Close
The crew mess is a small space filled with a galaxy of personalities that don’t always see eye to eye. With a typical crew spanning different age groups, genders, ethnicities and backgrounds —not to mention different political and religious views— it’s surprising that there aren’t more blazing rows.
For the most part, the crew mess is generally a pretty peaceful place where people tend to get along.
But that ‘getting along’ is no accident, far from it.
It’s all part of a delicate balance —an unspoken agreement by crew that some no-go regions are not to be spoken about. It requires that everyone plays by the rules.
But if rules are unspoken, how are you, meant to know them?
To keep your crew mess from becoming a tinderbox and you being the one to strike the match, we’ve assembled a handy list of things never to say in the crew mess. And they’re just not for newbies, any crew might want to brush up on these.
Just don’t. Never ask anyone how they voted on anything. Full stop. Ever. Don’t volunteer the information either.
It’s not just about avoiding an argument. It’s about maintaining long-term harmony so that you can live and work peacefully with people who often have different value systems and beliefs than you do. Because we promise, they won’t all have the same views as you. Some of their views might make your hair stand up on end.
After all, tens of millions of people voted on either side of all of these debates, and going by statistics, up to half the people in your crew mess had a very different view of the matter than you did.
This means that by talking politics, there is an almost 100% guarantee that you will finish the conversation, liking some of your crew slightly less. And the same goes for how they feel about you. Avoid.
As someone who made this mistake on their first day on a yacht and sorely regretted it, I cannot tell you how important this is.
Your last boat and how they did things —how fun the crew were, how many tips they made, how great the owner was, how amazing the travel and money was (why did you leave again?) ...all of these and more are stories that should be allowed to float off into the distant horizon.
You’re here now, on this boat. That you chose to be on. Some things will be better, some will be worse. Don’t offer your opinion on what is better or worse. And shut up about your old crew already. Or go back there, to your great boat, that for some reason you have left —despite it being the best boat in the world.
Sure, once you’ve been on the boat for a while and are indeed part of the crew, you can tell stories about your past boats.
But for the love of all that floats, don’t do it when you’re new.
“But what if I know something helpful? Like how to do something better,” I hear you ask.
Sure, if you know of a fantastic product from your last boat that will remove that stubborn mark on the boss’ linen shirt and save the day, then go forth. Carefully, though, without giving any sense that you feel the last chief stew’s laundry knowledge was in any way superior to your current one’s. Tread carefully, my friends.
What does this even mean? Don’t use these expressions unless you’re looking for a fight.
It wasn’t that long ago that a man talking about his emotions or caring about his health was considered unmanly, or a woman having a job or an education— or even an opinion, was considered unladylike. Let’s move on from those days, shall we folks, as quickly as possible. With that kind of thinking, no one wins.
It’s a sticky kind of language, though, these expressions we heard growing up. It’s easy to make a mistake. I accidentally used the ladylike one with my own daughter recently. It just takes a bit of consciousness to kick it to the curb for good.
Religious and moral belief systems will almost certainly differ across a superyacht crew, and even more so if the crew come from different cultures and backgrounds. Bringing religious and morality discussion into a diverse crew mess can be uncomfortable at best and inflammatory and divisive at worst.
If you are a deeply religious person, it’s sometimes hard not to share those views in front of the other crew. It’s a big part of who you are. But unless your crew share your exact form of faith and your depth of faith, it can also make them feel uncomfortable.
The same goes for atheists, who can easily upset religious crew members with their beliefs, and for people who tell others that their behaviour is ‘immoral’ —whether that judgement has religious underpinnings or not.
It is better for everyone, if understandably difficult sometimes if religious and moral belief stays in the private domain and out of the crew mess.
There is so much interdepartmental subtext in this statement that it almost groans with the weight of it.
It is something said (or thought) by a steward/ess on charter as they run frantically through a crew mess, where a group of the deckies and engineers are sitting watching their second movie of the day.
It is something said (or thought) by a tired, overworked engineer during a shipyard period, as they come into a crew mess where the relaxed, under-no-pressure stews are shriek-laughing about something so inane that even they don’t understand why they’re laughing anymore.
It’s something said (or thought) by the frustrated deckies when they’re still washing down when the charter finished five hours ago, but the rest of the crew have knocked off and are already halfway through the bottle of Cristal the guests left behind.
It’s something said (or thought) by a chef faced with a mountain of after-dinner dishes in a lonely galley, listening to the crew settle in for a movie down below, their bellies full of the delicious food the chef just made them.
The interdepartmental load sometimes feels unfairly distributed, although it almost always evens out in the end. Politely asking for help is always fine. But tacking on the ‘you guys aren’t doing anything anyway’ is always not fine and will have you burned at the stake. Sorry, lashed to the mast. Possibly even thrown overboard.
In fact, don’t even think like this if you can help it. There are so many times on yachts when one department is getting flogged, and another is cruising. So many long nights are spent in the bridge or the pantry while other departments are sleeping. Trying to keep score of who is working harder just makes enemies of other departments when life on board is SO much better when you’re friends.
Staying friends is much easier when you avoid these tinderbox phrases. Good luck!
