Derek S

Review of SunSail - Caribbean

While the week went well and the BVIs are beautifu...

While the week went well and the BVIs are beautiful, there were some significant issues with Sunsail that disrupted and diminished our experience.

We were not able to leave Sunsail until about 2:30 on Sunday the 26th due to delayed boat briefing and fueling of the boat. We essentially lost an entire day of sailing out of our week's vacation. The whole boat briefing process and checkout for the week was a chaotic mess. Many other boats around us had the same issue. Sunsail management in the harbor seemed clueless and overwhelmed. There really is no excuse for this...Sunsail knows in advance how many boats they have to checkout on a Sunday morning...how hard is it to plan in advance to have sufficient staff available to do the briefing/checkouts and refueling on a timely basis?

The boat was missing a mooring ball hook and, more significantly, flares. Luckily we caught this before we left. Flares are a legal requirement for sailing in the BVIs and without a mooring ball hook we would have been required to anchor each evening

The boat was in relatively good shape but the starboard cabins smelled of holding tank discharge the entire week. Not pleasant!

Several cockroaches were seen on the boat (nasty!)...a significant problem given we had a week's worth of food on board and no airtight containers for the open dry goods.

The generator failed the first night out of Road Town due to a bad impeller that could have been identified with a proper boat briefing and review checklist. And the first time we called the SunSail emergency number to report the problem, no one answered! We finally got a hold of someone and they sent a repair boat out the next morning (the repair team were excellent)

What's worse, we raised these issues with SunSail Customer Service and they have not bothered to address (or even acknowledge) the issues. While I would definitely charter out of the BVIs again, I would probably not do so with SunSail given the issues with briefing/checkout, the issues with the boat and Sunsail management's apparent lack of concern regarding these problems.