Taking Liberty from charter.

We scheduled to take our boat Liberty (Bavaria 41 Cruiser from 2015) out from Kiriacoulis charter. This was planned all year before. There were few reasons to do it after 3 seasons in charter. First of all, we could not stand out, how people are destroying our boat. Of course you see every little scratch,  that can be easily repaired, but there were bigger things, like few holes on the hull, cabin doors ripped out and few other stuff.

Secondary we want to be flexible to travel when and where we want. We decided to put the boat to Trapani on Sicily, there is direct flight by Ryanair.

The most sad thing for me was the treatment of the boat in the charter program. I was told that Kiriacoulis is the best company with high level of service and treatment. It was definitely true, the way you can use your owner weeks etc., this works fine, but the way the damages on the boat were repaired, I was not happy at all.

They were not using original parts from Bavaria, but the cheapest ones in the best case. Mostly they were using few screws and wood to hide the damages.

For example my anchor locker. 

The windless was not fixed for all the season 2017, so people who chartered the boat had a problem with chain jumping out from windless. The chain destroyed the fiberglass. Also you can see the piece of wood which was installed bellow the remote control. This was the way they tried to fix the issue instead of replacing the head of the windless. 

Another example is the engine. Incompatible filters for Volvo Penta were used, so there was still small leakage of diesel.

The syphon for salt water was leaking all the time, so the engine room is full of 1cm crust of salt. Here is the picture of Vetus syphon which is fitting the size of tubes with salt water.

Oil was replaced probably only twice during the whole lifetime of the boat. Volvo Penta suggest to change oil after every 250 engine hours. When we changed the oil, boat had 1800 engine hours, the oil was black like coke but caramelized.

And last thing which is creating full picture, how boats are treated in charter is the fact, that boat papers were lost. I was told to better look in the places which are most hidden. So at the end I have to order all the manuals again directly from Bavaria. The service book about the engine is of course also not in the boat.

When I was buying the boat, I did not have any people around me, who had an experience with having the boat in charter. If I will be buying new boat next time, I will definitely not do it again.

On the other side, we did not have to pay for the marinas and some small repairs. The money we saved is about 1/5 max of the price of the boat if we count also the vacations on the boats chartered from Kiriacoulis. Every boat owner has possibility of 4 weeks a year to take some boat everywhere in Kiriacoulis bases for little payment.

Finally the boat is ours, we fixed what we discovered and equipped by necessary stuff for living on the board in next seasons.

There is next article coming soon where i will describe all the installations we did and also few experiences from our long trip from Athnes to Trapani on Sicily.