With the exception of a few oddball spinnakers here and there, for the most part, I’ve always raced with North Sails. There wasn’t even a second of hesitation when asked if I wanted North to build the sails for our two new boats when I ordered them last Fall.

I’ll be sailing with these four North Sails that you see in these photos for quite a while too, mainly because I just spent a lot of hard-earned money on everything and can’t afford to just “try” another brand. So, because I’m going to be using them, I should get to rant a little…

(That’s where the headline about North One Design hating me comes in because it must suck to be a merchant these days and forget your customer may be one of more than a million bloggers today!)

Preface: This is mostly about one vendor but I have other rants building up about Layline (mast track mounts for my GPS – backordered, oh yeah, and the GPS), IntensitySails.com (emergency paddle – backordered), Team One Newport (Gill dinghy pants – backordered), the Sailing Anarchy Store (shirt – status unknown),  and West Marine ( batteries – not sure either) all of which have orders somewhere between me hitting the online “Submit” button and my front door.

This post is getting long already, so let me get to the point…

When I order a NEW main sail, I expect to get an unused, dirt-free, brand new main sail and NOT a sail that LOOKS new but has the old numbers “158″ peeled off leaving dirty glue shaped like a “158″ on the sail! This particular main requires a “162″ and those shapes don’t cover all of the glue spots. Too boot, I used existing lines drawn in ink to lay on the new numbers and apparently, the old sail had smaller numbers, so now I have to remove both sides and re-adjust! What a pain.

Furthermore… it shouldn’t be up to me to force fit “custom made” 2.4 Meter cockpit covers from your one-design shop onto my boats and leaving me to file down the clips to make them fit!

Test these things for 2 minutes and look at your orders before you ship them from your lofts in Sri Lanka.

The extra service will make your customers will think you are great because everything works and is exactly what they ordered, rather than leaving them to imagine that the “company” is trying to just shave a buck!

The sails did come in two really nice sail bags!

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UPDATE: To be more balanced and fair with North Sails about this rant, I should add another detail.

When we saw the covers didn’t fit, we were contacted by a North representative. He offered to ship new buckles for the covers. I didn’t want to think about finding someone to cut off the old ones and sew on new clips so I didn’t reply to the email right away. (We don’t sew.)

The next evening, Tracy mixed and matched three of the six straps and got one cover on the boat. I replies back to the guy and said to hang tight and the next time we were at the boats, we worked on the six remaining clips until they all snapped. I replied back that “it was all good”, thanked him for the offer, but declined the replacement buckles.

That was last week. Today was the first day we unpacked the second main sail and saw the ink marks and glue residue.

UPDATE 5/14/08: The Layline order showed up yesterday.