Omg what a mess. Sorry I haven’t posted in a few days, but I traveled from beqia to Grenada and back in the last two days to pick up what I thought was “crew”.
I don’t want to publicly humiliate this person so I will leave their name out of it. I have had over 15 crew for various lenghts of time. All of verying abilities. Some great some useless. I will give anyone a chance.
But this last one I traveled 145 miles round trip to pick up takes the frigin’ cake. I found this person on findacrew; a popular site for matching crew with boats.
This persons profile said they could sail, was competent crew and had 2 months “at sea” could cook clean do watch etc. Ok sounds good, we talk over whatsapp and I determined I’d head down to pick her up- This is where it gets good.
I show up and she gets dinghied over. 1 st thing she does is ask for a drink. Sure no problem, she grabs the 140 proof rum and mixes something I could smell upstairs. Cool whatever.
Drinks gone 5 minutes later. She then tells me
1-She has actually never sailed, that she has been in the same bay for 2 months. (Apparently that qualifies as sea time)
2- She’s a fall down alcoholic and that what here open sores on her arms and legs are from.
3- She gets deadly seasick, just the rolling in the bay sets it off.
4- She’s always depressed, takes pills and sleeps most of the day.
5- She has 0 dollars, no way to egress my vessel after a month.
6- She will do the dishes if I buy her alcohol, cigarettes and food.
Bottom line is don’t misrepresent yourself. It ruined 4 days of my life and 20 gallons of diesel. Not to mention customs clearances etc. Their is a serious problem with lying freeloaders looking to take advantage of generious boat captains.
The way to fix this is publicly out them for what they are. I would never want another captain to take this girl aboard under false pretenses and then be stuck with a flight bill simply to get this seasick lier of their boat.
However its not PC, safe space compliant, compassionate or whatever B.S. people on these crew sites come up with.
Does anyone have an idea how we fix this so captains don’t get screwed. Its a major liability having someone misrepresent themselves for injury reasons.
