Mr. Bad Example: Meet the Guy Rescued Three Times, Twice From Burning Sailboats

Someone Else’s Boat Was Sunk, Another Repossessed, Another Awaited in Norway

Peter Swanson Sep 9

READ IN APP

With apologies to Warren Zevon for the headline.¹

Jan Kanafoski had lived a life of crime and crappy behavior in the U.S. before finally self-deporting in February 2025, sailing a 72-foot ketch named Baba Yaga to her eventual doom near the Azores.

Kanafoski is a citizen of Poland, and Baba Yaga was a witch from Slavic folklore. On a day in early May, she burned like one—as recounted in Kanafoski’s self-published autobiography “Castaway by Choice.”

(The 66-page PDF omits felony crimes and that time he put a down payment on a boat and disappeared with it and all of the sellers’ possessions.)

In that most recent case, a freighter en route to Norway rescued Kanafoski, according to Kanafoski. That was rescue No. 3.

Rescue No. 1 was by Coast Guard helicopter from a burning boat in 2015. Then, there was another Coast Guard helicopter rescue off Cuba in October 2023, this time in the midst of a storm, Rescue No. 2.

The July 2015 case happened 69 miles west of Hudson, Florida, after Kanafoski had abandoned a burning sloop in the Gulf of Whichever. He told the world that he got into a liferaft because he couldn’t fight the fire and save his little dog, so he chose to save the dog.

“The boat burned fast and the sharks were there within minutes. They weren’t lying when they said sharks come to fuel oil and burned boats. They were small, but there were three,” Kanafoski wrote in a long Facebook post, which concluded with a plea for money for “John Supertramp Kanafoski.”

According to Kanafoski’s son, Kanafoski got possession of the big ketch that was lost last year from an “investor” who was told the boat could make money in charter. Father and son had a falling out after allegations that dad had assaulted son in Key West, where both were living aboard the boat.

Share

Kanafoski has accused his son of informing ICE of his lapsed immigration status. His son denies doing so but was “glad someone did.” Here’s how author Kanafoski described his eviction from the U.S.:

One morning, a U.S. Immigration boat rolled up, rifles pointed at my face. My green card had expired. They gave me two options: leave now, or rot in a cage until deportation. I left. That same night, I pulled anchor and pointed the bow east.

He arrived in Bermuda with torn sails and only his birth certificate and deportation papers for identification. He was allowed to stay to make repairs. He was out of food and begged from local churches to reprovision, then set sail for the Azores.

Here’s Kanafoski describing his latest rescue:

Day 61: I was just seventy-one miles from the Azores. I hadn’t slept more than 45 minutes at a time in days. AIS alarms kept blaring—ships all around. I adjusted course, fired up the engine to give us a little push, eased the sails, lashed the wheel, and started prepping to hoist the main. That’s when everything went to hell.

The hydraulics slowed, groaned, then failed completely. The engine screamed — runaway throttle—and then silence. The system died.

I went below to investigate and found the engine room filled with white smoke and flame. It looked like someone was welding with a fog machine going. Tried the CO2 extinguisher—nothing. Nearly passed out. Ran for another. Then another. Then another.

The fire had eaten through the rear wall by then. It had all the air it wanted. The room was an inferno. I turned on the freshwater shower and emptied every extinguisher on board. Nothing touched it. I called mayday.

One of the cargo ships I was dodging that got me in this situation responded immediately. While I gave my position, the fire crept closer. I deployed the liferaft—it inflated upside down, right next to the flames.

Threw the inflatable dinghy off the other side and scrambled for my gear. I grabbed my backpack. It had my birth certificate inside. Two VHFs. My Garmin InReach. A jacket, my rain hat, and whatever I could snatch near the chart table. Not much.

I paddled to the liferaft, tied it to the dinghy, cut the painter and drifted. The Rostrum Hamburg was on me in minutes. They couldn’t launch a boat in the swells, so they threw a line…

The ship’s crew treated me like one of their own. They clothed me, fed me, and brought me to Mosjøen, Norway. Nine days later, I stepped off the gangway with one pair of clothes and a backpack full of nothing that could help me now. and immediately was arrested by Norwegian authorities.

At this point, two things should be mentioned. Kanafoski was raised in Georgia from childhood and that he has one undeniable talent: The ability to convince others to give him a boat, sell him a boat for next to nothing, let him use their boat or buy-now-and-pay-never on a boat.

This is all the more remarkable, given that he accomplished all these things despite having a prison record in Georgia that anyone could look up. At 17, he was sentenced to three years in jail for criminal possession of an item with an altered ID mark, a charge associated with stolen property.

The story linked below was written by the owners of a junk-rigged 51-footer named Toketee to whom Kanafoski paid $2,500 down—a balance never received and the boat never to be seen again. This chapter was omitted from his bio.

The Grift: How an Ex-Con Stole Our Boat And Got Away With It September 11, 2023 Read full story

There was also the case of The RV Ocean Endeavor was another boat that Kanafoski had in his possession for a while, until the legal owner had him evicted with police help. During the eviction Kanafoski managed to vandalize the boat’s fuel system, according to Monroe County sheriff’s deputies, who were present. They arrested Kanafoski and charged him with damage to property amounting to more than $1,000, a felony. He was convicted and served time.

But not right away. Kanafoski avoided trial with the help of a North Carolina businessman who let him get away on his a 62-foot Bruce Roberts steel trawler named Scorcey. Kanafoski cruised her to the Bahamas in 2019 (where he claimed to participated in Hurricane Dorian relief efforts) and later to Isla Mujeres in 2020, where he advertised Scorcey on the AirBnB home-sharing website:

Enjoy all Isla Mujeres has to offer from a small yacht at a dock at isla Mujeres’ premier bar. The boat is minutes away from all the beaches. Enjoy swimming in the tropical waters. Snorkel dive or fish. Go see the sights of the islands or just sit on the boat and watch the world go by. Peaceful relaxation at its best in the warm tropical turquoise waters of the Caribbean. Stay up all night and look at the stars from the roof or go to bed and enjoy being rocked to sleep by the ocean.

All the while, his arrest documents warned that the fugitive Polish skipper “has a history of violence.”

The next thing you know, according to author Kanafoski, he was hiding out in the Middle River at Baltimore. Scorcey was anchored with her name painted over. And that’s where he was arrested on the outstading warrant by cops and Coast Guard in June 2021. Author Kanafoski takes up the story:

Meanwhile, the trawler didn’t vanish like I feared. My partners sold her, just like we’d always planned. When the dust settled, they mailed me my share. That money was the last gasp from Scorcey, my battered relief-ship-turned-outlaw-ride. I took it straight into another gamble: a 25-foot Cal, older than me, scarred but floating.

Kanafoski said he sailed the Cal, named No Say, from Baltimore to Key West because “that’s where sailors like me go when they’re out of ideas.” Then, it was on to Isla Mujeres again until the “kitty ran dry.”

Sailing back to the Keys in October 2023, No Say ran into storm conditions. Her towed dinghy slammed into the rudder at one point, wrecking the steering. At the mercy of heavy seas, she drifted toward Cuba.

For three days, Kanafoski said, his May Day calls went unheard. Then an airline pilot relayed his position to the Coast Guard, which set off the series of events that led to Kanafoski’s second Coast Guard rescue:

They tried dropping the swimmer again and again, but every time I’d surf past, rigging flailing like a madman’s whip. Finally, they dropped him ahead of me. A black silhouette in the foam, arms spread. I surfed down a wall of water straight into him, snagged him like a marlin on a line, and nearly drowned him dragging through the rollers. Somehow he kicked free and hauled himself into my cockpit—soaked, furious, but grinning like a devil. He shouted we had to jump.

Pitch black, wind screaming, salt spray choking the air. We hurled ourselves overboard. He grabbed my lifejacket from behind, and now it was my turn getting dragged half-dead through the waves. The helo’s cable snaked down, bouncing on the crests, rotor thrum pounding my skull. He shoved me into the rescue basket and with one violent jerk, I was airborne—spinning, dripping, ripped out of the sea like a hooked tuna.

By now, you may be thinking that trailer-park Odysseus here may have had some AI help writing his nautical epic. His son thinks so too.

Last we heard, Jan Stanislaw “Supertramp” Kanafoski, 45, had been living at a shelter in Wroclaw, Poland, supported by a safety net run by (what he describes as) a bunch of unsympathetic overlords. Before he left Norway—here we go again—someone had given him a free boat, an old 37-foot steel motorsailer named Snow Goose. Kanafoski said he was thinking about how he could get back there and take possession.