I was trying to set up a decent crew that would have a good chance for success but was unable to move any of the crew around between the 2 ships. Is a crew supposed to be locked in once it is organized?

 

I did find that if Ship 1 had 5 crew and I dismissed one, the left most crew member from ship 2 moved upward to ship 1. That is a way to optimize the crew for ship 1 but is very wasteful.

 

Is there another way to optimize the crew?

You are in the wrong setup window, go to your boat and to the crew tab on the single ship.

 

The window you are talking about and try to edit is the crew roster.

As long as both ships are in port, you can move crew between then by editing the crew in the edit ships window pane.

It sounds to me, like others have said, you are in the crew roster screen.

In this screen no-one is assigned to ships and it is merely a list of your crew.

 

To move crew around you must to go to the ship interace and click the plus button, as you did in the tutorial, where you can drag and drop captains and crew (who are not currently on a voyage) onto the ships crew.

I'll try that tonight when I get home. Ty for replying. It was driving me knuts but I knew there should be a way.