My 2 cents on Jay (mentioned in the docking section): At first sight this man indeed appeared to be friendly and helpful, but my further experience with him has been quite different:
– he claims to be the only one that is allowed to sell water to the boats, which is clearly a lie … fact is that he charges at least 3 times more than other people (6€ per 100 liters – I got 250 liters for 3.5€ from John, mentioned below);
– when he returned my laundry, a belt was missing, and it was only after pointing this out to him that he returned the belt;
– when I sold my diving compressor through him, he first came with an envelope that didn’t contain the amount of money we agreed upon (I counted the contents). He then took the envelope with him, came back
later with the same envelope and the missing amount separately, telling me “this you already counted, and this is the additional amount” … when I recounted the envelope (which he obviously hadn’t expected), it contained 2000 Escudo’s (about 20 EURO) less than before.
– for these reasons I decided to hire somebody else to watch my boat while I returned to Belgium for a couple of weeks, and his reaction confirmed my decision: he called me, calling me stupid for not hiring
him and threatening me that people would be stealing stuff from my boat. I thought it would be sufficient to not leave anything on deck to avoid this, but four days after I had left, I got a call from the guy looking after my boat (a man I can really recommend: John, or João), telling me that Jay had been seen
diving close to my boat the day before (something that he had never done before) and when John went to check, he found that the anchor line of the second anchor I had put out had been cut close to the anchor (so that it wasn’t obvious that it had been cut). He replaced the line with a stronger rope and we thought that would be the end of it. One week later, this new rope was also cut. This kind of vandalism hasn’t happened on any other boat and I don’t see any reason why someone would be doing this kind of stuff … my only suspect for this is this Jay person. Finally, 3 days later, my anchor completely disappeared (a 16kg CQR), a first for Palmeira according to e.g. the local police (where I filed a complaint). Only one suspect again: Jay.
So on the whole I would say this Jay isn’t exactly a good person to befriend, but rather a person to steer clear of: first impressions can be extremely deceiving.
BTW: his ‘taxi-boat’ is called ‘Denis’, not ‘Jay’
Frank Van Camp – Smoke