, too. As we examined several
models in various stages of completion, I noted all sorts of nifty features,
most resulting from Carver’s emphasis on in-house fabrication of
equipment and parts, an emphasis that harks back to a time when you did
it yourself, if you wanted it done right. Besides the woodworking facility,
Carver has dedicated electrical, metal, and upholstery shops. Thanks to
these, the 346 sports custom-fit electrical harnesses with waterproof
connectors and tinned-copper wire runs, all carefully loomed, tagged,
color-coded, and installed; bowrail stanchions that are double-welded
to their base plates; and exterior lounge and seat cushions with King
Starlite XL bases, water-repellent foam, mesh backing, stainless steel
staples, and extra-thick marine vinyl fabrics.
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