Adventure Sailing!!!! Take 2 (Caribbean Sea)

Jared got a hold of my blog post, just as I walked away haha
ANYWAYYYY, he did feel terrible, but I did not poop on his chest.  I just let him sleep until the last minute.  Our shuttle came to the hostel to pick us up at 4:45am, and we attempted to pass out once on the road.  About 3 hours later, he dropped us off at some teenie port, where we were told by the indigenious people, the Kuna Yala, that we had to hop in a small boat to another island.  Keep in mind, we had no idea where we were going.  Our captain had messaged us saying we should take the shuttle to Porvenir, which we thought was on the mainland, to get picked up.  Needless to say, we we not sure we were making the right decision, but got on the small boat anyway.  After about 40 minutes, we hopped off on a small island, and after a bit of calling and searching, found our ship, Tres Amigos, right offshore.  The take-away message of this post is...DO NOT USE NIRVANA CHARTER FOR YOUR SAIL TRIP!!!
Basically, from the very start things were amiss, and only got worse.  Apparently, the boat he showed pictures of when selling the trip to us, was not in fact the boat we used.  When everyone else arrived the day before, Captain Brian Blaze, hadn´t seen his boat in a month, and made everyone wait while he and his crew cleaned out the mess.  We got very close to the ¨crew¨, a young couple from the US who had never spent a considerable amount of time on a boat, and were hired solely to cook, clean, and entertain the guests, as they hated the Captain as well; we learned from them, that as they were cleaning out the boat, they found old food with mold, and bugs everywhere, and that Captain Brian put actual Bleach in the water we were supposed to be drinking!

                                          

Anyway, the Captain was a A-hole.  The food, which he had promised would be ¨fresh fish we catch on the boat, lobster, ceviche, all super healthy¨, was instead canned tuna sandwiches at lunch and pasta with canned tomato sauce at night.  Gross.  We ran the motor night and day, instead of actually sailing, until...the engine broke!

  

 The entire time he was trying to fix it, he kept mumbling under his breath how much he hated this, and shouldn´t bring passengers on the boat etc.  He was terrible to the crew; verbally chastizing them for not knowing how to sail (they told him before they got on that they did not know how to sail, which he responded to telling them not to worry, as that was not in their job description) in front of all the passengers.  I almost had a panic attack the first night because I was stuffed into a TEENIE bed with no air circulation, sweating profusely.  No one slept.

There are 2 beds in there

 Almost everyone got sea sick.  Poor Jared was still sick the whole time.  The last night we were there, we literally almost died when the boat got ravaged by a swell that came out of nowhere!  The boat almost tipped, broke 2 safety straps, and ripped a huge hole in the sail.

 Thank god for the couple guys on the boat who tried to help, having no sailing experience, or we would have been in big trouble.  Oh, also, he had never told anyone where the life vests, flares or any safety equipment were; the crew didn´t even know!!!  Bad bad bad!!  Spread the word, Nirvana Charters are terrible!!!!!!  Lastly, he was a complete chauvinist, and continuously made derogatory comments about women and creepy sexual comments to the single girls, GROSS!

Ripped sail

                                              

Showering

One good thing came out of the whole experience, we got really close with the other passengers, and since arriving in Cartagena, Colombia have all been staying in the same hostel and hanging out together.  Everyone is very nice.

On a sad note, Nicole left us yesterday to go back to the US :(  wahhh.  It was amazing having her, and she will be missed massively.