December 19, 2005

Photos

Sometimes you just have your back against a wall. I committed to getting boats out before Christmas and we are doing everything we can to do so. Fun 1, Fun 1.5 are ready to go. The rest of the boats are being made as we speak. We got our first production seats and U-channel bracket in on Friday and worked all day on Saturday, and Sunday (until 9:30pm) and the guys are working 16 hours today. Our goal is to make as many boats as we can before we close on Friday for a week. We were initially going to close for two weeks, but everyone was behind doing what we could to get the boats done.

Goat, Brad, Jase, Tim, Tom, Adam, Nate, Daniel, Stephen, Tommy (Tom's 14 year old son), Clay, Kristine, and I all put in time over the weekend. We made trim templates for the seats for all boats, bracket templates, and put together a bunch of seats. Right now each seat takes 15 minutes to trim out, and another 15 minutes to prep for instalation. We have a long way to go to be efficient making Boat Armor Outfitting, which is a huge added expense on our 2006 boats, but well worth it for the performance and safety.

I am heading over to the shop now to see where we are after the first 8 hours of today's production. The guys were doing well when I was there early this morning. Clay and Stephen are into working tonight as well, how cool is that! Our team guys are team players in every sense of the word. Clay even brought in beverages last night.

:) EJ

P.s. Of the 450 boats we were supposed to ship before we closed, we are going to get out maybe 120 and the rest will go out in January. A failure to meet our delivery date? Yes. We are two months earlier than we were getting 2005 product out and have the creekboats ready for creek season! This will be a great spring for Jackson Kayak. If you are waiting on a boat- let me know what it is.