It's not just crew who don't know what they're doing. To give you the opposite side, I sailed on 9 different private sailing boats working passages from
Europe to NZ as unpaid crew. Being aware of the fact I'd be at the mercy of the skippers, I did plenty of courses and got as much experience as possible before I left. On the
Atlantic crossing the
boat (80ft):
1) Took on enough
water that it took 24hrs for an
electric pump to get rid of it.
2) Broke 5 halyards due to poor maintenance/no preparation and thus dropped many
sails in the sea.
3) Broke a
roller furler due to poor
maintenance leaving us in 35kts of
wind and atlantic swell in the middle of the night with an hourglass shaped foresail half up and half down
4) We were boarded by refugees of
Cape Verde
OK so the boarding wasn't the skipper's fault but everything else was.
The next
boat I was on was infested with cockroaches. We set off from Trinidad heading north straight for
Grenada, of course we got pushed so far west that the trip took twice as long as it should have and we totally missed
Christmas day. When I got to have a look at the
charts the
skipper was 'using' it turned out the only one he'd got was a
passage planning chart for all the
windward islands. He had an
autopilot that he didn't know how to use and we almost
lost him
overboard in a squall. As we pulled in to
Georgetown harbour he revealed to me that the
engine 'wasn't working properly' and hadn't been for a while so I got him out of the harbour and motored in circles until I established a jury-rig for
gear selection then took us in. He couldn't get us anywhere near the
mooring buoy so in the end I did it having to leave the
helm and dash below to change between fwd and reverse with him out of harm's way up the bow. I spent 2 days rebuilding the cable-controls and throttle/gear selector.
When we sailed up to Union Island we had to
motor the last few miles and the temp on the gauge kept rising, he said it 'always did that' until I pointed out the smoke coming from under the
saloon floor. We came into Union island (none of us had ever been there before) between the
reefs at night under sail having put out the
engine fire.
In Moorea I was on a
catamaran where the owner/skipper tried to
anchor in 40m, because they had 50m of chain. I convinced them that only the big ocean liners anchored there, and we ought to go and
anchor where all the other cruising-yachts were. The anchor was one of those ones that deploys off one bow and then you use the
bridle to centre it between the hulls. They tried to back up on the anchor to set it, and the boat twisted sideways so much that the chain jumped off the roller. I cleared up the mess and we tried again, same result. I cleared up the mess again. 3rd time, I was at the
helm and instantly realized that the port engine was stuck in forwards. The
skipper who'd owned the boat for 30 years and already circumnavigated in it once, hadn't noticed. I immediately shut off the port engine and anchored using the stbd one. The next day the
generator caught fire.
Need I go on...?