Here be dragons
e-sailing.gr is a small family business. As such, when everything is right, expect a friendly and casual behavior. When things don’t go as expected, something any sailor worth their salt knows to expect, is when the e-sailing owners will not hesitate to attack you with insults, anger and disrespect.
We chartered the S/Y Zefyros, a 46ft Bavaria. The boat has plastic-leather cushions for the deck, 3 electric heads and the age is starting to show. Their “check-in process” was anything but a process. An e-sailing employee (the same one that also cleans the boats) came in the boat without the inventory papers. We didn’t count anything on the boat or open the sails to check their condition. We found the dinghy to not be fully inflated, on my remarks the check-in guy just dismissed it as “that’s how it should be”.
At about half an hour after the comical “check-in process” finished, the wife of the owner came into the boat to give us the boat papers and sign the inventory. When we kindly explained that the check-in process was finished and we could not sign any inventory at this point, she didn’t hesitate to shout at us and insult us.
In the end, the inventory that was signed contained only fenders and winches.
One of the many issues with the boat was that the fore head was leaking water when flushed. We noted the issue, a handyman came in and “fixed it”. While at sea we discovered that the head was still leaking...
When we stated all the above and a lot more issues to our broker, "Seafarer", they sent our complaints straight to the e-sailing.gr folks. What’s worse, they didn’t even bother with editing the outrageous and insulting, in-writing, response that the e-sailing.gr folks responded with.
The e-sailing owners took the opportunity to further insult us and dismissed any issues with ridiculous and false claims, lying and straight out mocking us. On one instance for example, when we had confirmed - and double confirmed 2 days before the charter - with Seafarer, that we wanted a second 50m floating mooring line, when e-sailing did not deliver on this and we complained about the safety of mooring onto rocks with the boat’s aft, their written comment was (verbatim):
“In regards to the issues of mooring onto rocks, it would be good to not approach rocks since there is the fear and inexperience to handle those conditions”.
Naturally, the owner doesn’t know us or what our skills or experience is, but even so, that is definitely not a way to respond in writing to a complaint, regardless if it holds any merit or not.
A lot more happened, like a not properly cleaned shower and deck, a bow-thruster that wasn’t connected to the electric system so it never recharged or a radio that did not have GPS connected thus rendering the “distress” operation of the radio useless, but I have already written too much and spent too much time on this.