Live Sand and Rock Delivery
Live sand and rock comes today (well, I should say, Delta now says today). Very excited for it and TBS has been very good about communication.
TBS had two shipping options for me and I picked the cheaper one (Delta) despite TBS saying Southwest was their preferred carrier. With multiple direct Delta flights from Tampa to Boston each day, what could go wrong? lol
Maybe not my best decision. Next shipment, will go with Southwest.
I know that shipping issues are a common discussion at Reef2Reef, but not so much for direct air cargo flights, so I'll give my experience and thoughts here.
The rock and sand was dropped off at Tampa some time in the late afternoon. Since TBS had told me the likely incoming flight to Boston would be arriving at 10 AM with a backup of a 2 pm arriving flight, I was happily surprised to hear that it would catch an earlier flight that was supposed to arrive at 1 AM. Great. I figured I'd get a very early start, beat the Boston rush hour traffic, and be home with it by 8 AM.
Well, that was actually a curse, not a blessing. The Boston to Tampa plane that was supposed to bring back my rock had an equipment failure in flight and had to return to Boston. That is why it was rescheduled to arrive at Tampa and then leave Tampa unexpectedly late and my rock would be able to be on it when normally it could not catch that flight. Hours passed, and Delta finally cancelled both the Boston to Tampa and Tampa to Boston flights. Presumably they could not fix the equipment problem. No rock delivery that night.
OK, next flight leaves at 7 AM. That's the flight I originally expected and would be good. Delta had all night to get my 9 boxes set for that one. Reading between the lines, they failed to do anything like that. The Delta manager said they recovered the boxes from the ramp at 5 AM and returned them to the warehouse. That was probably the death knell for catching the 7 AM flight. In any case, the 7 AM came and went without my boxes. It arrives in Boston in a few minutes. lol The Delta excuse: they do not control what planes the cargo gets on. Um, OK, but then who does? Did someone decide that a box saying "Live" on it is in no hurry?
We are now scheduled on the 2 pm arrival backup flight. That's OK, just not good service from Delta. It doesn't take off for a while, so I won't be sure it made that flight until later today.
Lessons learned
1. Listen to TBS and go with Southwest for delivery.
2. The Delta cargo tracking app is especially useless. It listed 1:10 AM as the expected delivery time for hours after 1 AM, even when they knew the flight had already been cancelled at least 6 hours before. It also sometimes listed crazy times. For a while early on it said 6:30 pm delivery, which did not even make sense. Then shortly later it registered that 1:10 AM consistent with what TBS had been told.
3. Just my speculation, but I'm thinking that faster delivery of the premium top off rock is probably more important than for the base rock and sand that is potentially going to cycle some any way (though with my refugium and a little rock in it being set up a few weeks ago, that effect might be minimized some).
4. If something seems unusually good (like a unexpected flight), wonder why. lol
5. We are still on schedule for the original backup flight which leaves in a couple of hours. Wen (TBS) indicates that there is sufficient O2 in the boxes for that flight delivery to be fine, so I am not overly concerned, assuming Delta follows through properly.
www.saltwateraquarium.com
