Boat builder, Sopchoppy, Florida

His contact form worked for six years. It sent the inquiries to someone else.

Spear Boatworks · spearboatworks.com · Client work for Nathan's uncle, August to September 2026

What was happening

Harry Spear builds fishing skiffs by hand in Sopchoppy, Florida, and built his first in 1978. He is also Nathan's uncle, and this was a client engagement.

His old website had a contact form. From March 2020 to August 2026 it collected 718 messages. Its notifications went to an address that was not Harry's, and after October 2020 not one message has a reply on record.

What we did

• Rebuilt the website, live August 16, then added checks to its inquiry form that screen out automated junk without a CAPTCHA.
• Pulled all 718 old messages and sorted them: 156 spam, vendor pitches, or scams, and 562 real inquiries from 560 people.
• Hand-checked a field the first pass had guessed by pattern matching. It had flagged 52 people as fishing guides. Reading all 52 found 24 real ones.
• Built a HubSpot CRM and fixed three import bugs that would have failed silently, one of which would have misfiled 84 people with no error shown.
• Imported all 560 people with zero failures and read every record back. Checked all 92 email domains and removed the 4 contacts on domains that no longer take mail.
• Wired the new site's three forms into the CRM: a build inquiry opens a deal, a kit pricing request opens a task, and a newsletter signup records consent.
• Wrote a standard kit price reply and sent it on Harry's behalf to four recent kit inquiries in September.

Where it landed

• 560 real people identified, with 556 on email domains that still take mail.
• The new spam checks let through all 18 real answers they were tested against.
• The new site's forms feed the CRM directly, instead of an inbox that was not his.

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