Page 137 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
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  Left to right: Ron Cawley manned Peterson’s dock facility as technician and partsman from 2013-18; Peterson marine service dock in Richmond, CA
to provide maintenance and renovation repairs for boat owners on the San Francisco Bay. They of- fered superb craftsmanship along with a number of other maritime vendors, all located on KKMI’s property near the end of the Santa Fe Channel at Point Richmond. Since 2013, Peterson Power has been one of them, with 110 feet of dock space and a shop just steps away.
Randy Richter, Peterson’s marine product support rep from 2009-2017, recalls several jobs at Point Richmond back in the late 1990s, while he was a field service dispatcher. “One day I was at Foss Maritime, out at the end of Pier 3, where we had a repower job. And I remember thinking: There’s a lot of potential out here in the repower business. We could really make some money. We had the manpower and the know-how; we just didn’t have a dock facility. So I got this idea to start looking for something to fill that hole.” In 2005 Richter transferred up to Oregon as the Power parts and service sales rep (PSSR) and the dream got put on hold. But when he came back in 2009, the search resumed. “Pier 3 wasn’t available at the time, and the boatyards didn’t want us doing work for them. But I kept looking.”
Then in 2012, Richter got a phone call. “Paul Ka- plan with KKMI said they didn’t want to do en- gine work anymore. They wanted the experts, and for them that meant Peterson.” It took about a year to get the idea sold up the chain of command. On April 1, 2013, Peterson opened for business on the water right next to KKMI. “It isn’t a division yet,” says Ron Cawley, the 25-year Peterson vet- eran who manned the facility as technician and partsman from 2013 to 2018. “We’re still consid- ered part of Power’s field service. I like to call it Peterson at KKMI.” Cawley’s first job at the dock was a 100-foot sailboat named Adele with a 3412 Cat engine.
PETERSON’S DOCKSIDE SERVICE
The dock is an L-shaped 50x60-foot floating barge anchored to the land near the end of the Santa Fe Channel—a calm deep-water channel with a big past. “We rarely see any wave action in here,” said Cawley back in March 2016. “But it has an enormous amount of history. Rockefeller developed the Standard Oil Refinery down here for his oil tankers to unload. Ford built the largest
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