Off and on I have been thinking about installing a Smartplug and whenever I check, the retailers have been entirely out of stock. I mean ENTIRELY. None in Seattle. No boat show special in January! No stock anywhere... zilch! None in April. Nada.

Well, the Smartplug headquarters is in Seattle so I phoned them a few minutes ago and talked with one of the founders. Yes, they had not anticipated the growth in demand and have been struggling to keep up. The Defender order went out today and Fisheries Supply should have lots of stock by Monday. I picked a good day to call.

The Seattle boating world is pretty small. Three years ago when Smartplugs were discussed on CSBB, I wrote a brief account of Jack Heady's terrible loss of his investment and hundreds of hours restoring his Nordic 40, wiped out by a shore power cord fire (see link). I remember now that I saw that very boat being rebuilt at Ocean Marine along with a fire damaged Norseman 535. The boat restoration outfit specialized in insurance claim boats, so they had seen the results of a lot of electrical fires. It was Jack's boat that was their inspiration to design a better shore power connection system. After a lot of hard work and securing patents, developing the product, setting up production, etc., SmartPlug was launched.

The Smartplug folks really appreciated my positive comments today. It sounds like runaway success hasn't been easy.