Slamming Sammy Baker

[Barney]

To The Bakers,
The last post in the bolt thread from Sam was asking if we could clear this up. Rickracer also contacted me to remind me that if not for the Bakers, high performance outboards for the public might not exist. Rick is right, The Bakers have helped most everyone here.

From my perspective, this was much more about people and safty than it was about bolts and liability.

I know everyone here holds The Bakers in a special light, (wanna see my email!) We all love and respect you Bakers for giving so much, sharing your love and passion in a sport you introduced most of us to.

It was my personal feelings toward the Bakers that came out. I held them above human status and found myself dissappointed when they were human, I'm sorry for that Sam.

What Rick helped me realize was that you guys do care, you show it everyday with all the things your family does to promote this sport and all of us. I'm sorry MY insecurity effected this whole thing.

I just really wanted to hear that you still love us too!

I'm very sorry if my sediments expressed anything else.
I hope you can accept my appoligy Sam, but I will understand if you don't.

Barney

[Sam Baker]

Of course I accept your apology. Obviously I get defensive when people attack our work because I'm very proud of it overall, but I also know that we as humans are prone to occasional mistakes and when things like this happen, it's good to learn from them so they don't happen again. I would still like to get to the bottom of it as it seems that it was a jackplate malfunction (your post above said that it was the bolts holding the two halves of the jackplate together) that caused the breakage and not a rigging situation.

The jackplate manufacturer and Allison would probably like to know about this so they too could learn from it.

My brother and I have been very fortunate when it comes to the way we were raised. I love being able to share this information and experience with other people. It's what makes the industry and the sport even more fun for us. I won't take credit for starting the sport or even being a founding member - I'm only 32 for God's sake - but I do like to help and I would just like to help find the problem that you have and help solve it going forward. If I can pass the info on to Allison and to the jack plate manufacturer, that would be great.

Thanks for your post and absolutely no hard feelings. However, if you (or anybody for that matter) has an issue with me, I would appreciate it if they would try to e-mail or contact me about it first to hopefully get to the bottom of it before it gets public and ugly.

Thanks again.

Sam Baker

[Barney]

Do you guys sell chap stick?
The good stuff? :D
I'm gonna need some after all that! :)

[Fl Boy in ILL]

Sam,

The other post is so long (the second one)I'll post here. I had posted in the 1st long one about the bolts what boat that is Wickys and you mentioned again you weren't sure about which boat came from your shop.

The 97 Grand Sport was my Teal and Platnum GSE with the 97 225 PM that your dad sold me. I hope this clearifies this for you. I asked the question earlier could it be that the bolts in question came from the manufacture and not the dealer, but nobody responded to that question.

Rick Conklin