The Fletcher Factor

I don’t remember Abbot’s official title, but I presume it had something to do with schedule and metrics.

Abbot seemed to have been a timeless fixture of the shipyard when we arrived. He and his wife Eileen seemed to adopt some of us, maybe as you might a stray dog. I recall visits to the family summer camp down on Orr’s Island.

I recall Abbot stating that he moored his sailboat in the same location that his father and grandfather did, but since he happened to be born outside Maine, he could never be a true Mainac.

Somehow I ended up crewing with him on the Monhegan. I don’t think I added any value. It was a pretty becalmed sail – but he had an uncanny sense of where to find any small breath of wind. He would bemoan that his old sailboat, built in 1966, had a much lower handicap than the most modern plastic high-tech racing machines.

Back to the shipyard – Abbot had acquired the unenviable job of proving, despite all indications to the contrary, that the ship would be delivered on time. You could find him in any shop, checking progress, and working on the graphs. He would be in any status meeting, or anywhere in the shipyard, with his blue plastic BIW windbreaker, hard hat (always green, as he never accepted a white management hat), and yard bike. He would work with metrics that to mere mortals would be doom and gloom, but to him showed that all indications were positive, and he just needed us to trust him.

This was the “Fletcher factor” which, when applied to the metrics, would get us over the finish line.

An engineer might observe that the “Fletcher factor” involved both a time machine and the square root of minus one. But Abbot never wavered from his task, dragging us to the finish line despite what the metrics indicated was possible.

Tribute to my late father, Abbot – by Max Fletcher

MAJEK Moments on the Coast of Maine – by Abbot Fletcher for Points East