STR Takes On-Call Service To Next Level
With no organized boating events on the schedule yesterday in Southwest Florida, MTI catamaran owners Chuck Stark, Stephen Miles and Zach Martin enjoyed an unhurried morning at Stark’s waterfront home in Cape Coral. Morning stretched into late afternoon before their motivation returned. But eventually it came back and the trio decided to hit the water for a blast in their cats docked behind Stark’s place.
(Clockwise from bottom left) STR’s Bobby Pezos and Nick Imprescia worked the problem alongside MTI 340X catamaran owner Stephen Miles. Photos by Matt Trulio.
Stark and Martin ran solo in their 39-footers. Miles invited me to join him in his 340X.
First off the dock, we led the group to open water. As soon as he hit the throttles and the boat started to come on plane, the dreaded nasal-hornet sound of a fault-code warning assaulted our ears. His port Mercury Racing 450R outboard engine—still under warranty—was not happy.
Miles throttled back, and the code (throttle-position sensor) cleared. And off we went again, first to take a mild beating off Fort Myers Beach, then back to the protected Intracoastal Waterway. We cruised into twilight at 100 mph. Life was good.
But in the two-plus hours we spent on the water, we experienced six fault codes, from the aforementioned throttle-position sensor alert to a camshaft sensor warning.
After the last one, Miles had enough. So he pulled out his phone and called Nick Imprescia of locally based Shaun Torrente Racing. They talked for a few minutes before Miles hung up, tried a suggested fix that didn’t work and called him again.
After running diagnostics and inspecting the port outboard, Imprescia and Pezos believed they had a possible cause and remedy.
“We’re going to meet Nick at the launch ramp and he’s going to look at it you don’t mind,” Miles told me.
Of course I didn’t mind. I had just spent a late-Sunday afternoon with a fine friend running through paradise in his fine boat on his dime. And I was curious, not so much about the codes—codes happen—but about why Imprescia even picked up the phone at 5 p.m. on a Sunday evening.
Imprescia and fellow STR team-member Bobby Pezos were waiting for us when we finally pulled up to dock at the correct ramp—second time was a charm. They were already there helping Minnesota’s Jeremy Tschida with a fuel-pump issue on one of the outboard engines powering his 37-foot Outerlimits cat. STR’s Ian Morgan continued working on Tschida’s cat while Imprescia and Pezos worked with Miles.
They hopped into the boat, Imprescia with his laptop in hand, and went to work. They diagnosed what they believed was causing the issue and off the four of us went out to test their solution.
But it didn’t work, so we headed back to the docks.
“This is your vacation—we’re working, we’re on call all week for you guys,” Imprescia told Miles. “Why don’t you go back to Chuck’s and enjoy your dinner? We’ll fix the problem and bring the boat to you at Chuck’s.”
I almost had him repeat what he had just said.
Before we left, I pulled Imprescia aside and asked him what the hell he was doing out there on a Sunday evening. He smiled.
“Shaun has something like 20 customers down here for the week leading up to the Gratton Run on New Year’s Day,” he explained. “Our customers are our friends and our family, and we appreciate them. We want to take care of them the entire time they are here. So we are on call 24 hours a day for the next week. We loaded up the company truck with every conceivable part for every Mercury Racing outboard we carry. Basically, we brought the kitchen sink.
It was getting dark by the time the group headed out to test the proposed solution.
“That’s what Shaun is all about, that’s what STR is all about,” he continued. “Our customers are here so we are going take care of them. We want all of our buddies to have a good time doing the ‘Four By Four’ (event series) while they are here. We want them to come back.”
The problem turned out to be with outboard’s umbilical wiring harness. Imprescia, Morgan and Pezos resolved the issue, and Miles’ cat is ready for today’s Torrente-organized, customer lunch-run to Doc Ford’s Rum Bar and Grille in Fort Myers Beach.
As promised, the cat is now tied up at the docks behind Stark’s home. With the cockpit cover on, of course.
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