Crew Life
There's an excellent chance that you'll travel over water this month. The forecast is for blue skies, except for when it will be raining, or gloomy. Or nighttime.
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MLC 2006 will finally be implemented on 20 August - so how will it affect you? Melanie Langley answers your most frequent questions.
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Not everyone who grows up in South Florida ends up the better for it. But Mike Wilson seems to be one of the few to have bucked that trend by taking advantage of the most visible industry in the region.
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Today, the concept of sustainability is both a ubiquitous and welcome concept that has affected not only modern industry but also most aspects of life in the 21st century. Businesswise, doing more with (much) less is now not so mu...
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Thank you to our readers for your comments on Melanie Langley's article published on 4 March: 'MLC 2006: What You Need to Know'. We asked Melanie to respond to each point and you can now read her answers to your questions here.
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Mex has pretty much seen and done it all in yachting as well as the wider maritime industry. That’s why he’s known to most people simply as ‘Mex’. Over the years he’s served as a captain, a chief and sole engineer, a program manag...
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Imagine if you found out that half the generous tip you gave to the waitress last night for outstanding service had been confiscated by her manager and was being held ransom for a year, in a bid to coerce the waitress into staying...
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I love being at sea, more a seadog than an hotelier, but the service aspect aboard has become one of the driving factors in the yachting industry.
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With the Med season already under way, new crew are arriving in their hundreds to the top locations: Antibes and Palma, hitting the docks and armed with CVs. Here's how to make sure yours stands out.
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Over the years, we have all worked on yachts with overall programs that vary from the very best to the very worst. The right overall package can be a very tough thing to find and is not something you just walk into either; it tak...
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There is a popular myth that all of us training providers are at each other’s throats, stabbing each other in the back (mmmm…can you do both?...maybe not). But anyway it’s not true.
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The wines of Europe in general, and those of France in particular, can seem very confusing. This is especially true for people who may have grown up with more familiarly labelled New World wines. In essence the difference for this...
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Captain Pascal Pellat-Finet career began in the familiar waters of the Mediterranean where he was involved in the construction of the first Maxi in the Med, S/Y Halisara, and learned from the likes of Dennis Conner and Gary Jobson...
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As a yacht manager and former yacht captain, Fabien Roché has had quite a bit of experience with placing crew. In recent years however, he’s noticed that not everyone has necessarily put in the right amount of time to gain the exp...
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Adam Laithwaite had always sailed. And when his career as head of “arty farty marketing bollocks” ended prematurely, he had to decide what to do next.
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Nowadays, before guests sip their first cocktail, the first and most common question seems to be: ‘Do you have internet?’ Internet has become a lifeline for some, and rather than surfing the waves, many spend hours surfing the Net...
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This year marks the 120th anniversary of the ingenious inception of Dr. Rudolf Diesel’s eponymous creation, and few inventions of similar vintage can claim credit for markedly improving the quality of life of the globe’s populatio...
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The act, or ‘art,’ of filling a space which is half the required size with twice the required amount of supplies, with the added psychic ability of the provisioner to ascertain with no prior knowledge whatsoever which particular s...
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On 23rd August, the Philippines became the 30th country to ratify Maritime Labour Convention 2006, setting in motion the 12 month run-up to its full implementation and some major changes for yacht crew.
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Off the back of a day of candid discussion surrounding the training of engineers, John Wyborn, training director at Bluewater Yachting, discusses how crewmembers, training providers and regulatory bodies can work together to move ...
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The 52-year-old captain has been with the 42m (138 ft) ketch sailing catamaran almost since it was built in 1998. To this day, it is one of the largest sailing catamarans on the water, and blisteringly fast – sailing at up to 18 k...
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Grant Atchison – Director at Moore Stephens IOM, considers the impact of MLC 2006 from an owner's perspective. Are owners being made adequately aware of these changes, and how will they effect crew employment?
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Recent years have seen a surge in Russian-speaking superyacht owners, bringing with it a range of new demands for captains and crew. One is communicating with them, as on the whole Russians tend to speak little English and feel m...
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The water was sparkling like a thousand diamonds in the early morning sun rising over the quiet anchorage. The guests were arriving up on deck, enjoying their first coffee while starting another day in paradise. The deck crew ju...
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Lots of crew magazines offer helpful hints and advice on how to prepare and behave in a job interview, but not much consideration has been given on the other side of the table: how do you interview a potential crewmember?
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Anyone working as an engineer in the marine industry, whether it be on yachts, commercial vessels, or anything in between, knows that organization, orders and tracking, spare parts and inventory are integral to a successful engine...
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Better known among her peers as "German Anni", this 15-year veteran of the superyacht industry got into it by accident. It started when Anni Riedel moved from Germany to the Caribbean, where she worked on land for a while. But the...
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What drives you can be the route to success, and there are many ways to gauge that success. Sure, money is one of them. So is position, size, program, type of yacht. But for the yacht crew I’ve known to be the happiest, the greate...
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Wine is becoming an increasingly important part of many superyacht trips, whether they are for charter or owner. An understanding of wine is often de-rigueur for many crew nowadays as a result of wine-knowledgeable guests, and the...
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The 25-year-old South Africa native left his hometown of Cape Town, South Africa, in May of 2011 and moved to Antibes. After a lot of dockwalking, he eventually landed his current position: second engineer on M/Y Shooting Star. He...
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