Haulashore Island Ferry – superb customer service!

I showed some pictures from a field trip to the Boulder Bank in my last post.  That morning had some real highs and lows for me.  I’ll explain. We went across in the Haulashore Island Ferry. We were landed around 100m from the Lighthouse.  It was still very dark against the dawn sky, so I began by exploring the views to the south.  Like this one:

Views in other directions were also interesting, but I’ll leave those shots to the end of this post and get to the point.  After 45 minutes or so, I decided that I would try to get a picture of our house.  For that I would need my longest lens,  (the 300mm f4 Nikon AF-S) which I had packed into my overloaded backpack.  It wasn’t there.   I must have forgotten to put it in, I thought, and carried on photographing.  Imagine how I felt when, on arriving back home around 0930, there was no 300mm lens.  It had probably rolled out of my backpack as I was shifting locations in those first 45 mins.

I managed to get hold of the ferry owner, who arranged to meet me back at the wharf at 10 am.  To my surpise, he was accompanied by his wife and daughter.  “I thought extra eyes would help in the search” he explained.  The area to be covered was not all that large, just 100 meters or so,  but it’s not easy to spot things amongst the driftwood.  Eventually, when all we had gathered was a load of plastic rubbish to be taken back home with us, I gave up.  I resigned myself to the loss of a lens worth several thousand dollars and we made our way back to the boat.

Then I spotted it, sitting not very far from the boat, about 5 meters from the incoming tide.  Hardly a scratch on it, it must have just rolled out of my backpack as I picked it up.  Another 30 mins or so and it would have been under water.  It was a real lesson for me in the careful use of a backpack!

Afterwards I thought about the service provided by the ferry owner.  Not only did he take me back over, at very short notice, and provide extra helpers for the search, but he also refused to charge me the full minimum rate.  So the very least I can do is tell people about such truly excellent customer service.

Here are some other shots from that morning: