Step Two: Make Friends

I woke up early on my first Saturday in Antibes. I was excited, slightly hungover and utterly desperate to finally get out and do some dockwalking in the hopes of finding a job. It had been months since I had done all of my courses and I had heard every piece of advice under the sun.

The yachting industry consists of a whole bunch of young, good looking South Africans, Ausies, Brits and Kiwis all desperate to find a job on one of the amazing superyachts that line the docks along the Mediterranean. It is competitive, cut throat and there are more people than there are jobs and to make matters worse, the jobs that are available usually go to people with experience.

This means that the newbie yachtie is the absolute runt in the system and has to struggle to find that first job that will allow you to break the No Experience, No Work cycle. And because this is such a difficult task, every single human being who has ever made it in the industry has a whole long list of advice about how to get a job and more often than not, this advice constantly contradicts the last bit of advice you were given.

But one thing that seems to reign true for all newbie yachties is that whether you like it or not, you have to dock walk. Dockwalking is the entirely demotivating process of walking along the docks, CV in hand in the hopes of handing it out to anyone who will take it. And once you have given your CV to virtually everyone you can find then you have to hope that somebody important sees it and likes it enough to phone you for an interview, or give you some daywork or better yet, give you a job.

Like all newbies, I arrived expecting to do one or two days of dockwalking before finding the most incredible job on the most incredible yacht with a salary that would blow your hair back and now I was excited to get started.

What I hadn’t taken into account was that it was now Saturday and in France, the whole world stops on the weekend. Everything was closed and I couldn’t print CVs, I couldn’t buy food and I definitely could not dockwalk. My life as a yachtie was not off to a good start and after not eating for over 24 hours, and a terrible bout of hay fever starting up I was starting to feel severely homesick.

Perhaps being a yachtie would not be so easy after all. And it wasn’t long before I was desperately trying to remember all the useless bits of advice I had been given over the months leading up to this. In the end, the bowl of pasta that a new friend had made me was worth far more than any of the advice I could remember and soon I realised that as always, Baz Luhrman had been right.  

“Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping off the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

So here is my bit of advice, that is probably not worth a penny to anyone but me, but I will say it anyway. The people you meet whilst dockwalking will be the people who give you the motivation to carry on dockwalking until you find the first job, so put a smile on your face, be friendly and look after the people around you. You never know when you may need that bowl of pasta that will save you from despair.