Steamforger wrote:Another sailboat "disaster"
I'll never understand how people define planning as "stocking up on food and water" and not actually learning some basics and fundamentals of sailing before embarking on these journeys.
No incomes. No experience. No idea what they were doing. No insurance. They do have a Go Fund Me up and running though....
Thank goodness these people cant afford aircraft.
Shit happens... There are plenty of people who do exactly what they did with as much experience, and succeed. Then on the other hand plenty of others who do have experience and do know what they are doing still manage to run into trouble, so I don't think the article contained sufficient data to conclude whether this was a result of inexperience or just one of those things. A guy could argue that they should have known that the shoals and channel shift around in the area where they got stuck, because obviously the locals know, but here's the thing... If you are sailing the world, most of the time you aren't going to have that local knowledge and you have to go by the best information you have in the form of charts, instrumentation, etc. Maybe there was a warning on the chart that they overlooked and maybe not. Not enough there to know without getting a copy of the chart they were using. Charts are not always right or up to date. Yeah, you should be aware of this, but it may be what you have to go on.
Also consider that the shipwwrecked couple are probably sailing experts compared to whoever wrote the article, and the writer's main goal is to generate traffic/readership more than to accurately convey facts.
The Gofundme is kind of lame, but plenty of long distance cruisers have "no income" or at least no regular income. Some do work that can be done long distance and/or at sea; others cruise until the money runs out and they stop to work for a while to rebuild their cruising fund. The current hip thing to do seems to be to document your experiences on Youtube, and get income from ads and Patreon. If you can get somebody to send you money because they find value in watching what you produce, why not? It's possible to live pretty cheaply while cruising if you stay out of marinas, and eat a lot of rice and fish, while depending on your sails rather than burning up expensive diesel. It's not like you are in a hurry.
Not having any boat (or airplane) insurance is pretty common... If you financed your boat then the lender is going to require it, but if you bought an old boat for cash and then fixed it up yourself, then having insurance may not really be worth what you pay for it. From what I have read, there are lots of exclusions on what they will cover. One common exclusion seems to be named storms... With many of those boats in the Caribbean that got whacked by one hurricane or another last season, even insured owners got exactly zero payout on their destroyed boats. I guess the rationale is you should be smart enough to not be in that region with your boat during hurricane season.
As for stocking up, that's just part of traveling on a boat for months at a time.
Again, not saying that these people are
not idiots, I'm just not willing to assume that based on what was presented.