Shockingly unprofessional!

BEWARE!! Do not be fooled by any overall positive ratings for this company/academy. Most of the good reviews are over a year old. These ratings may have been true when there was another business partner involved at that point in time, but it is certainly no longer the case. This “academy” has become a one-man-show ran by business owner Mark Devitt. We (husband and wife) booked a 2-week course (late March / early April 2025) for both our competent crew and day skippers licences. Sadly, we left at the end of the period without our qualifications after having spent a small fortune on the course, accomodation and travel expenses - which all had to be prepaid before the course commenced. We are no experts to determine seaworthiness of a vessell; however, the boat (recently purchased from what we understood) was untidy, seemed unkept and the engine had to be fixed, which Mark figured out on Day 2 of our course when it didn’t want to start. This meant we couldn’t get any practical experience for 5 days at the start of the course, while he was trying to sort this out - with absolutely no sense of urgency. We consequently focused on the theory during this time, most of which turned out to be self-study as the “classes” were well below par and mostly lasted 2-3 hours a day. Mark also seemed very unprepared, and there was no structure or clear outcome of what needs to be achieved/mastered from each lesson. We did manage to write the theory exams for our day skippers licences but we had to get South African Sailing (SAS) involved to collect our theory exams from Mark to get these loaded on their system - this was our only recourse as we couldn’t get Mark to do this, despite following up with him on numerous occasions (both during and after the course). During the course, we ended up having very little practical experience, where most days ended up being half-days at best, or we could not go sailing due to weather conditions (the 5 days when the boat was not operational would have been perfect sailing weather). The extremely disappointing result was that we were nowhere near ready to take our practical exams with the SAS examiner at end of the course and could thus not complete this exam or get our skippers licences - even though it was paid for. To date, Mark neither took accountability nor apologised for this. Furthermore, Mark (as the instructor) was consistently extremely sarcastic and condescending, expecting one to grasp all the concepts with minimal training/demonstration or explanation. At some point, he was basically shouting at us. Mark may be able to sail, but he is certainly not instructor/teaching material. His behaviour was shockingly unprofessional. We have also reported this incident to SAS. We cannot emphasise this enough : DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER USING this company/academy - do yourself (and your pocket) a favour and go somewhere else!