LITTORALICIOUS
"The cooking gets you in the door.
Everything else determines whether you stay."
The Honest Starting Point
There are two ways into yachting. The first is the one you read about online: get your STCW, walk the docks in Antibes, land a job in a week. The second is what actually happens: months of preparation, strategic positioning, relentless networking, and learning a set of skills that have nothing to do with cooking.
Required Certifications
Before anyone takes you seriously, you need paperwork. Not because it proves you can cook — because it proves you won't be a liability at sea.
Non-Negotiable — Without These, You Don't Board
- STCW (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping) — The baseline. Five-day course covering firefighting, sea survival, first aid, personal safety. Without this, you don't step on a commercial vessel. Budget around $1,500-2,000 depending on location.
- ENG1 Medical Certificate — Seafarer medical fitness. Done through approved doctors. Valid for two years. Book it before your STCW — if you fail the medical, you've saved yourself the course fee.
- Food Safety / Food Hygiene Level 2 — Some flag states require this, some captains demand it. Get it regardless — it's cheap, it's online, and not having it is an easy reason to pass on you.
Strongly Recommended — Makes You Competitive
- Ship's Cook Certificate (STCW Reg III/3) — Required on vessels over a certain tonnage. Not all yachts demand it, but having it makes you competitive on larger boats where the money is. If you already have a culinary diploma (CAP Cuisine, NVQ, BTS, any culinary degree), you don't need to pay for the full assessment (~$2,000). You can get a flag state recognition for $320 — no exam, just paperwork. See the Cayman Islands shortcut below.
- STCW Advanced firefighting, medical care, and security awareness — The "refresher" modules. Increasingly expected on larger vessels and by management companies.
- Powerboat License (RYA Level 2) — Seems unrelated. It's not. On smaller yachts, the chef drives the tender for provisioning runs. On larger yachts, it shows you're a team player who can help outside the galley.
The Smart Shortcut: Cayman Islands Recognition
If you already have a culinary school diploma or equivalent qualification (NVQ Level II, CAP Cuisine, BTS Hotellerie, or any recognized culinary degree), you don't need to pay $2,000+ for a full Ship's Cook assessment. The Cayman Islands Maritime Authority (MACI) offers a document-based recognition pathway — no practical exam, no cooking assessment. Just a paperwork review.
What you need to submit:
- Copy of your culinary qualification/diploma
- Proof of yacht sea service (discharge book, employer letters)
- Valid STCW Basic Safety Training
- Valid ENG1 Medical Certificate (minimum 3 months remaining)
- Level 3 Food Hygiene Certificate (no more than 3 years old)
- Passport copy
Cost: $320. That's it. No assessment, no travel, no 2-day course. Submit the form, get your recognition letter, and you're legally compliant on any Cayman-flagged vessel — which is a huge percentage of the superyacht fleet.
The form: CISR 3910 — "Qualification as a Ship's Cook Recognition Application." Download it from cishipping.com/forms under the Technical Compliance tab, or request it by emailing technical@cishipping.com.
Recognition letters issued after July 2023 have no expiry date (as long as your ENG1, STCW, and Food Hygiene stay current). Note: this is accepted on Cayman-flagged vessels. Some charter management companies and surveyors prefer the full MCA assessment — but for getting started, the Cayman recognition is the smartest move if you already have culinary credentials.
Where to Train: The Main Hubs Worldwide
The Antibes College (formerly ACYC) — yacht-specific culinary courses, STCW, Ship's Cook prep. ITA Training (Oceanwave) — Cayman-approved Marine Cookery Assessment. The epicentre of Med yachting.
Blue Oceans Yachting — approved by Marshall Islands, Cayman Islands, and Jamaica for Marine Cookery Assessment. MPT (Maritime Professional Training) — STCW, advanced modules. The hub for Caribbean-based crew.
Leiths School of Food and Wine (London) — the gold standard MCA-approved Ship's Cook assessment. Ashburton Cookery School (Devon) — yacht-specific culinary course with industry placement. UKSA (Cowes, Isle of Wight) — STCW and full maritime training. The strongest training infrastructure in the world.
IYT (International Yacht Training) approved centres. STCW courses via local maritime schools. Growing as an alternative Med base — especially for refit work and off-season training.
Superyacht Culinary Academy (Cape Town) — Ship's Cook certification, yacht culinary training. SAMSA-approved STCW centres. Significantly cheaper than European equivalents. Large South African crew community in yachting.
AIMST (Australian Institute of Marine Science and Technology), various AMSA-approved STCW centres in Sydney, Gold Coast, and Auckland. Good starting point for crew heading to the Pacific or Asian superyacht market.
The Two Entry Points
Path 1: Restaurant Background
You have speed, pressure tolerance, and mise en place discipline. What you need to learn: provisioning in foreign markets, plating for 8 instead of 200, radical service flexibility ("dinner moved from 8 to 10 — adapt"), and cooking every station alone — pastry, cold apps, hot line, bread, crew meals. All of it. Every day.
Path 2: No Kitchen Background
Harder, not impossible. Start on 24-30m sailing yachts where expectations are lower and learning is intense. Do a yacht culinary course (Ashburton UK, ACYC Antibes). Build a portfolio fast — cook dinner parties, photograph everything. Nobody hires based on your description of a dish.
Antibes: The Capital of Yacht Chef Recruitment
If there's one place in the world to start your yacht chef career, it's Antibes.
Port Vauban — the largest marina in Europe. 1,600+ berths. Yachts from 24 to 180 metres. Every one of them needs a chef. This is where the industry lives from March to October.
Bluewater, YachtCrewLink, The Crew Network, Crew4Yachts — all within a 10-minute walk from the port. Register in person.
The Antibes College (formerly ACYC) — STCW, yacht culinary courses, refresher certifications. Train and look for work simultaneously.
500-800 euros/month for a shared room. Boulevard du Marechal Juin and Route de Biot. Live with job-seekers, share leads, hear about openings before they're posted.
Daily morning market. Your classroom. Walk it every day, learn the products, talk to vendors. When you land a job, you'll already know where to source.
The other hubs — Fort Lauderdale for the Caribbean season, Palma de Mallorca as an alternative Med base, Barcelona for refit work — are all important. But if you're starting from zero: fly to Nice, take the bus to Antibes, find a crew house, and start walking the docks.
Getting Your First Job
Crew Agencies and Job Platforms
Register with crew agencies in every major hub. The main ones:
- Antibes / Cote d'Azur: Bluewater, YachtCrewLink, The Crew Network, Crew4Yachts, Dockwalk
- Fort Lauderdale / US: Luxury Yacht Group, The Crew Network, Crew4Yachts
- Palma de Mallorca: Peter Insull's, Dovaston Crew, Hill Robinson
- Online platforms: Dockwalk, YachtCrewLink, CrewFO, and Yotspot — one of the most active crew job boards. Strong search filters, good reputation with captains and management companies. Keep profiles updated weekly, not monthly.
Register with all of them. In Antibes, go in person — a face-to-face registration carries more weight than an online form. Update your profile weekly during season. Respond to messages within hours, not days. Agencies work fast — a captain calls at 9 AM, they want a chef on board by 5 PM. If you're slow, you're invisible.
WhatsApp Groups: The Real Job Market
Here's what no agency website will tell you: a huge percentage of yacht chef jobs are filled through WhatsApp groups before they ever reach a formal listing. Captains post "need a chef in Antibes by Thursday" and it's filled within hours.
The key groups for yacht chefs:
- Yacht Chef Group — the largest chef-specific WhatsApp group. Job postings, day work leads, provisioning tips, and real-time industry intel. This is where positions circulate first.
- Chefs Helping Chefs — more community-oriented. Recipe sharing, advice, supplier recommendations, and job leads. Good for networking and building your reputation before you even step on a boat.
Join both. Introduce yourself briefly when you join — your experience, what you're looking for, where you are. Don't spam. Don't ask basic questions you could Google. Be helpful, share knowledge, and when a position comes up that fits, respond fast with a clean CV and portfolio link.
Do You Need Formal Training?
If you have a strong restaurant background — two or three years minimum in serious kitchens — you can get into yachting without a yacht-specific culinary course. Your knife skills, speed, and ability to work under pressure are what captains actually need. The yacht-specific knowledge (provisioning, preference sheets, small-number plating, service flexibility) you can learn on the job, especially if you start on smaller boats.
What you do need regardless of background: STCW certification, a good attitude, and the ability to demonstrate your cooking through photos. A portfolio of 20 well-photographed dishes carries more weight than any diploma.
If you don't have restaurant experience, a yacht-specific course (Ashburton, ACYC/Antibes College, or equivalent) is strongly recommended. It fills the gap and gives you credibility for your first interview.
Day Work
This is the real secret. Day work — showing up at the docks and offering to help with anything — is how most people get their first break. Not from agencies. Not from online applications. From being physically present and useful.
In Antibes: Walk the Port Vauban quay between 8 and 9 AM. Start from the capitainerie end, walk all the way to the Fort Carre side. Look for activity — hoses out, crew in uniform, tenders being prepared. That means the boat is crewing up. Ask the first person you see: "Hi, I'm a chef looking for day work — do you need any help today?" Bring your CV printed (yes, printed), a pen, and be ready to start immediately.
In Fort Lauderdale: Bahia Mar marina and the 17th Street Causeway docks. Same routine, earlier start (7:30 AM — Florida heat means early mornings).
In Palma: Port Adriano and the STP shipyard area.
Day work isn't glamorous. You're washing decks, polishing stainless, cleaning bilges. But you're on board. Captains see your work ethic. When the chef quits mid-season — and it happens constantly — the captain thinks of the day worker who showed up every morning and never complained. That's your job.
Where to Start: The Smart First Position
This is where most people get it wrong. You have restaurant experience, you're confident in your cooking, and you think: "I'll go straight to sole chef on a 50-metre." Don't. Not yet.
The Two Smart Entry Points
You work under an experienced head chef who already knows the boat, the guests, and the systems. You learn provisioning in foreign ports, preference sheet management, galley workflow at scale, and how to handle the owner — all with a safety net. When you step up to head chef, you've already seen how it's done.
You do everything yourself — breakfast through dinner, crew and guests, provisioning, cleaning. The pressure is real but the stakes are lower. Fewer guests, simpler menus, more room to learn from mistakes. This is where you build your independence and confidence fast.
Both paths work. What doesn't work: jumping straight to sole chef on a 50-metre with 12 guests and a demanding owner when you've never provisioned a yacht, never managed preference sheets, and never cooked at sea. The cooking is the easy part — it's everything else that catches people off guard. Give yourself one season to learn the systems, then step up.
Your First Season: What to Expect
The Hours
You will work more than you've ever worked. During charter season, 14-16 hour days are normal. You start with breakfast prep at 6 AM and finish cleaning up after dinner service around 10 PM. Then you plan tomorrow's menus. Then you sleep. Then you do it again for 7-14 days straight.
Between charters, the hours drop. You provision, deep-clean, prep ahead, and actually breathe. Guard this time. Use it to experiment, practice techniques, and build your recipe collection.
The Space
Your galley is smaller than most home kitchens. On a 30-metre boat, you might have 4-6 square metres of workspace. One oven, a four-burner hob, maybe a salamander if you're lucky. You learn to mise en place with surgical precision because there is physically no room for disorder.
Your cabin is smaller than the galley. Privacy is minimal. Noise carries. You share a bathroom. This is the part that breaks people who love cooking but hate confined living.
The Money
$3.5-5K
$5-7.5K
$7.5-10K
$10-15K+
Tips on top of salary. During charter season, guests tip the crew — typically 5-15% of the charter fee, split among the crew. On a busy summer season, tips can equal or exceed your base salary. On private boats (no charter), tips are rarer and lower.
The real financial advantage: almost zero expenses. Food, accommodation, transport, insurance — the boat covers it. Your salary is essentially disposable income. Chefs who are disciplined about saving can accumulate significant capital in 3-5 years.
What Nobody Tells You
You're Not Just a Chef
You're a therapist for the crew, a diplomat with the owner, a logistics manager for provisioning, a budget controller, a nutritionist, and sometimes a bartender. The cooking is maybe 40% of the job. The rest is people management, emotional labour, and problem-solving under constraints that would make a restaurant chef quit.
Isolation Is Real
You live with 5-20 people you didn't choose, in a space you can't leave. Your friends and family are in a different time zone. Wi-Fi is inconsistent at sea. Relationships suffer. The chefs who last build routines outside of work — exercise, reading, a creative project, anything that gives you an identity beyond the galley.
The Owner Is Always Right
The owner wants a well-done wagyu steak with ketchup. You cook a well-done wagyu steak with ketchup. Your ego has no place on this boat. Your job is to make the person who pays for everything happy. If they want scrambled eggs at 3 AM, that's what you make. With a smile.
Seasons Have a Rhythm
Mediterranean summer (May-October). Caribbean winter (November-April). Between them: yard periods, refit, Atlantic crossings, time off. The smart chefs plan their year around this rhythm — saving during season, travelling or studying between them. Some take temporary restaurant stages in the off-season to sharpen skills. Some rest. Both are valid.
How to Move Up
The path from first job to head chef on a 60-metre is not automatic. It requires:
- Build a preference sheet library — after every charter, document what worked and what didn't. After three years, you have an intelligence database that makes you irreplaceable.
- Learn wine — WSET Level 2 at minimum. Owners notice when the chef can discuss wine pairings intelligently. It's a differentiator.
- Master dietary complexity — keto, vegan, celiac, halal, low-FODMAP, AIP. The more restrictions you can handle without the food suffering, the more valuable you become.
- Build relationships with captains and management companies — your next job comes from your last captain's recommendation, not from an agency. Be professional, be reliable, be easy to work with. Everything else is secondary.
- Photograph your food — consistently, in good light, on clean plates. Your Instagram or portfolio is your CV. Update it constantly.
- Stage at restaurants between seasons — even a week at a serious kitchen teaches you techniques that set you apart. Seek out the best restaurants in ports you visit.
Coming Soon
Become a Yacht Chef — The Full Course
A comprehensive, module-based programme covering everything in this article and more — certifications, first-job strategy, galley operations, preference sheets, provisioning logistics, menu systems, and career progression. Built by a working yacht chef.
View the CourseThe Question to Ask Yourself
Not "can I cook well enough?" Most people who consider this career can cook. The real question is: can you cook well when you're exhausted, homesick, confined, sea-sick, and serving someone who doesn't appreciate it?
If the answer is yes — if you can find purpose in feeding people beautifully even when the conditions are against you — this career will reward you in ways that no restaurant job can. Financial freedom, travel to places most people only dream of, and the rare satisfaction of mastering a craft under the hardest possible conditions.
If the answer is "I'm not sure" — try it anyway. The only way to know is to do a season. The boat doesn't need your commitment for life. It needs you for six months. See if it fits.
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