Certificates & medical — what you actually need

Every commercial vessel carries a safe manning certificate. The flag state issues it. It sets the minimum number of qualified crew the vessel must carry at sea, and exactly what each of those people has to hold.

A captain cannot bend that document. Not for anyone. It does not matter how well you did on the dock, how good your CV is, or how thick your folder looks. If you do not fit the manning certificate, you cannot sign on. That is the whole game.

So there is only one question worth asking before you pay for anything: does this appear on a manning certificate, or does it not? If it does, it moves you toward work. If it does not, it is a hobby you are funding.

Nothing else on this page matters until these are done. In this order.

The RYA Personal Watercraft Proficiency ticket is not on the legal minimum list, and in practice you should treat it as though it is. Guests want the jet skis out. Boats that carry them need crew who can run them. It is one day, it has no prerequisites, and it is the cheapest yes you will ever put on a CV.

Do not confuse it with PWCI, the instructor ticket. That is a different, dearer thing with its own conditions, and it is covered further down.

People say it like it is a single card. It is four separate elements:

• Personal Survival Techniques
• Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting
• Elementary First Aid
• Personal Safety and Social Responsibility

Then there is Proficiency in Security Awareness, and this one catches people out. It is not one of the four. It is a separate requirement under the ISPS Code, and it applies to superyachts of 500GT and over, and to any vessel carrying twelve or more fare-paying guests. That is a large slice of the boats you are trying to join.

Most schools bundle it into the five-day package now. Some do not, and sell it to you afterwards. Ask before you book, and get the answer in writing. It is a small cheap certificate and a miserable thing to be missing on the Thursday a boat wants you aboard on the Saturday.

These are the ones that change what a captain can legally do with you. Mostly they are what you plan for with your first season's money — with one exception, and it is worth knowing about before you fly.

Once you satisfy the manning certificate, the next question a captain asks is what else you bring that the boat would otherwise have to buy in, or go without. This is where you stop competing on enthusiasm.

Dive instructor. A boat that can run guest dives without chartering someone in has a real advantage, and you are the reason.

PWCI. The instructor ticket, not the proficiency one. A vessel running jet skis commercially in the Med needs an instructor aboard. Of everything on this list, get this one done — see below.

Real technical ability. Engines, electrics, plumbing. Note the wording: ability, not a certificate saying you attended something. The deckhand who can actually trace a fault at 0700 when guests board at 1000 is the one who gets kept, promoted, and asked back. If you come from a trade, you are further ahead than you think.

A boat running jet skis commercially in the Med needs an instructor aboard. Hold PWCI and you are that person — you run the toys instead of watching somebody else run them, and the vessel does not have to find anyone else to do it.

Of everything on this page that is not legally required, this is the one to prioritise.

To sit it you need the PWC Proficiency certificate, a valid first aid certificate, RYA membership, and officially two years' experience driving personal watercraft. Do not let that last one stop you. There is no book, no stamp and no sea time record for hours on a jet ski, so it is not the barrier it looks like on paper. If you can get on the course, get on it.

The “superyacht deckhand course”. The “career ready” package. The online course stacks from providers no one on a dock has heard of.

Nothing in them appears on any manning certificate. Most of what they teach is how to wash and detail a boat — which is the one part of the job you will be taught properly, in your first week, for free, by the bosun, on a real boat, with the actual products. Paying thousands for that in a classroom is the single most common way green crew burn their runway.

Be careful with the multi-week “yacht hand” and “deckhand training” programmes too — the ones bundling seamanship, interior work and a rating course into a single invoice. It is not that everything in them is worthless: the Yacht Rating course inside one is a real certificate and the next section explains why it is worth having. It is that you are paying for a lot of padding around it, and the padding is a classroom version of things you will be shown properly, on a boat, in your first fortnight.

Buy the modules you want individually. Nobody needs the bundle.

Arrive with the right ones. Not all of them.

If you want to turn up better prepared than the person standing next to you on the dock, do it for the price of a coffee. Buy a length of rope and learn your knots.

Bowline. Clove hitch. Round turn and two half hitches. Rolling hitch. A cleat hitch that will actually hold. There is no fee attached to sitting on your floor and tying them until your hands know them without you — and unlike a certificate, that shows on day one, in front of the person deciding whether to keep you.

A candidate spends four thousand pounds on a package sold as “superyacht career ready”. None of it appears on any manning certificate. None of it is MCA or RYA recognised.

They turn up to their first serious interview with a folder that looks tremendous. No Yacht Rating. No AEC. Nothing the vessel actually needs to put them on the crew list.

The captain likes them. The captain cannot hire them — and cannot make an exception, for them or anyone.

The money is gone. They now have to find the cost of the right courses, having already spent their runway on the wrong ones. This happens every single season.

The slower version of the same mistake is the cheap STCW that cannot be refreshed. It does not hurt on day one. It hurts in year five, when a two-day refresher turns out to be a full course at full price.

This is the number most guides will not show you, because most guides are written by people selling UK courses.

People treat certification as a one-off cost at the start. It is not. Some of it comes round again for as long as you stay in the industry, and nobody mentions that while you are working out whether you can afford to get into yachting at all.

Your basic STCW is the gentle version. Only two of the four elements ever need refreshing — personal survival, and fire fighting — every five years. The other two are done once, forever. The refresher itself is short and cheap.

Further up it costs more. Advanced fire fighting and survival craft both have to be renewed every five years too, so once you are on the officer track you are keeping four things alive rather than two. I have redone both. That is not bad luck or a bad choice at the start — it is simply the cycle, and it keeps coming round.

The good news is that a renewal is usually a small job. Survival craft is normally half a day, and you generally have to be there in person, because the assessment involves a boat and davits. Advanced fire fighting is the more flexible of the two — a number of schools now run at least part of that refresher online. Worth knowing when you are working: half a day ashore fits into a yard period, a full week does not.

There is one place where a cheap certificate genuinely comes back for more money, and it is worth understanding now even though you are years away from it.

When you go for your first Certificate of Competency — an officer's ticket — four certificates are looked at: survival craft, advanced fire fighting, medical first aid and medical care. Two things sit on them.

First, and it is written down in black and white: a refresher does not count towards a first ticket. You have to have done the full course. Being current is not the test. What you originally sat is the test — so the renewals you have been diligently keeping up do not, on their own, get you there.

Second, the list of countries whose courses are accepted for those four has been getting shorter. South Africa was on it in 2020. It is not on it now — today it is the MCA and EU states, and nothing else. Nobody writes to tell you when a list you were relying on changes.

So the question is not whether your certificate is acceptable today. It is whether it is still acceptable in five years, under a rule nobody has written yet.

None of which is an argument against South Africa. Your basic STCW is fine from there — the MCA accepts it from any STCW country and that wording has not moved in years, so the Cape Town price is a real saving on the thing you are actually buying right now. It is an argument for being deliberate about where you buy the expensive tickets later, and for being able to evidence exactly what you bought. SAMSA-approved and MCA-approved are not the same thing, and a price list will never make the difference obvious.

So ask the school directly, in writing, and ask it precisely: which administration approved this course, and who issues the certificate? Those are plain facts and they must be able to state them. If they will not put them in writing, walk — that reluctance is the whole answer.

Then keep the reply, and keep the certificate itself somewhere it cannot be lost. In five years that paperwork is what you hand the next school, and it is worth more than your memory of what you were told at the time.

You will not buy any of these for a while, so this is a note for the version of you that has a job and is starting to think about tickets. These are the four that have to come from the MCA or an EU state if you want them to count towards a first Certificate of Competency:

• Proficiency in Survival Craft and Rescue Boats
• Advanced Fire Fighting
• Proficiency in Medical First Aid
• Proficiency in Medical Care

And one that catches people even earlier: Fast Rescue Boat. To sit the short refresher on that one, the original has to have come from the MCA or an EU administration.

So ask the same question every time you buy a ticket, not just the first time. The money goes up with each one, and so does the cost of getting it wrong.

Checked against the MCA's current guidance in August 2026. The rules and the notice that carries them are both revised regularly — confirm before you commit money.

We keep a list of schools sorted by who approves them rather than by what they charge, so you can see the difference before you book.

Indicative ranges from published provider and authority listings, not quotes.