This was a wonderful and challenging experience.
We took a risk for our honeymoon to spend five days with two people we did not know and trust them with a Greek Island sailing experience.
Linda and Ed are super knowledgeable about the Greek islands. They are well-connected, committed to clearly take pleasure in what they do. They love sailing and the catamaran lifestyle and were generous with their knowledge and their stuff (e.g. lent us snorkeling gear, had lots of food available, and many solid recommendations on where to go and what to do.) They really care about safety on the boat, which made us feel safe and thought after.
Our time with Linda and Ed was colored by challenges in communication, especially about planning the itinerary and mutual expectations around the frequency and nature of shared social time. We were consistently unclear how and when it was our place to give input on our overall itinerary: where we were going and how our time was being managed. For example, they thoughtfully booked us a surprise Friday night reservation for what wound up being one of the best meals of our trip. The process of understanding the details involved, where we did or didn’t have choice in the evening’s plan and reconciling it existing priorities of ours was filled with confusion and, it seemed, mutual frustration.
As another example, we learned on our last day that we had created hurt feelings by not planning for any dinners or cocktail hours together — an expectation that caught us by surprise.
Lastly, we never had any formal process of deciding together where we would go despite being the only guests on board. On the last day, we learned that they had changed up their previously intended route to accommodate a comment we’d made about wanting to swim in a beautiful bay. I believe it reflected a genuine desire to make the trip wonderful for us but would have worked better as an explicit conversation.
If you are excited to be under the wing of two seasoned travelers of the Greek islands, this could be awesome for you and in any case recommend as much explicit expectation-setting up front as possible.