Mid-Season Burnout: How to Recognise It Before Your Best Crew Walk Off

I didn’t know I was burning out. That’s the thing about it. There wasn’t a single moment where I thought, right, this is burnout, I should do something. It crept in like a tide. One week I was fine, cracking jokes at dinner, showing up normally. A few weeks later I was racing to the crew mess, eating in four minutes flat, shoving my plate in the dishwasher and disappearing back to my cabin before anyone could start a conversation. Every meal. Every day. The only person onboard I felt safe around was the chef. My cabin mate. Everyone else, I just couldn’t face.

I’m a people pleaser by nature. Hyper conflict-avoidant. So the fact that I’d completely withdrawn from a crew of people I was living and working alongside should have been a massive red flag. But nobody said anything. And I didn’t have the language for what was happening to me. I just thought I was tired.

How it builds

That season was on a large private vessel. Owner onboard almost permanently, a skeleton deck crew, and a season that stretched on for months with night watches in constant rotation. The workload alone was enough to grind anyone down, but it was the culture that made it unsustainable. The captain openly mocked crew who struggled during crossings. The message was clear: if you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t be here. Struggle quietly or get out.

When leadership sets that tone, everything underneath it fractures. People stop communicating honestly. Little cliques form. You start figuring out who’s safe and who isn’t, and you adjust your entire existence onboard around that calculation. After long seasons, the smallest things start annoying people. Not because anyone is petty. Because everyone is sleep-deprived, overworked, and emotionally running on empty. The compound effect is brutal.

According to ISWAN research, 82% of superyacht crew have experienced low morale onboard. A separate 2021 survey of over 1,000 crew found nearly half had considered leaving the industry altogether. Those aren’t numbers from disengaged people looking for an excuse to complain. They’re exhausted people in an environment that was never designed with their mental health in mind.

And burnout doesn’t look the same in everyone. On that same boat, another crew member hit a wall in a completely different way. Not withdrawal like mine, but something more existential. Feeling stuck in yachting, questioning whether the life she was building left room for the things she actually wanted. That’s a completely different kind of burnout than mine. But they came from the same place: too much pressure, not enough support, and a culture that didn’t make space for either.

Same pressure, different result

After I left that boat, I quit yachting entirely. Went home to South Africa for about six months. I was nearly one of the 50% who walk away for good. Luckily though, I got the call for Kensho. A 75-metre, charter and private, dual season Med and Caribbean, 3:1 rotation. The best crew I ever worked with.

I worked harder on Kensho than on any other vessel. The hours were just as long. The charter pressure was real. But the captain set a completely different tone. Approachable, friendly, and unmistakably in charge. That combination changed everything. People felt safe enough to be themselves. Cultural differences across the crew didn’t become fault lines because the leadership made space for people to actually connect.

End of season on Kensho, tied up alongside, first night out. Everyone exhausted, finally breathing. And all those emotionally charged moments from the season, the difficult guests, the long days, the tension, they became things we could talk about and laugh about. That was the processing. Nobody scheduled it. The culture just allowed it. The harder the season had been, the better the bonding afterwards.

Same industry. Same confined spaces. Same gruelling hours. Completely different outcome because one environment treated crew wellbeing as foundational and the other treated it as irrelevant.

What to actually look for

If you’re a captain or HOD reading this, the crew member burning out is rarely the one causing drama. It’s the one going quiet. The one whose personality has shifted over weeks without anyone naming it. The one eating alone. The one who used to be engaged and now just does the bare minimum to get through the day. By the time someone hands in their notice or has a breakdown in the crew mess, the burnout has been building for months. You’re seeing the explosion, not the fuse.

And the crew who leave first aren’t the weak ones. They’re often the good ones who got tired of nothing changing.

I built Haven around this exact gap. Not because I read about crew burnout in a report. Because I lived it on one boat and then saw the opposite on another. The first workshops I ever ran were pro bono for the Kensho crew, and the captain ended up paying for them because he saw the difference. Crew don’t need motivational posters in the crew mess. They need to feel psychologically safe. They need conflict dealt with when it’s still a ripple. And they need someone in charge who makes it clear that being human onboard isn’t a weakness. That’s not soft leadership. It’s the kind that keeps your best people from walking off.