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UPDATED 3/1/2011

An Introduction to SHYC and a Family... Of Sorts

How One Couple and a Yacht Club Helped Put Bottom TIme on the Map

by Kirk Hathaway

“Do you do topside work, as well?” That was the question that launched Bottom Time Diving from a part time business to a full time operation with a couple hundred trusting customers. All it took was the inquiry and insight of Linda Turlington, the owner of Pura Vida Promotions and a Beneteau sailboat by that name home-ported at Oriental’s Sea Harbour Yacht Club.

In 2008, with a number of New Bern customers relocating to various locations along and beyond the Neuse River, I was experiencing a productive start-up for a new company, a hull cleaning dive business where more and more new customers were sharing amazement with narratives I provided, invoices detailing the cleaning of each vessel with the condition of its paint, prop, and sacrificial zincs. The start-up $60 per hour rate was also helping to gather attention, but all advertising was done by word of mouth, one customer to another. With all going on, I wasn’t thinking much about the growth of the company until called out to Oriental, 20 miles beyond most of my Craven County customers.

Sea Harbour Yacht Club, just outside of Oriental on Pierce Creek, is a peninsula marina at the mouth of the creek with an attractive view into the Neuse River. Having a comfortably equipped dockhouse and pool at the end of the peninsula, the docks wrap around a jutting piece of land with one central dock at the end of the point directed out toward the river. The waters in Pierce Creek are mostly fresh with just enough salt content to keep off most fresh water algae and moss found in the upper Neuse. The bottom is a mix of sand and hard mud with a shoreline of reeds and grasses containing quickly moving, tiny crabs. Soon, I was to discover that diving at Sea Harbour mostly means maintenance and careas a matter of brushing down hull or gently prying off only a small to moderate growth of shells a few times a year on each vessel, sometimes the barnacles having an oyster or scallop among them.

After a dive and Linda’s question about topside work, the liability issue of putting applications on a craft worth hundreds of thousands prompted the reasonable step to purchase a standard million dollar policy to cover care of such premium crafts. The serendipity of this action came into play a few days later when one dock master or another began requesting insurance information, which, by that time, I had acquired.

Linda and Jim Turlingtion were not the first new customers I had gained that week with my reputation quickly spreading, but Linda’s question about my doing work above the waterline created a series of events that made Bottom Time an official business and helped to eventually launch the premiere of Cape Carolina as Linda and Jim, upon our meeting, took an encouraging interest not only in my diving but the online journal I was still projecting only in my thoughts. The Turlington’s it turns out own a promotional company providing insignias, logos and designs printed on virtually anything and, remaining at the front of that business, have recently purchased equipment to make printing more cost effective than the traditionally known silkscreen process. No doubt, Linda Turlington might have seen the potential of a future client, but having account that include such as BB&T, she would hardly profit greatly from helping a fledgling diving business. And yet, she moved forward with an advertiser’s energy.

Within weeks of my starting topside work on Pura Vida, the Turlington’s had sent emails around their community of Sea Harbour recommending my diving services. People were stopping by Pura Vida to view hull compounding and the cleaning and treating of teak rails. Soon, one Sea Harbour boat owner after another was adding their vessel to my dive schedules, but even before I had their business, the Turlington’s had invited me as a guest to the club’s summer picnic, Sea Harbour’s Jimmy Buffett Party.

Here I had the opportunity to meet many future clients as well as the dock master Landon Winstead who, in the super hero atmosphere of proud and dynamic members of the yacht club, plays a mild mannered, humble Clark Kent like role---worth noting: when I made this analogy aloud, one Sea Harbour member chimed in saying, “Yes, but we keep hiding his phone booth.” With veteran members Bryan Moore and Jim Turlington trading quips and cracks to up one another, Landon could be seen quietly making his way to all his clients greeting them in manner of a concerned pediatrician, which is maybe only to acknowledge that despite their years and maturity, the yacht club members seems at once and always to embrace an eternally youthful joy and energy.

For week following this party, I would get a call from one new client or another at Sea Harbour, always having heard about me from one or another email the Turlingtons and then the Moores were sending around.

Following a 2009 fire that took two boats and part of a third at the club, Landon contacted Bottom TIme and asked me to complete salvage work at the docks. Landon said he wasn’t worried about the cost so much as the assurance that all the unburned fiberglass sheets fallen into the water were recovered with any other debris that posed a danger for nearby and docking vessels. Owners of a couple of the crafts close to the burning called on my topside buffing as well, but in the week of recovery and restoring work I performed at Sea Harbour, nothing quite gave me the pride of a Sea Harbour regular like the moment Dock Master Landon showing a perspective new member and buyer a Sea Habour slip passed by me saying, “And this is our diver.” Such is the graciousness of Sea Harbour and its members who later that year donated $2000 to the Oriental Volunteer Fire Department that ultimately saved the marina from a more devastating fire.

Today, or any day in a following week, I can find my way to Sea Harbour and be assured of seeing one of my clients and receiving the warm greeting I first received there from Jim and Linda Turlington. From the trust of their patronage, Bottom Time initiated a Companion Dive Program where boaters are not so much on a monthly contract as they are on an “as needed” contract. And like with any good business, a lesson I am learning well from Linda, is that need is something best shared between the business owner and his or her clients. Two days ago, a boater considering moving his craft closer to his residence wrote to ask if there was any place around Bath that I would recommend. Diving a large region, I was able to provide the recommendation of Bath Harbour Marina, but I had to add that no place in Coastal Carolina could match the friendliness and family atmosphere of Sea Harbour Yacht Club.

© 2011 Cape CAROLINA LLC, All material within this site is permitted for use on this site only. No materials may be copied or distributed without the expressed permission of Editor Kirk Hathaway, or specific authors or artists cited within. All original works are printed here for a one time use on this site and permission for further reprint or publication is not allowed without permission of the creators. This site is anecdotal and informational and is not intended for navigational purposes.

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