Link to story in PDF format, link to story in Text format.
In the mid-1980’s, I was itinerant crew on sailboat deliveries in the Irish Sea, Mediterranean and Atlantic. Many large sailboats, 40’/12m to 80’/24m, had absentee owners who used these boats for themselves, their friends or for business. These boats usually had resident skippers. When the owner wanted the boat to be elsewhere, the skipper would pick up two or three crew to transfer the boat, mostly all expenses covered, sometimes also paid. A transfer could be a day to a month or more. My girlfriend at that time and I were those crew.
In the Atlantic region, most of these boats would spend the summer in the Mediterranean, US or Canada and winters in the Caribbean. The eastbound route would stop at the Azores, the westbound at the Canary Islands or Cape Verde Islands.
I was in my early thirties at the time and I was one of the oldest crew. We were fortunate in that we had enough resources to pick and choose deliveries. Most crew could not, they took what was available. The life could be hard. Sailing would 24 hours a day, we took watches in turn, always at least one person on deck. In bad storms we would heave to (tiny storm sail only, not moving much), in hot windless days we could swim off the boat. Things always broke (steering, sails, rigging, electrical power, engine) and had to be fixed wherever we were. There was a fire once, minimal damage. But the show must go on. Sometimes after the sailboat arrived at the destination we could stay on the boat, sometimes not then scramble to find a place for the night, anything from renting a shack to a spot in the forests with other crew.
For us, it was word of mouth. “Hey, do you know Bob on Fortunate needs a couple of people to go to Grenada?” Not surprisingly things have changed now. Crew and boats looking for crew list themselves online. It was a small community, we mostly knew each other, skippers and crew. Now there is GNSS (colloquially GPS), we had Transit which might or might not give a fairly good line of position. Much navigation was dead reckoning. Also sextants but I only used that to keep my hand in.
Keep in mind that as adventurous as this seems, it is small compared to many others who have sailed around the world. Some sailed single handed (alone), some nonstop, some several times around the world. By comparison I have not quite sailed offshore equivalent (inland does not count) to about halfway around the world.
Long story short, I kept a journal. A few decades later I found the time to transcribe and edit it into a short memoir, in PDF format. Contact me for the eBook format because can’t upload it here. The intent of the memoir is not about me, it is to show what that type of life was like, the good times, the bad times, the hard times, the joys. Enjoy.