Bulgaria - now
For two years now my destination has been Istanbul - mostly to have a goalpost. I continued from there to Bulgaria. I will stay in Bulgaria at least until the 14th of June.
During the summer months I'll have my family on-board in Greece. If you enjoy being with children and don't mind a crowded boat, up until the 19th of July there may still be space for you, on several occasions we've been having one extra guest onboard, and it has worked out fine. From the 19th of July we're hosting a Spanish family ... I hope it will work out.
UPDATES
I sailed solo most of the way from Marmaris to Bulgaria. Sometimes there are lots of potential crew contacting me, other times it's silent. I did have a Norwegian couple on board for some few days, but due to sea sickness they abandoned ship.
Arrived to the Sea of Marmara in early May, and did various detours before staying in Istanbul for a week or two. Discovered I'm only allowed to stay in Turkey for 90 days out of 180, so I left urgently for Bulgaria.
THE PLAN
No exact plans as for now, while waiting for my family to become ready to start the summer vacation. Will probably do some local sightseeing in Bulgaria, perhaps even visit Romania.
The captain always have veto rights, but the day-to-day planning is discussed in plenum - I always ask my crew for opinions.
COST SHARING
Short story: As a minimum, crew should take their part of the grocery bills. It would also be nice with a contribution like 10-25 EUR pr person per day towards the running costs.
Obviously, the more people we are on board, the more food we eat.
Some crew prefers to count every cent of it, but we may also simply do turns on doing the grocery shopping - I'm flexible. There are other "extra costs" with having more people on board, but most of them are negligible. I usually cover the costs of laundry runs, even though clean bedclothes and towels for the crew may be considered an "extra cost".
The list of running costs is quite large - there are harbour stays (though, staying by anchor is typically for free), diesel (has been around 100-500 EUR pr month lately), insurance, local taxes and maintenance. The latter is a big thing, I estimate to have an average monthly maintenance cost of 1000 EUR. Sails, rope, rigging and any equipment tends to get worn out and needs replacement every now and then, and things get destroyed due to carelessness or negligence from the crew, skipper doing some serious mistake or just bad luck. Sometimes things can be mended on the go, other times it's needed to buy expensive replacement parts or hire professionals to fix things. We do not argue about who is to blame when things go wrong, we rather discuss what went wrong and try to learn from the mistakes. I will not claim any compensation for broken equipment from the crew, it all goes on the "running cost"-budget.
I think I have gotten two fines during the last 5 years. The captain does of course bear most of the responsibility for checking up local regulations and adhere to it, but in case of fines, I think it would be fair to shared it up until 100 EUR per person on board, the rest is taken by the captain.
CREW EXPECTATIONS
You're welcome on board regardless of age, gender, qualifications and experience, as long as you're prepared to give a hand when it's needed. I've once had a dad joining together with his toddler - that did work out very well. I've also many times had helpers on board that had absolutely no experience with sailing. Either you learn, or the primary task on your shifts will simply be "wake up the captain if anything happens".
If we decide to sail throughout the nights, most often we'll put up a duty plan where we share the burden of staying awake at the helm - but I still expect to be woken up when I'm "off-duty" if needed. If someone happens to be wide awake when their duty ends it's OK to stay a bit longer, and if someone happens to fall asleep over the rudder it may be important to wake up the next duty even if the time is not there.
I generally expect that we share doing the chores (cooking, dish-washing, maintenance tasks, putting out fenders, cleaning the deck, organizing ropes, etc), but as I also need to spend significant time on my day job I may have a bit reduced capacity.
For relaxed sailing in sheltered waters I'm comfortable sailing single-handed. Two persons on board works out fine for rougher sailing, three persons are optimal when doing night-time sailing, four will work out, five and it starts getting crowded (we have double beds, so 3 persons plus a couple works out quite well). We once were six adults and six children on board for four days ... I remember it as a nice trip, but I have no idea how we managed :-)
I'm flexible when it comes to diet, I eat almost anything (but be warned, I tend to eat quite much). If crew has special requirements (i.e. vegan diet) I will try to adapt. I can do some cooking, but I'm not very good at it, so I'm generally happy with my crew taking care of it. I've had crew members on board cooking food only for themselves - that's faux de pas, in this ship we try to eat together when possible.
REFERENCES
I'm relatively new at crewbay, but I've been hosting travelers both at home and on the ship for decades. I may provide references from earlier crew members if needed.
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Thumb's up
Together with an other crew, I had an enjoyable time on Solveig. It's a unique ship with a welcoming skipper, who made me feel at home immediately. While doing a mix of short trips and longer passages, including night sailing. I had the opportunity to test my sailing skills under supervision of the skipper. In four weeks we made around 500 miles. I had an exceptional good time and learned plenty about life aboard.
13th Feb 2024