The Brief
This was an opinion feature I pitched to OnboardOnline, aimed at those seeking their first superyacht crew job. There isn’t a great deal of information available about the realities of working on superyachts, so this article was created to fill that gap and allow prospective crew to assess if their personalities were well-suited to the industry. As of October 2014, this was overwhelmingly the most popular article to have ever run in the publication, with over 25,000 hits upon publication, and many positive comments from captains, crew, training schools, and crew agencies.
You could work on a boat where all the things described do happen. But it is misrepresentative to suggest that they happen on all boats, all the time. I understand the business of media: sensationalism sells, and Marie Claire are not printing falsehoods, so have done nothing wrong. Even if it might feel wrong to us. Perhaps the truth of it is that only people within this odd little industry can ever really understand it. And even then, each yacht functions as its own floating society, with its own laws, rulers, politics and personalities- and can vary tremendously in culture and work requirements, even if the job descriptions are fundamentally the same across most yachts. For example, someone who spends their career on a quiet private yacht owned by a lovely family is going to have an entirely different impression of the yachting industry than a person who worked on frantically busy charter yachts over-run with demanding, rude oligarchs with penchants for prostitutes. There is no exact description of what a superyacht job is, or what it will be for each person- so perhaps it is inevitable that the mainstream media will always get it wrong to some degree. Having said that, given that such articles in the press lead to more candidates pitching up in Antibes each year, it strikes me that perhaps it’s time to put a little more candid information out there for those considering a career in yachting.