Sailing Opportunities
View our sailing opportunities
Delivery skippers and private boat owners quickly realize their friends and family have jobs and cannot always sail with them. So they call us looking for crew. We collect their information and pass it on to our members to help them get aboard. Since you are helping to deliver a boat, you get to go sailing for free. Many are repeat skippers or members so we pre-qualify a majority of the opportunities for you.
Hear from Hank Schmitt, Founder and CEO of Offshore Passage Opportunities, how crew can find boats, and delivery skippers can find qualified crew.
ATTENTION BOAT OWNERS and DELIVERY SKIPPERS
We offer a free service to boat owners and skippers. We will be happy to help you get free crew that will pay their own way to and from the boat. Normally the owner pays for all onboard food and boat expenses. If you are looking for crew on short notice expect to help pay for some transportation costs if you want to get qualified crew. We reserve the right to refuse to post information if we do not have enough information or feel the passage is unsafe in any way. Please do not hesitate to call if you have any questions.
St. Maarten is our winter home and we have spent a good part of our winter season using this beautiful location as our home base as we visit other islands. We have become personal friends with many of the locals who make our winter visit more enjoyable.
However with the arrival of Hurricane Irma this past week everything changed for the people living on the island of St. Maarten, BVI and surrounding northernmost Leeward Islands.
These people, our friends, have not just lost their homes -- they have lost their jobs. Until tourists can visit again, they do not have an income. Think about that. No home, no income after a long underemployed summer and now looking at losing the income associated with the essential winter tourist season.
Even scarier, we have not been able to contact many of our friends in St. Maarten and we have no way of delivering to them what they need this minute (water, electricity and food).
But we want to be ready when the need has been identified and we will collect money on their behalf. Each donor will be informed how their contributions will be used. We have a Board of Trustees being established for the Mooring Field Foundation and I will ask them for financial oversight. We will keep track of every donor and every penny. In fact we plan to collect e-mail addresses from contributors as we do not see this as a onetime fix, but perhaps a long recovery.
We are not just asking OPO members to dig deep and help. We are reaching out to others at the Newport and Annapolis Boat Show. In Texas and Florida, our people have resources of local and Federal Governments, rule of law and wealth beyond the grasp of many people living in the Caribbean.
We are also searching for individuals to help sail boats to deliver supplies and gear for damaged boats to the islands. It's a great opportunity to help others while expanding your bluewater sailing resume. If you would like to act as relief crew, please click on the banner below.
So, if you feel lucky and blessed, won’t you please donate? OPO is donating $5,000 split equally between the Mooring Field and the St. Maarten Relief Effort.
With hard work, 50 mooring blocks are currently in place in Dominica and they are almost ready for use. But more importantly, the island, people and economy of Dominica have been ravaged by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Without your help, our friends and the island of Dominica will take decades to recover -- if at all.
We are asking those who are in a position to help our island friends to contribute to the relief effort. This will help those who make our visit possible to have access to water, food and electricity -- the basic essentials of life. And once their needs are met and they are back on their feet, we can once again focus upon building the mooring fields.
Our last big task is acquiring and installing the new mooring buoys that will withstand the weather. The new mooring buoys are being made by the Gilman Corporation in Gilman, CT. They are the same type of buoys used by the Jamestown Boat Yard in Jamestown, RI. The buoys including numbers and "PAYS" written on the side.
I visited the the buoy factory this past summer and they kindly extended a very attractive bulk, wholesale price to complete the first mooring field in Dominica. The new buoys are guaranteed to last for 12 years. Once manufactured, we need to transport them to Miami and ship them via boat to Dominica to be installed by the New Year.
However, we need your help to finalize this dream. We are seeking contributions to complete the last phase of this project.
To help in this effort Offshore Passage Opportunities has donated $2,500 to help complete this important project. Two other OPO members also made unsolicited contributions. The current funds raised are available, in real-time on our site's home page.
Once we receive sufficient funds for the manufacturing and shipping of the buoys and the replacement moorings, we will stop collecting. Importantly, our Board of Trustees will keep track of every donor and every penny.
If you've ever considering deepwater sailing but were not sure how to jump start your sailing career, our Swan Program is for you.
Our Swan Pogram was specifically designed to introduce people to the world of offshore sailing by providing hands-on crew experience under the watchful eye of an professional skipper on a proven boat. During your tenure onboard, you’ll learn to keep watch, make log entries, navigate, use the radio, steer the boat and perform tasks that are essential to safe offshore sailing. The Swan Program offers a fixed price for everything you’ll need aboard—you just pay for your travel to and from the boat. The Swan Program sails south from New England to Bermuda and the Caribbean in the fall, and north from Bermuda and the Caribbean to New England in the spring. Summer trips are also available.
After your first Swan Program experience, you’ll have the skills to sail on other boats. Please view the video below to learn more.
NARC Rally 2017 – The 18th Annual NARC Rally departs on Saturday, October 28th, or best weather window after that date. If you have a boat and would like to sail south you can sign up for the rally from Newport to the Caribbean (St. Maarten or BVI). Most of us do not have an offshore ready boat so we provide a very nice option to sail on a Swan with a pro skipper.
I will be sailing Avocation, Swan 48, south once again. Murray (Swan 60) will be back with us along with past OPO skipper favorite Patrick Childress (Swan 53). Patrick has been sailing in the south Pacific the last 9 years and will be back on the East Coast to sail as skipper. Johnathan Ishmael (Swan 60) will also be back from Europe in time to skipper a boat for us as well. The price is $3,000 for the all-inclusive* 15 to 17 days aboard with us. The dates are to arrive in Newport on Thursday or Friday October 26th or 27th. You can make flights home by November 15th.
You can reserve a berth by making a $500 deposit. You can pay on our online store or you can call with your credit card at 631-423-4988. If you have any questions please feel free to call anytime.
*Means all-inclusive except travel to and from the boat and meals and drinks ashore outside the rally socials. You will not need to stay in a hotel or rent a car or pay for any head tax. All the onboard food, fuel and dockage included. We even provide the linen, towels and sleeping bags.
