Hiring
The captain is the purchase
An owner spends a year choosing a boat and an afternoon choosing the person who will decide what that boat is like to own.
Ask ten experienced owners what they would do differently and eight will say the same thing: they would have spent more time on the captain and less on the joinery. The boat is a fixed object. The captain decides whether she is ready on Friday, whether the crew stay, whether the yard invoice is fair, whether the guests notice anything and whether the owner ever receives a phone call that starts with the word unfortunately.
What the job actually is
On a fifty metre yacht the captain is a master mariner, a general manager with a payroll of a million euros, a hotel director, a project manager during refits, a compliance officer and the person who says no to the owner about weather. Most captains are strong at three of those six. Knowing which three, and hiring the heads of department to cover the rest, is the skill.
- Seamanship, which is assumed and is the least of what goes wrong.
- Crew leadership, which is why crews stay and therefore why the boat runs.
- Technical judgement during yard periods, worth six figures a year on its own.
- Guest sense: knowing when to appear and when to be invisible.
- Administration: certificates, rest hours, accounts, and the paperwork that keeps a port state happy.
- The ability to disagree with the owner, politely, about safety.
How to actually interview one
References from previous owners, not from crew agencies, and the specific question of why the last two positions ended. Long tenures are the single best signal in a CV: a captain who has done five years on two boats is more interesting than one who has done one year on ten, however impressive the names.
Then put a case in front of them. The forecast is bad, guests are due at the airport, the alternative anchorage is two hours away and the charter broker is on the telephone. What do you do, and who do you call first? Listen for whether the crew and the guests appear in the answer in the right order.
I do not hire a captain who has never told an owner no. I am buying that sentence.
A family office manager who runs three yachtsThe reference call that matters
Call the chief engineer from the last boat. Engineers have no career incentive to protect a captain, they see the technical decisions and the yard invoices, and they know whether the boat was actually maintained or made to look maintained. A five minute call with an engineer is worth more than every written reference in the file.
What to pay
The market rate, and then a retention structure. Captains on large yachts move for money, for rotation and for a better owner, in that order for the first ten years of a career and in reverse order afterwards. An owner who pays at the top of the band and offers rotation on a boat that is used heavily will keep a good captain for a decade, which is cheaper than any other arrangement.
Use it now
Crew Planner
Who is on board, what they earn, and what rotation does to the payroll.
The mistake owners make
Hiring below the captain. An owner who arranges crew directly with a stewardess, or who overrules the captain in front of the crew, has taken away the only authority that makes the system work, and the good crew will leave first because they can. The relationship is with the captain, and everything else runs through them.
