Some people sail single-handed. I’ve done it. But mostly, sailing involves two or more people, especially cruising. Where do these extra people come from? It’s one of those questions with thousands of answers.
Someone commented the other day on the number of couples cruising where the husband is significantly older than the wife. My immediate reaction was, well, yeah, it’s always better to have younger crew.
One of the Baja Ha-ha rally boats is crewed by a father and daughter, who’s taking a break after college. They seem to get along wonderfully.
At the kick-off party for the Ha-ha, the day before everyone was to leave, there were a number of boats still looking for crew, and people looking to crew. Nothing like trusting your life to someone you just met yesterday…
Our friends on Epiphany had their daughter along for crew. After the Ha-ha, she switched boats, to crew for one headed to Mazatlan.
One captain we talked to over drinks said the best crew are those who pay to do it. By which he didn’t mean than it’s nice to get paid, but that having that sort of formal, financial relationship solidifies what everyone expects from the experience.
For us, although we could have done the Ha-ha with just the two of us, we decided — for safety and to make things easier — that we wanted at least one more crew. We started out talking to some of our long-time sailing partners. But none of the “usual suspects” could make it. Then we talked to an instructor from Tradewinds, but he backed out, choosing instead to do missionary work in Africa. Really.
So we ended up sitting around one day in our cockpit back in Richmond, wondering where we’d find someone, when this guy showed up, completely out of the blue, and asked if we were looking for crew for the Ha-ha. That was Wes.
Turns out, Wes was building his own boat (literally, but that’s another story), was planning to do the Ha-ha on it, but it wasn’t ready for this year’s Ha-ha. So he wanted to go with someone else for the experience. He’d been talking to people in the marina who knew we were doing the Ha-ha, and they pointed him in our direction.
Our first reaction was caution, not knowing anything at all about Wes. So we invited him to a day sail or two, which went very well. Then a trial run to Monterey and back. By then we were convinced that he was the right crew — easy to get along with, knowledgeable about sailing, willing to do it “our” way, even when he thought there were better ways, but also willing to share the better way with us.
Having now completed the Ha-ha, we can say definitively that Wes was just about the best crew we could possibly have hoped for. We got really lucky that day he dropped by the boat in Richmond.
