Landing on the dock

You land with a bag, a folder of certificates and no idea which way the marina is. The next three weeks decide it. I have hired people who got it right in nine days, and watched others fly home after six weeks.

Your first week ashore

A crew house is a shared house that takes yacht crew by the night or the week. Bunk rooms, a shared kitchen, a noticeboard and fifteen other people doing exactly what you are doing. You are not paying for the bed. You are paying for the noticeboard and the fifteen people. Most daywork I have seen handed out started in a crew house kitchen at nine at night.

Prices as of August 2026:

Book four nights, not four weeks. You want the freedom to move to whichever house the working crew are in. A short let with three or four others is cheaper, but it cuts you off from the noticeboard.

Day one: buy a local SIM, walk every marina on foot, find the cheap supermarket. You need to know how long it takes from your bed to each gate. When a bosun calls at 07:10, that number is the job.

Then the agencies. Register online first and finish the profile: CV, STCW, ENG1, passport photo page, visas held. A half filled profile still reads as half filled. Then walk in, because consultants put forward people they have met. Dress the way you would dockwalk, arrive five minutes early, and check in weekly rather than twice a day. Agency names are in chapter 10.

Facebook groups exist for every hub. So does Yotspot, running since 2010 with around 90,000 registered crew, and DayWork123, a free crew bulletin board covering more than 387 ports. Give the three an hour a day between dockwalks, and verify who posts. A real post names the boat, the agency or the captain. Nobody legitimate charges a fee to place you in a job, so anyone asking for money up front is selling you something.

From the bridge: I have never hired a green crew member off a CV emailed to the boat's general address. Not once. Every one came through a face I knew, or one known to someone I trust.

Daywork and dockwalking

Daywork is casual work paid by the day when a boat is short handed or up against a deadline. Washdowns, chamois work, tender moves, laundry, provisioning runs, polishing. It pays, it fills a CV, and it is how most first jobs start. As of 2026 it runs about EUR 120 to 160 a day in Antibes, EUR 100 to 150 in Palma, and USD 150 to 200 in Fort Lauderdale for a green deckhand or stew. Cash or transfer at the end of the day. Ask before you start, not after.

Five rules. Break none of them.

• Be on time. Early is on time. Half past seven means twenty past at the passerelle.
• Ask before you touch anything, and never assume. The worst dayworkers I have had were the confident ones.
• Own your mistakes the minute they happen. Break something, go find whoever is in charge, and say so. Everyone breaks things. The ones we remember hid it.
• Finish the task. Leave when you are told to leave, not when the clock says so.
• Write down what you did, and ask the head of department for a reference or permission to list them.

Dockwalking is walking the marina with CVs in hand, asking boats whether they need help today. Go between 07:30 and 11:00, when deck crew are out and interior crew are heading ashore. Do not go between noon and one, because crew are eating and you will be remembered for it. Never approach a boat with guests aboard: flowers going up the gangway, a passerelle watch, a crew member standing still in whites. Walk past.

Dress: clean plain polo, shorts or chinos, deck shoes, sunglasses off your head and in your hand when you speak to someone.

Say it in one breath. Your name, the position you are after, that you hold STCW and ENG1, that you are free today, and may you leave a CV. Then stop talking. If it is a no, thank them and go. Eight or nine boats out of ten have nothing on any given morning. That is arithmetic, not a verdict. The tenth boat is the reason you walked.

Some marinas do not allow unsolicited dockwalking, and gate security will say so. The United States is the strict one. If you are not a US citizen or resident, you need the right visa and work authorisation before any work aboard a yacht in US waters, and that includes unpaid daywork. This is not legal advice. Check the official page before you book.

From the bridge: The dockwalkers I remember are the ones who took the no well. That is most of the test, and most people fail it by day three.

The other half of the job hunt

Networking sounds like a seminar word. On a dock it means boats hire the person somebody vouched for. Every crew member you meet in a queue is on a boat that will be short of someone in March.

Six things that work, none needing you to be an extrovert.

• Compliment something specific, not the person.
• Comment on the place you are both standing in. It is a free topic.
• Talk while you wait to order. Two minutes costs nobody anything.
• See someone you know in a group? Walk over and join it.
• Join the run, the yoga class, the beach volleyball. Shared effort skips small talk.
• Go to agency and crew events, including the awkward ones.

Clean up your social media before an agent looks, because they will. Set the accounts private, or spend an hour deleting every photo of you with a drink at three in the morning. And in crew groups, never complain about a boat, a captain or the industry, because that screenshot travels faster than your CV.

You will hand your CV to fifty people this month. Make it the CV a captain expects. I built SeaPapers (seapapers.com) for exactly this; chapter 09.