Beach Butter

It is also significant to realize that you have no living expenses at all—no food, rent or utility costs—even your crew uniform and toiletries are provided – it’s not unusual to wake up each morning in a different part of the world – but that’s in addition to the obvious travel benefits. There are also significant tax advantages to living and working on a superyacht. Most crew pay little or no tax at all.

On top of this, you have a professional chef cooking deluxe meals for you at least twice a day and all you earn you can take practically take straight to the bank. You are also entitled to full medical insurance and, depending on the yacht, dental insurance too.

Should you complete one year’s employment, you are entitled to 4 – 6 weeks paid holiday per year, and some yachts even provide one paid flight home per year as well as cash bonuses.

Crew working on charter yachts can expect several thousands of dollars in tips (it is not unheard of for some crew to receive a $5,000 dollar tip during a two week charter). Some, designer watches, jewelry and clothing are also being given.

These are only some of the more obvious benefits – but then when one considers that you are learning something new each day and meeting new people from different cultures all over the world on a weekly basis – you really cannot go wrong.

The Caribbean, Mediterranean, Australia, South America, US, all you need to do is choose where you want to work—and the world is your oyster!
Wow, that sounds great – but are there any downsides?
Well, there is nothing quite like working as crew on a superyacht. Related to working with other crew is the most of the downsides of the job. You are, after all, working in a relatively confined space, which only serves to exaggerate the little annoying practices of others.

These are the five most common behaviors that annoy crew the most:

1) The Silent Zone

When you’re working an 18-hour day while on charter, the one thing you need most is sleep. At any point during the day your hours of rest could be split, depending on your watch schedule. So when you have an hour to rest, you do your best to get the most out of it.

Welcome to the silent zone…

Just when you’re about to fall asleep—BANG—a door slams, pulling you back from the verge of a blissful dream, there is usually some clueless soul who fails to realize that you’re on a break.

2) Mixing Colors

One of the biggest gripes for stewardesses is the fact that their fellow crew don’t understand the difference between white and the rest of the colors in the rainbow.
Laundry baskets are clearly marked one or the other, yet it’s apparently lost on some individuals.
To quote one of my stewardesses:

“How hard is it to put colors in one basket and whites in another? You’d have to be blind to miss it, but it still happens!”

3) The Missing Key

After a good evening in port, you arrive on deck late and open the locker where the ‘secret’ spare key to the crew mess door is stored… only to find that it’s missing.
You then realize that John the deckhand left the bar 30 minutes before you did and has let him in, locked the door, but neglected to return the key!

So, you start calling the numbers of your fellow crewmembers while they’re encased in a steel housing but none of their phones have signal.

So you’re stuck outside with two options:

1) Sleep in the rescue tender; or

2) Start banging on the Captain’s window to let you in.

Both options are, of course, not ideal. Your only reward is the fact that John will get a telling-off in the morning!

4) The Clothing Exchange

There are still occasions when you cannot find a t-shirt or worst of all—any clean underwear!  While the numbering system on the labels of crew clothing goes a long way to avoid this.

You know it’s been washed for you put in your dirty laundry over three days ago, which means it has now made its way into someone else’s cabin, resulting in the silly situation of someone else wearing your underwear.

I have even heard of Captains wearing the deckhand’s underwear and willfully so! But to add insult to the recognizable injury, when you don’t have the time to go fumbling through the drawers of another cabin and the clothing exchange is only open when you’re on charter!

5) The Spanish Inquisition

This last point comes from the Captain of my yacht. What’s the thing that annoys him most about crew commonly?

“Being asked where are we going next or what the plans are,” he says. “The problem is not the question as such, but the fact that you get asked this question by every single crewmember over and over again. As soon as I know where we’re going I’ll write it on the board in the crew mess. Until then, relax!”

So, even with all the wonderful advantages that come with a job on a superyacht, it still takes a pretty strong-willed individual to completely ignore the bad habits of fellow crewmembers.

The Superyacht Access Club
Advanced Training For Superyacht Crew
<a href=”www.workonsuperyachts.com “>www.workonsuperyachts.com </a> 

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