“She’s so bad at cooking she’d burn water!”

It’s one of those stupid phrases people say that always gets a laugh because it’s seemingly absurd. However, during my first attempt at cooking for another human being I did managed to burn a pan of boiling rice, which isn’t too different. It was my second week of university and my boyfriend at the time was coming to visit, so 18 year old me decided that a home cooked meal would be very welcome, not to mention highly impressive. Armed with very clear instructions from Mum on how to make a Thai curry (with a ready made paste of course) I began. It was all going well, but then my boyfriend arrived and I stopped paying as close attention to the stove. Anyway 20 minutes later, I’d managed to burn the rice (completely destroying my brand new Robert Dyas pan), set off the fire alarm and been responsible for the evacuation of the entire block of flats. 

Thankfully, my experiences with cooking could only really improve from the rice incident. Throughout university I began to really enjoy cooking and experiment with different recipes and ingredients. Some of experiments worked, some didn’t. My dear cousin Alex loves to bring up my “scrambled eggs and cornflakes” experiment (see below), and whilst I admit the Facebook picture wasn’t really necessary and didn’t exactly do it justice, it was a recipe from a student cookbook and I still maintain it tasted better than it looked.

My uni meals did actually improve and by third year my love for herbs and spices had blossomed. It was a regular ongoing joke amongst my housemates that any ingredient a recipe called for could probably be found in my cupboard.

After graduating, I fell into various different jobs – waitressing, barmaid, customer service, project management etc. I never really found anything I was passionate about and although all my spare time was taken up with visiting food festivals, farmers markets and trying out recipes from that new Malaysian cookbook I’d got, it never seemed like an option to me pursue my foodie obsession in any capacity other than for fun.
It has only been in the last few years when I jacked in my sensible project manager office job to become a “yachtie” that the possibility of cooking as a career even occurred to me.

Yachtie. Its a word most of us muggles have never even heard of before delving into the world of super yachts. Technically I guess it’s defined as “a person who works in the yachting industry”, but you soon come to learn that there’s so much more to it than that. Being a yachtie does not just refer to your job – it encompasses your entire world, your friendship groups, your outlook on life, not to mention your attitudes towards money, extravagance and (of course) alcohol.

When I first arrived in the south of France to find my first job on a boat, the big advice from all the responsible people around me was that I shouldn’t try to live the yachtie lifestyle before I officially was one. But what does that mean? What is the elusive yachtie lifestyle? In Antibes it appeared to involve an awful lot of drinking nights at The Hopstore but not much else. Its not until I joined my first boat and within a week had a 1400 euro cash tip in my pocket and a weekend off in Monaco that I even began to understand the mysterious world of the yacht crew…

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Working on a yacht is a peculiar way of living, especially for those of us trying to adjust from a normal 9-5 office job. No matter how much you try to convince yourself that living in a house with your mates at Uni has prepared you for communal living, none of us are prepared for the intensity of living in such close quarters. It doesn’t really hit you – or it certainly didn’t hit me – that these crew that you’re introducing yourself to on your induction walk around will be the people you will not only be working with, but also eating with, sleeping with (sometimes in both senses of the word – despite the cardinal “don’t screw the crew” rule!) and sharing bathrooms with. And thats just the beginning. These people will be your drinking buddies, your shoulders to cry on, the person you rant to when you’ve had enough, your dinner dates, your shopping companions, the people you go for a weekend away with, your confidents, the guys you have weird inside jokes with that noone else understands, the people that can drive you mad, but also the ones who cheer you up and have you crying with laughter. 
Essentially you become a family. A weird little dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless. 

Over time as crew members change, you make friends or move boats, your small little yachtie family becomes bigger and bigger until you end up with this incredible global network of people. One of my favourite aspects of the “Yachtie Lifestyle” is the fact that no matter where you are in the world, it is totally normal to bump into someone you know. Earlier this year I was walking down the road in Antigua and I spotted a Kiwi guy I knew from Antibes playing basketball with his crew. We ended up out for dinner that night and had a wonderful evening catching up. Its these tiny little moments that really emphasise how special this job really is.

But anyway, back to the story. As I said, it still hadn’t occurred to me that cooking was an option unless you were Michelin restaurant trained and therefore I started my yachting journey like most other females – looking for a stewardess position. Yachting its a fairly antiquated industry in terms of gender expectations. Men are generally expected to be deckies – working outside doing the manual labour – and women are expected to be stewardesses, working inside, keeping the boat clean and being a smiling face for the guests. It can be hard to break out of these stereotypes, but I have some wonderful male friends who are rocking it as stewards and I have some equally kick-ass female friends who are deckies and officers, so it is definitely possible.

For me, however, not being overly confident in my physical ability to haul around lines and fenders, I pursued the traditional stewardess option and within 3 days I was headed to join a very well known 50m motor yacht mid-charter as the 3rd stew. I ended up staying with the crew for the remainder of the season, learning huge amounts, having some fantastic experiences (such as motoring past Mount Stromboli at night and watching it erupt!) and gaining some lifelong friends that I am still very much in touch with. 

The only downside was that I just wasn’t as in love with the job as I wanted to be. I loved being on the water, I fully embraced living in close quarters with a group of people and I certainly enjoyed the money I had coming in, but I had completely underestimated how big a transition it would be going from running a project management department singlehandedly, to being micromanaged cleaning a toilet. But nevertheless, something was still pulling me towards boating, so after another stint in sunny Antibes, I headed off to join my second boat…. IN THE BAHAMAS!

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Now as shallow as it sounds, there is something about crystal clear waters, baking hot sun and endless fried conch that does wonders for making you forget how much you dislike cleaning showers and doing laundry all day. At least to start with anyway. Yet again, I was lucky enough to have an incredible crew, some of which I now consider lifelong friends. One very notable person was the chef. A wonderful Maltese man with a passion for food to rival anyone. It was not uncommon for him to announce as you took food down to the crew mess that “these are going to be the best f***ing ribs you have ever tasted! They are so succulent and so f***ing tasty” – and they always inevitably were. 

The. Man. Could. Cook. 

Anyway, the chef very quickly picked up on the fact that I loved to cook and within my first couple of weeks started telling me to forget being a stew and to train as a chef. Naturally I smiled and ignored him, thinking it was way beyond me, but after a while he started to wear me down…

Fast forward to April 2018, I have handed in my notice and I am flying back to England to take a 1 months chefs course at Ashburton Chefs Academy in Devon. At this point I still wasn’t really convinced I could cook for a living, but I knew I would at least enjoy the course and it seemed as good a use as any for my tips. I won’t bore you now with going on about the course, but I will say that it was an incredible experience and anyone thinking about the school should stop thinking and book it. I have recently found out that they have just started offering a specific yacht chef follow-on course so I very much hope to be able to join that one day.

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Having passed my assessment (a pretty scary Masterchef style affair) and armed with a newly acquired powerboat licence and wine qualification I headed back to good ol’ Antibes to look for the next adventure. This time was different though. I was picky. This is sometimes frowned upon when you are still relatively new to the industry, but for me I knew I wanted something that was going to fulfil me, challenge me and just generally excite me. I just didn’t know what that would be…
Several declined job offers, crises of confidences and countless glasses of cote de Provence rose later, I found myself with a decision to make between two job prospects:

• Winter crew cook on a 50m motor yacht in Italy. This was a nice boat that a few of my friends had worked on with a lovely crew of 12. Or…
• Crew cook/sole stew on a 37m sailing yacht with a round the world itinerary and only 4 crew (all of which were male).

So a nice safe option to ease me into the cooking thing or crazy risky option that could be incredible or I could hate it.

I went for the sailing boat.

Something about this job just felt right. It felt bonkers – the itinerary involves serious miles at sea in some of the most remote corners of the planet – but it just didn’t feel like something I could turn down. So here we are. That takes me upto now, sat typing this in the crew mess of a sailing yacht that I’ve called home for the past year. And a bloody brilliant home it is!