tobixen

Greece now: "Winter" sailing and New Years celebration

I'm currently not so far from Athens (Kythnos), with open plans for the next few months. There is place for more people on board - perhaps even space for people with strong opinions on where to sail next! Albania? Aegean? Turkey?

I've done more than 5000 nautical miles so far this year - I have a vision to slow down a bit in 2025, spend more time at each place I visit, make shorter journeys, dedicate more of my time to my day job and boat maintenance.

So far I have two points on my calendar - I have a flight from Athens the 11th of December and will return to Athens the 30th of December - if you want to join during this period, it will have to be negotiated with my crew.

Unless you join, we will be two persons on board until the 11th of December, and one person from the 11th of December.

COST SHARING

I expect the crew to take their part of the grocery bills. If you could also afford contributing like 10-25 EUR pr person per day to help with other costs (as listed below), it would be appreciated.

There are three models for sharing the food costs, we can count every cent of the food shopping, we may contribute equally to a "food piggy bank" and use that one for grocery shopping, or we may also simply do turns on paying for the grocery shopping, I'm flexible, but I prefer the latter model. Most other "extra costs" with having more people on board are negligible.

Travelling by sail is probably the most expensive way of travelling for "free"! The costs include:

* Maintenance. This is the biggest 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, things get destroyed due to carelessness or negligence from the crew, skipper doing some serious mistake or just bad luck. Sometimes things may be mended on the go, other times it's needed to buy expensive replacement parts or get professional help. 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.
* Diesel (has been around 100-500 EUR pr month lately),
* Harbour stays - this is usually fairly low, as I prefer to stay by anchor when possible.
* Insurance, local taxes and other administrative costs ... like fines. 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 it's not always easy to be up to date on all local regulations. In case of fines, I think it would be fair to share it up until 100 EUR per person on board, with the rest taken by the captain.
* Laundry, refill of drinking water, gas, sometimes electricity in harbours, ....

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 some double beds, couples and children tend to compress pretty 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 :-) We also had a guest family on board summer 2024, four adults and five children for more than a week did work out.

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 may provide references from earlier crew members if needed.

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