• Pair
• Family
• Group of friends
• Loners

It happens sometimes that the crew is formed before the intention arises to go on a journey. Two people meet and realize that they have a common dream that has not been realized so far just because there was no one to fulfill it with. And finally, both of them succeed. Like, for example, Jerome Poncet and Gerard Janicon, the guys from the Damien sailboat. In Grenoble, at the age of sixteen, they both dreamed of polar ice and voyages to the poles. Together they graduated from school, scraped together money, built a sailboat and set sail. The trip fully met their expectations.they spent three years of the cruise, more or less, in friendship and harmony. At least they themselves say so. But they were young and unpretentious, and besides, what significance could the shortcomings and quirks of a satellite have in comparison with the dangers of polar navigation?

The vices and quirks of people become more noticeable with age, and for someone they are strongly expressed from an early age, and in the cramped space of the boat, in full, one hundred percent contact, collapsed during the voyage, which you cannot even imagine.

A family of five, having passed along the eastern coast of Africa and reaching Durban in good health, split into two parts: the mother with older children returned home, leaving the father on the boat with the youngest son of four years. He was still too young to contradict the decisions of the elders. A similar story is told in the book Cape Horn - A Man's Dream, A Woman's Nightmare, where four sons, who were supposed to go with their parents from Los Angeles to Cape Horn, rebelled one by one before the sailboat left Mexico.

Arriving in Sri Lanka, a rich daddy with a belly full of beer, noticed that he could no longer afford to have a Creole sailor and his twenty-year-old wife on the same boat, with whom he was going to reach Bali. To return to the Seychelles, he was hopelessly looking for a pair of sailors, a man and a woman, who were bound to be firmly attached to each other, and even better gays, as his announcement in sailboat help said.

Countless times we have met broken and newly formed couples. Two Swedes, both in their sixties, met in Cape Verde. He is with the crew, she is with her companion. She joined his boat, and together they crossed the Atlantic and, arriving in Tobago, were married.

In the Marquesas, six years after Tanzania, we again met a familiar American sailboat and did not recognize her, because the owner, an elderly and frail rich man from California, changed the most noticeable thing on board: a blonde Englishwoman, cheerful and witty, despite her age in her fifties, to an even older brunette prude and moralist, fitness fanatic. A real Californian!

But we met the most interesting crew on Suva: a 66-year-old American woman crossed the entire Pacific Ocean in the company of two large Persian cats.

“Walking alone is not my choice. she repeated.

- My partner in Panama suffered from nervous exhaustion, could no longer satisfy my requests (?!) and returned home, leaving me his two cats, to which at first I was even allergic.

But was there anyone who had a successful swim? - you ask. Of course, many! However, choosing the right people is very important. In the middle of the sea, it is impossible to drop everything and return home or just retire for a while to think. The crew must be a well-trained group, in which the hierarchy, relationships and dependencies are known and accepted by all, where everyone knows each other well, even in critical situations, when the masks fall off and everyone becomes who he really is, where everyone can foresee the reaction of the other and knows to what extentdegree and to what extent you can rely on it.

1 pair

Maybe because it has already been said above, the most common crews are couples. Two people who live together and know each other well for a long time will not encounter surprises like:

“I didn’t know that gloomy trait of your character!”

"So you've been pretending so far?"

Because during a storm or a complete calm, when there are thousands of miles ahead and behind to the nearest port, incompatibility of characters cannot be justified.

It would be optimal if the passion for the sea and sailing on a sailboat came from both sides, so as not to end up in a situation where one follows the other only out of love, because in this case life at sea can turn into torture and lead to an inevitable break . Some really went sailing only at the call of love, and everything turned out well.

Naturally, the couple can be straight or homosexual, because there is nothing better than a sailboat to live a free life, because there is no one around who would be curious or judgmental ..

Usually when there is a distribution of roles in a couple, it is also kept on the boat. He or she makes all navigational decisions while the other takes care of the daily routine. And it works great. We know an English lady traveling with her husband, a retired naval officer, from England to the Solomon Islands. Her only participation in navigation was night watches: with knitting in her hands, she simply watched what was happening around, in order to wake her husband if something happened. It took her five nights to make a sweater for him and three nights for her granddaughters.

2. Family

Another successful type of crew is the family group. The roles have already been assigned and it remains only to transfer them to a new environment. Of course, if everyone agrees!

The age of children is very critical. Small ones require a lot of attention, but are more manageable. Newborns are kept in small hammocks or fixed chairs. As soon as they begin to crawl, they require constant supervision, they are fastened with safety belts and the rails are covered with nets so that they do not fall overboard. After three years, children require a little less attention, they play more and there is relief for everyone.

Many children study remotely, learn to swim, control a boat, see animals and fish that their peers who stay at home do not even know about, learn foreign languages, they develop an open view of the world, which is rarely formed in other situations.

Problems, as usual, begin in adolescence.

During this period, children, as a rule, are less and less interested in the affairs of their parents, no matter what they do and wherever they are. They need the company of peers, brothers alone are no longer enough, the opportunity to have their own interests. Besides, what social life teaches, what a teenager of twelve years and older absorbs like a sponge, is so great and so significant that keeping him away from everything on a sailboat for a period of more than a couple of years would mean depriving him of something. something important, without which he will always be on the sidelines among himselfsimilar. The child must be armed with all the possibilities that our society has to offer. If he then decides to leave and change his life, this should be his choice and not depend on the choice made by his parents.

I saw, mainly in the Caribbean and the Far East, where human life is cheap and vices are available to everyone, young people who, following their parents at sixteen and eighteen, wandered aimlessly on a sailboat, alien to the society that surrounds them and unable to return and adapt where they came from . Many of them become drug addicts, get involved in various dark deeds, others simply cannot adapt to a normal life.

3. Company of friends

Of all the possible situations, such a crew is the most risky. And the risk increases in proportion to the duration and difficulty of sailing. Indeed, it is not at all easy to combine the tastes, desires, interests and habits of a group of people who, in a normal environment, each live their own lives. Single sex companies tend to be more dull and boring. Men's companies are often such for very specific reasons - girlfriends, wives and brides are either absent or not eager to swim. Women's, as a rule, a conscious choice, but the resultthis does not change.

One of the biggest dangers in a group is having too many leaders, or sometimes none at all. On a sailboat, especially with such a crew, there should be someone who decides for everyone, and this someone should be alone - the skipper. Even better, the skipper would also be the owner of the sailboat, her condition and safety are closer to his heart. In this case, the cruise has more chances for a successful completion. In a crew formed in this way, duties should be distributed among everyone, without concessions to gender and age. Everyone should participate equally in navigation and in everyday life.day life. No one should relax on the grounds that even without him there is someone to take care of everything. Of course, if we are talking about a long voyage, you can adapt the distribution of duties according to individual inclinations. If the crew, for example, turns out to be a good cook who happily stands at the stove, but hates to steer, duties can be slightly redistributed. But only if everyone agrees! Too often it happens that women are removed from the management of the sailboat, then immediately from participation in decision-making, then forpiss in the galley.

Once, with us on board, there was one of our elderly friends, who every evening, before the start of the night watch, with the ostentatious gallantry inherent in his generation, always came out with the same phrase:

“And let the ladies sleep, so as not to overwork. - in compensation for this, he did not even rinse the glass behind him.

I was the only woman on board and every evening I had to explain that it was not difficult for me to stand the night watch and that he would not be worried. On the third evening, putting aside all hypocrisy, I also expressed my opinion:

- And let those who are over 65 sleep. And who knows...

From the next evening there were no more chivalrous statements.

It is very important for a group crew that everyone can have a minimum of privacy, this is exactly what people are usually willing to sacrifice in a couple or in a family group. And the opportunity to retire is directly proportional to the size of the boat.

In India we met a small American boat with five people on board. They had budgeted that at every stop, where possible, one crew member, on a first-come, first-served basis, could sleep in a hotel. The day's lucky guy was staying in a lovely colonial-style hotel with a four-poster bed, mosquito net, fan, wood-paneled room, and in-room breakfast costing ten dollars a night. The costs were shared among all crew members.

Another danger in carriages of this kind is love. Couples can form on board during a voyage, and this, unless of course arouses the jealousy of others, is not a big problem. This can only be a problem for the couple themselves. The real problems begin when the couple break up during the voyage and one of the two converges with the other crew member ... The situation can become very difficult and cause uncontrollable conflicts, because the feelings involved here, as you know, do not obey the mind, although the latter suggests that at this time moment eatsand more important issues that need to be resolved, for example, to complete the ocean crossing, which is still more than a week away.

The same applies to love relationships tied up on the shore. It may happen that someone meets the man or woman of their dreams during their planned week-long stay in the port. And what to do? Take a new companion on board? If we are talking about a local resident, this is often impossible for technical and bureaucratic reasons. If this is a tourist or a person from another sailboat, then of course this is possible, but the balance in the crew, relations with its other members may be disturbed, inconvenience will be added and then, the new crew member may not get alongwith someone or with the sea.

In short, for such situations, tactics must be thought out in advance, because then hurt feelings will not allow you to make a rational decision.

The crew of one Australian boat that we met in Cochin, India, consisted of three men and one woman, the wife of one of them. One of the two bachelors in Sri Lanka, during a trip around the island, met a compatriot and was filled with feelings. The sailboat was planned to stay in Sri Lanka for a month, and the new bride spent this period on board, with the consent of the entire crew. By the time she sailed, she had won general sympathy and, to the great joy of her lover, she was offered to stay on a boat with a trial period to India. But during the transition, by all meansAccording to the general opinion, she showed so little attention to navigation that, upon arrival at the port, she was not allowed to stay. The groom preferred to go further with a sailboat and rather vaguely agreed to meet his beloved on the African coast. Maybe it wasn't true love?

4. Loners

How can you not mention them! From Slocum to Chichester and Fogar. They were the first to tell us about going one on one with the ocean, they were the first to plant dreams in us. Some were loners by choice, others by necessity. The same is true today.

You can not even specify, most singles are men. But last year in Fiji we met two ladies, one American, the other from Canada, who are sailing alone in the Pacific Ocean and look quite happy, despite the fact that one of them is over seventy years old!

Many, in their youth, build themselves a boat and go to sea. Then on the way they meet the woman of their life and she completes the crew, then children are born. It is not uncommon to find a boat of 10 meters where the father is Irish, the mother is from South Africa, the children were born, one in Brazil, the other in Martinique.

Some swim alone because there is no other choice than Bruno, the only single Italian we met on our first trip around the world.

"I'd rather travel with someone," he repeated, "but I didn't find anyone."

Many, on the other hand, go solo deliberately and prefer to remain single, although in ports they never are. For women, locals and visitors, there is no character more attractive than a lone sailor who arrived from afar. This charm also extends to the neighboring boats. Therefore, singles on the road never have to think about what to cook for dinner, an invitation to another sailboat will always be guaranteed.

It is difficult to say what makes these people overcome all the dangers and difficulties of a solitary voyage. Maybe the opportunity to measure strength with something really big and great, such opportunities in our lives are becoming less and less. Maybe just a desire to be alone in the sky and the sea, alone in the middle of the endless ocean.

All the lone sailors we've met, apart from being a bit weird and eccentric, are the most serene people we've ever known.

Random crews.

There are always people in every port ready to replenish the crew to the next port or beyond. Sometimes boats with a small crew decide to take someone before a difficult transition. Usually a new crew member pays some amount for food and a cabin and undertakes to stand watch and be on duty in the galley.

Apart from the inconvenience of having an outsider on the boat, taking a stranger on board can always be risky. He, for example, may not have paperwork in order, or not have enough money to buy a return ticket when local authorities require it, as for example throughout French Polynesia and Australia. The skipper who decides to take a random person on board must control all these things.

We hardly ever met people who were excited about the idea of having strangers on board.

Once, on the transition from the Marquesas to the Tuamotu, we took a German boy, whom we already knew from Panama, he asked for a lift. They regretted it already on the first day when he appeared on board and the first thing they did when they reached the port was to take him ashore in a tender. The boat after that began to seem twice as spacious and surprisingly quiet.