Almost everyone does this badly, and they never find out why. They walk a marina for three weeks, hand out forty CVs, hear nothing, and conclude the market is dead.
The market is not dead. They were doing the wrong activity — because nobody told them what a dockwalk is actually for.
There is no work on that boat today
That is the thing to understand before anything else. On any given morning, on almost any boat you walk up to, there is no job going. That is not pessimism, it is arithmetic — a boat hires a deckhand perhaps once or twice a year and you are one of a hundred people who walked that quay this season.
So if your goal is to find a vacancy today, you will fail today, and tomorrow, and the day after. And then you will go home and tell people it does not work.
The goal is not to find a job. The goal is to be the person whose CV gets kept instead of binned — for the job that has not happened yet.
Every single thing on this page follows from that one sentence.
You are not looking for a vacancy. You are auditioning to be remembered when one appears.
Late morning. Not eight in the morning.
At 0800 the crew are in washdown, rig checks, tender prep, provisioning. They have no time for someone they have never met. Turning up then does not read as keen — it reads as someone who does not understand how a working boat runs, which is precisely the thing you are trying to prove you do.
By 1800 they are standing down, cleaning up and dealing with whatever the day threw at them. You will get nothing meaningful at the end of a long day.
Late morning into early afternoon. The operations have settled, people have a moment. That is your window, and it is narrower than you think.
Go alone. This one is not negotiable.
People walk the docks in pairs and threes because it is less frightening. It does not help. It actively costs you, for two reasons.
A group standing on the dock is an imposition on a working deck. One person is a conversation; three is a delegation, and nobody comes down to meet a delegation.
And the real one: in a group you cannot demonstrate personality. You have no sea time, no references and no yacht experience. Being someone they would want in the crew mess is the only card you are holding. In a group you cannot play it — you are a face in a cluster, and the conversation goes to whoever talks most.
Go on your own. Every time.
The damage is not what you think
Dress as though you already work on a superyacht. Clean deck shoes, smart casual. Not beach wear, not trainers.
Here is the part worth understanding, because it is not vanity. When someone turns up scruffy, the deck crew do not come down at all.
You are not being judged at the passerelle and found wanting. You are being assessed from thirty metres away by someone deciding whether it is worth putting down what they are doing. Get that wrong and you never have the conversation — and you will never know it happened, because nothing happened.
Printed CVs, several of them, in your hand. Not on your phone. Not “I can email it to you”.
Put a code on it
Paper is still what gets handed over and carried up to the chief officer — that part does not change, and nobody is scanning anything on a passerelle with wet hands. But paper has one flaw: it is out of date the moment it leaves the printer.
Print a QR code in the corner of your CV that opens your Career Passport — your certificates with their expiry dates, your right to work, your languages, how to reach you, when you are free, and where you are right now.
Get your Powerboat ticket in April and the bosun who took your CV in March sees it, without you doing anything. Move from Antibes to Palma and the card says so. When the day comes that you have sea time and a captain's endorsement, they are on the same link.
Nobody scans it on the dock. They scan it later, when they are sorting a pile and working out who to ring — which is exactly the moment this whole page is about. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and almost no one does it.
You do not lose the conversation. You never get one — and you never find out why.
Never the captain
Shouting down a dock asking to speak to the captain is not going to happen, and everyone within earshot now knows you are green.
- Under 50 metres — ask for the chief officer.
- Over 50 metres — ask for the bosun, or the second officer, if they do not mind.
But do not miss the bigger point. The deckhand on the aft deck is not an obstacle between you and somebody important. They are the person you are trying to impress.
They are the one who decides whether your CV goes in the bin or gets walked upstairs. If they turn round and say “that one was good”, you are ahead of every candidate who handed over paper and walked off.
Ask about the boat, not about work
You are taking someone out of their working day. Come at them with “do you need crew?” and you get the honest, immediate, useless answer: no. The conversation is over in thirty seconds and your CV is in the bin before you reach the next boat.
Instead: wait until they have a moment — you will know when. Then talk to them like a person. What is the boat like? How long have you been on board? Where are you headed this season? Be interested, because it is genuinely interesting and because they are the ones who know.
Let the CV arrive at the end, naturally, as the thing you leave behind rather than the thing you led with.
What you are doing is making it easy for someone to think: that person would be all right to work with. That is the entire transaction.
Ends it on the spot
- Turning up in a group.
- Shouting or waving from the dock.
- Asking to speak to the captain.
- Interrupting someone mid-task.
- Not saying good morning.
- Beach wear, trainers, anything you would wear to lunch.
- Opening with “do you need crew?”
Gets you remembered
- Turning up alone.
- Late morning, once operations have settled.
- Dressed as though you already work there.
- Waiting until they have a moment. You will know when.
- Asking about the boat before asking about work.
- Letting the CV come at the end, not the start.
- An email the same evening, three sentences.
Do not walk the same docks twice a day
When people are told to try harder, they walk the same quay more often. That is not effort. That is how you become the face the crew start avoiding — and having built a bad impression, you now have to leave town to escape it.
Effort means somewhere new, not the same place more often.
Get on the train. Nice, Monaco, San Remo, and over the border — Genoa, La Spezia. There is a working port roughly every stop. That mobility is the entire reason to base yourself in Antibes rather than on an island, and hardly anybody actually uses it. The people who do are covering five times the ground for the price of a rail ticket.
Follow up, because almost nobody does
Send a short email the same day you met them. Three sentences. Thank them for their time, attach the CV, say you enjoyed hearing about the boat.
A vessel might take a few hundred CVs across a season and remember almost none of them. They will remember the person who had a real conversation on the dock and then turned up in the inbox that evening.
Most candidates do none of this. That gap is free, and it is yours.
Write it yourself. Do not put it through ChatGPT.
I can tell, and so can everyone else who reads crew email all day. It arrives polished, evenly spaced, faintly corporate, and it sounds like nobody — which is the exact opposite of what you achieved by standing on the dock and being a person for five minutes. Three plain sentences in your own words beat a perfect paragraph in somebody else's, every time.
Think about it properly before you send it, though. Well written and yours are not opposites: get the boat's name right, get the person's name right, and read it once more before it goes.
Become a familiar face
A dockwalk is not an event you do once. It is a campaign you run for weeks.
Go back. Say good morning to the same deckhand you spoke to last week. Ask how the trip went. Do not ask about work every time — you already asked, they already know, and asking again just makes it awkward for both of you.
Because here is what happens. On a Friday afternoon a boat loses someone at no notice, and the bosun needs a body on Saturday morning. He is not going to open a folder of two hundred CVs from strangers. He is going to think of the person he has said good morning to four times, who seemed decent, and who he could picture in the crew mess.
That is the whole job. Be that person, on as many boats as you can manage.
Four ways people burn a season
The eight o'clock interruption. Walks aboard at 0800 while the crew are rigging for a charter departure, asks the first person he sees if there are any jobs going. That person is the captain. He is now memorable for exactly the wrong reason — and marinas talk. Captains see each other on the dock, in the bar, on the radio.
The thirty-second CV. Calls across to a deckhand working a line, waves the CV, asks if they need crew. Thirty seconds, binned before it gets near the chief officer. An hour later somebody else waits until that deckhand has finished, has a normal conversation, and leaves after five minutes. The chief officer hears about the second one before the end of the day.
The group of four. Arrive together, stand on the dock in a block. Nobody comes down. Nobody was rude and nothing was said wrong — they simply never got a conversation, and not one of them will ever know why.
The same quay, twice a day, for a fortnight. Mistakes volume for effort, becomes the face people avoid, and never once gets on a train.
Luck decides which door opens. Discipline decides how many you are standing at.
Do this properly and one of those conversations turns into a day's work. That day is the real interview — and it is how most green crew actually get their first berth.
That is Module 08, daywork. Until it is written, get the thing they will ask you for into shape — the CV you are handing over on the dock.