LateSail Avis 422

The agent involved with my booking, Russell, was absolutely brilliant.

Friendly staff, detailed information, no remaining questions and smart online platform for checking all necessary data needed to conduct the charter trip.

Good quick service no pestering follow up. Excellent looking boats to select from

Provided helpful advice on possible sailing areas (Greece - Ionian, Saronic vs Turkey and Croatia) to enable a decision to be made.

Consistently patient with our changing customer requirements and with good pricing on available boats. The website is straightforward to use to manage our booking and insert crew details etc. as they become available.

One suggestion might be to allow customers to refresh a selection of quotes automatically on a button press, to see which boats now have availability and how prices may have changed. At the moment this process is manual, but I accept that this may require contact with the charter companies by phone so is outside of Latesail's ability to implement.

I have just returned from my second bareboat charter booked through Latesail. This year I chartered in Turkey (Gocek), and in 2017 I chartered in Croatia. Both were excellent experiences with smaller charter companies -- excellent in terms of the quality of the boat, base management, and value.
I had experienced difficulties with communications during the busy holiday season, but Latesail says it has addressed those issues. I will be going to Latesail first for my next charter!

Great guys, very competent and got the best prices.

Late sail the no1. All very happy & helpfull, have used them many times, Europe, turkey & the West Indies.

We've only booked so far but Latesail have been very helpful!

This is our 5th or 6th booking with the Russell at Latesail. We always get a good price, and are able to ask lots of questions before and after booking. Latesail is our first port of call for flotillas and bareboat charters, and we wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.

As always very helpful - excellent service - looking forward to our Sardinia sailing trip.

Efficient very helpful - a great start !

Latesail were not only willing, but very able at providing me with a personal booking experience. They listened to my needs, and worked to get me the deal which was not only within my budget, but fulfilled all my requirements. This is not unique, I have gone back to them for several years now.

If it was possible to give more stars I would!! In a very short period of Time Lynn found us a fantastic yacht at a great price. Service and knowledge was impeccable and I will be using them again.

Only booked so far
Can’t comment on anything else

Saona 47- Guiriden – Charter from 5 to 15 February 2019
During our discussions with Late Sail in the run up to the charter it had been made quite clear that the boat was absolutely new (indeed, still in build at the time), but many of the inevitable teething problems would have been sorted out because there was a charter booked immediately before ours.
When we arrived at the boat, it was obvious that the boat was far from new:
• The covers were slightly grimy and had seen a lot of sun.
• There was damage to the veneers in the main saloon, and a number of chips to the gel coat in the cockpit and elsewhere.
• There were cracks in the superstructure on both sides where there was a change of section where the cabin terminated at the aft end.
• Both engines had done over 2,900 hours when we started the charter.
• The ship’s log revealed that the craft had been in steady employment since she was commissioned at La Rochelle on 28 October 2017.
Late Sail’s advertisement promised that there was Wi-Fi on board and, indeed, the name Guiriden appeared on all our phone and tablet settings. A password was demanded, but Ivan Vecchio of Dream Yachts in St Vincent told us that there had never been wi-fi so there was no password. This caused us considerable 4G expense throughout our charter as there was a need for us to be in contact with UK and all of us needed to be in touch with the 20 other yachts that were in company.
Preparation of the boat seemed casual and no attempt had been made to prepare the port aft cabin bunk for use.
The key to the hatch leading to that cabin was missing and Ivan had to provide us with a long wire strop and padlock to secure it.
We paid over US $1,000 to have the boat stored before our arrival, but some of the foodstuffs such as lettuce and mushrooms had been placed in a fridge that had been turned down to a deep freeze temperature and were, therefore, ruined. Ivan compensated us for their loss.
We found there were insufficient glasses compared to the inventory, though Ivan did provide us with some more.
The inventory-listed fire blanket wasn’t there and Ivan didn’t have one he could give us.
Ivan began the briefing by admitting the boat was based in Grenada and he’d never seen her before. The brief itself wasn’t good. Ivan started about twenty minutes later than the agreed 09:00, due to an urgent telephone call, he said. An even longer telephone call took him away from us an hour or so later. Pleasant though he and his partner, Marielle Mathieu were, clearly Ivan did not know the boat and he felt his way through the briefing at a snail’s pace, covering the basics of seamanship and how to sail a boat which we didn’t need to know, but giving us vague or inaccurate information when we asked specific questions about our particular boat.
We were told that the generator did not heat the fresh water calorifier or charge the batteries and we would have to run the main engines to do that. We queried that in some detail because it seemed so unlikely, and indeed we later found out that the generator was more than capable of providing everything required. In fact, it was a good, reliable machine which started immediately and ran well whenever it was required.
A more trying issue was that of the 220/240V supply. Ivan showed us the switch to change over from shore supply to generator at the panel below the navigator’s desk, and we then asked the specific question ‘Where is the large breaker needed to do the actual change-over?’. We were told it was automatic, a fact which surprised us, but we had to accept at the time. In fact, we learned from an electrician who came aboard when we asked for help at our first stop in Bequia, that the breaker was located on the forward outboard bulkhead of the starboard engine room, a position which means having to cross over the hot engine to reach it. Nevertheless we would have had little trouble finding it had we been correctly briefed.
We finally got away at 1245, so our log says, though the contract said we would leave in the morning.
The electrician who came aboard at Bequia also successfully brought to life the dead chart plotter in the saloon by taking off the panel on which it was mounted and rebooting it. It should be said that the plotter was working when we left St Vincent, and only died as we approached Bequia.
We were advised by Ivan to keep a reef in at all times. It seems possible that this edict was to mask the difficulty that was to be had on hoisting the mainsail to its designed height. In spite of the electric winch, using the jammed main halliard was very laborious, suggesting a badly worn sheave at the masthead.
The recommendation not to use the full mainsail could also have been made to spread the abrasion to the mainsail at the spreader tips. We could easily see that this had been a nuisance before, as the odd patch in the sail was evident where the sharp un-taped swept-back spreaders had chafed the fabric which was, unusually, not protected by spreader patches. To avoid a full scale tear this unfortunate oversight made us anxious about using the mainsail at all, especially with no kicking strap fitted. The situation was aggravated when we found that the nut on the bolt holding the boom to the gooseneck had come off. Use of the mainsail traveller was inhibited by severe stiffness in the cars, moreover one of the jammers required Goliath-like strength to operate.
Many of the clips on the cabin windows, especially the starboard forward cabin port inner porthole, were so challenging to operate that, inconveniently from the point of view of ventilation, they had to be left permanently secured. There was no WD40 or like substance on board which might have relieved this problem.
Ivan told us not to use the holding tanks, but to leave the heads on free flow, ‘as everyone else does’, he said. With numerous friends and acquaintances swimming in close vicinity to Guiriden for longish periods at places such as Bequia, Mustique, Mayreau, Tobago Keys, Union Island, Carriacou and Grenada this did not seem sensible but, when the holding tanks were used, a disgusting powerful sewage stench spread throughout the boat, lasting perhaps a minute or so. It was concluded that the holding tanks had not been flushed and disinfected for some time.
The dinghy had a slow air leak in the tubes and had to be pumped up no less than five times.
The outboard motor started well but the tick-over revs were slightly too high, resulting in harsh clutch engagement.
The anchor cable was not calibrated when we arrived at the boat, but Ivan arranged for brightly coloured line to be tied at 10m intervals up to 30m, and that worked well. However, the last several metres (after the 30m mark) were impossible to use because the chain was so badly twisted in the cable locker that it was in a tight and unyielding bundle and wouldn’t go over the winch.
The air conditioning was very noisy in all cabins, but that wasn’t a problem in most of them because the occupants preferred to sleep with the hatches open - where we could - and the air conditioning not running. However, this didn’t apply to the port midship cabin were the ventilation is so poor without air conditioning that the temperature became unbearable. The occupant had to sleep on the seats in the saloon.
The shower drain pump in the starboard after cabin ran very intermittently and the heads space could have flooded and then the cabin itself.
The ships locker lids did not have gas struts to ease the fall when shutting them and in some cases it was difficult to close the quite heavy locker lid without fingers becoming trapped. The small barbecue worked well except that the over-sized bracket made it wobbly. We solved that problem by wrapping the stanchion with line to increase its diameter, but a more suitable clamp would be much better.
The method of locking the saloon sliding door was completely unsatisfactory. The door locking arrangement had clearly been broken at some time in the past and a poor repair had been made using an inadequate padlock system that was clearly visible and could be easily overcome by any would-be intruder. A crude modification appeared to have been made some time before our charter.

As mentioned earlier, on arrival we found that the key to lock the external hatch to the aft port cabin could not be found. When we mentioned this to Ivan he provided, at the last moment, an incongruous-looking basic heavy wire strop and padlock. Although we did not have any unwanted boarders in the event, this stop gap arrangement did not fill us with confidence. Certainly the single female occupant was concerned about security whether she was in or out of the cabin.

Summary
Apart from the difficulties with the mainsail, rig and deck equipment, most of the essential items such as Guiriden’s engines, generator and water-maker ran well and we achieved all our main aims, but we felt badly misled about the age of the vessel and, to a lesser extent, the lack of Wi-Fi.
Security was unsatisfactory, the briefing was of low quality, we were late leaving due to reasons outside our control, and there were a significant number of items showing inadequate maintenance or in an unsatisfactory state.
With immediate future users in mind, we alerted just some of the problems we had experienced to Bernard Leclerc of Dream Yacht Charter in Grenada who, without any suggestion on our part, reimbursed us for the cost of refilling the fuel tanks, which was $174.
He took no responsibility for advising us that the boat had just been built, nor the lack of Wi-Fi, which rests with LateSail with whom we had the contract and who are therefore responsible for offering a vessel that was not as described, nor in a fit state for charter.

It is always difficult trying to coordinate friends diaries to book a sailing trip abroad. Russell was patient, extremely helpful and got us a fantastic deal. This is the third occasion that I have booked through Russell at Late Sail. I thoroughly recommend their service. Excellent!

Russell was very patient and helpful during the process of finding the right boat for us.