Merchants are cursed

So me and my friend are doing merchant stuff so we decide a lost shipment is best, we figure out the clues and a skelly fleet decides to be where we need to go, we manage to escape with the loot and decide on doing another. But when we got to the ship the only thing there was the merchant manifest and a rank 5 athena at a nearby island. Important to the story a while back we took down a youtuber. so with that impressive feat in mind we decided to fight the athena, they were not on their ship so we sunk it and sword dueled them, although they killed me once I did take them out and despite the fact that whenever I sail for the merchants something goes terribly wrong I actually got quite a bit of gold and rep so something finally worked with the merchants.