Why Superyacht Crew Quit Mid-Season (And What Captains Can Do About It)

Halfway through a Med season, I hit a wall. Complete withdrawal. I’d race to the crew mess, dish up, eat in about four minutes, shove my plate in the dishwasher and rush straight back to my cabin. Every meal. Every day. The only person I felt safe around onboard was the chef, who happened to be my cabin mate. Everyone else, I just couldn’t face. I was frustrated, constantly tired, unable to interact properly. I didn’t have a name for it at the time. I know now it was burnout.

I didn’t walk off that boat mid-charter. But I quit yachting entirely at the end of that season. Went home to South Africa for six months to figure out what I wanted to do. According to Quay Group recruitment data, nearly 40% of junior crew leave within their first season. In a 2021 survey of over 1,000 crew by Quay Crew and the Maritime Human Services Society, half said they’d considered leaving the industry altogether. I was nearly one of them.

How it builds

The deck team was understaffed for the entire season. Months of back-to-back work with night watches on rotation and barely enough people to cover the basics. The vessel had been sold to me as a mix of charter and private, but it turned out to be owner-on almost permanently. The workload was relentless, and the culture made it worse. The captain’s attitude toward any sign of struggle was dismissive at best. That kind of leadership doesn’t just damage morale. It kills trust. And once trust goes, the whole crew fragments into little survival cliques. Us versus each other, not us versus the problem.

In a 2018 ISWAN survey of over 400 crew, 82% reported experiencing low morale onboard. Those aren’t disengaged people looking for an excuse. They’re exhausted people in an environment where nobody taught them how to cope and nobody in charge seems to care whether they do.

The problem compounds. One person leaves mid-season, the rest absorb the workload. Fatigue climbs. Patience drops. Someone else starts thinking about their exit. And here’s what captains don’t always see: the crew who leave first aren’t usually the weak links. They’re the good ones who got tired of nothing changing.

Same hard work, completely different outcome

After six months at home, I got the call for Kensho. A 75-metre, charter and private, dual season Med and Caribbean, three-to-one rotation. I worked harder on Kensho than I had on any other boat. Genuinely harder. But the environment made it sustainable. The captain set the tone. He was approachable and friendly, but you knew he was in charge. That energy filtered through the entire vessel. People actually wanted to bond with each other. There were cultural differences across the crew, but it didn’t matter because the leadership made space for people to be themselves.

My favourite memory in all of yachting is from Kensho. End of a long season, tied up alongside, first night out as a crew. Everyone’s exhausted, finally breathing. And suddenly all those emotionally charged moments from the season, the difficult interactions, the pressure points, they became things we could actually talk about and laugh about. That was the processing. The harder the season had been, the better the bonding afterwards. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the culture allowed it.

Same industry. Same gruelling hours. Same confined space. Completely different result because one captain understood that crew wellbeing isn’t a perk. It’s the foundation everything else runs on.

What changes this

Most captains I’ve spoken to genuinely care about their crew. The gap isn’t intent, it’s tools. They came up through navigation, engineering, deck work. Managing people’s emotional states was never part of their training. And the STCW framework only caught up to this in January 2026.

When I built Haven’s crew programme, I designed it around this exact gap. Not because I read about it in a report. Because I lived it across three boats and saw the difference that good leadership makes versus no leadership at all. The first workshops I ever ran were pro bono for the Kensho crew. The captain saw the benefit and ended up paying for them. That was the proof of concept. Crew don’t need bean bags and meditation apps. They need to feel psychologically safe. They need conflict addressed when it’s a ripple, not when it’s already a wave. And they need their captain to set a tone that says it’s okay to be human onboard.

If you’re reading this as a captain or fleet manager, the question worth asking isn’t why your crew keep leaving. It’s what you’re doing before they decide to.