One adventure I’ve been pursuing for awhile is to go sailing–real blue-water, ocean sailing. I love to windsurf, and I greatly enjoy tacking about Siskwit Bay in my little, sunfish-type sailboat, so sailing intrigues me. However, I’m not now prepared to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of experience necessary to pilot my own deep water sailboat.
So, I investigated sailing as unpaid crew and discovered several websites that match sailboat owners with crew, paid and unpaid. There even seemed to be openings for someone like me–inexperienced, but willing to help out and to learn. I soon discovered that there is a hierarchy for crew. At the top are experienced crew, some with decades of sailing experience, who often get paid for their help. Next are attractive young women, who seem able to secure unpaid crew slots fairly easily. Third are those with non-sailing skills, like cooking. Last are people like me, who are interested but have few or no skills attractive to boat owners.
I created a profile and started to look at openings–and then COVID hit and the crew opportunities dwindled to zero. But things started picking up again in 2022, and I started looking again when we finished the Via Francigena in October. I exchanged messages with an experienced Slovenian boat owner who was looking for crew for an Atlantic crossing in April, 2023. The opening looked promising and I booked a flight to Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas to meet him, see his boat, and do some sailing.
Janez, the Slovenian owner, has spent the last two years restoring a catamaran that had been badly damaged in a hurricane. He’s retired now, but he once owned a fleet of twenty cruising sailboats that he rented out. He’s an accomplished craftsman who can handle a range of mechanical, electrical, rigging, and fiberglass repairs. The boat is a 42 foot catamaran made by the French boat builders Fontaine Pajot.
Janez has been training me in. We’ve taken several multi-day runs in the Bahamas, including one 50-mile, blue water run down to Eleuthera Island where the nearest land to the east of us was the coast of Africa. I now know the difference between a jib and a genoa (types of sails), between a halyard and a sheet (types of lines). I know how to rig a storm jib and why.
I’ve got a lot to learn, but I’m no longer completely raw.
Geezer Adventures 