I’m cooking on a yacht in the middle of the ocean wearing only an apron, while on board guests mill about around me enjoying the sea views and party atmosphere.
For the past decade, during my work as a chef on private boats, I have aimed to live up to the moniker of one of the wildest hosts on the water. I have gone around the globe, enduring gruelling hours of ship work, preparing hundreds of meals and enjoying outrageous parties and nights of bacchanalian revelry. And now I run my own business as a group travel host. So how did I end up here, and what is it really like working below deck?
I didn’t plan on becoming a world traveller or living a life at sea. But aged 25 and tired of sitting at a desk, I resigned from my career as a financial analyst on Wall Street in 2015 to take a year-long sabbatical to travel. Fast forward 11 years and I haven’t looked back.
It all started the summer before my sabbatical when I was a guest at Yacht Week’s upmarket flotilla in Croatia. Effectively, Yacht Week is a floating festival in which you sail around a beautiful and sunny part of the world with as many as 20 or more boats – and I found the experience so brilliant that I applied to work for them below deck the following year.
However, I had no hospitality or professional cooking experience, which is what they mostly want for such work, and I soon found myself rejected.
Then, a few months later, Yacht Week – which runs festivals in different locations including Greece, the Caribbean and Tahiti – found themselves in such dire need of chefs that they decided to take a chance on me. Before I knew it, I was headed for the high seas.
For the first five years I worked on boats for about three months of the season but have since cut this back to one month of cooking and hosting exclusively on private charters.
With pay ranging between £780 to £1,300 a week, along with additional tips, I could make around £2,600 a week on sailing charters, which more than covers life on board and my travels during the off-season.
Kesi Irwin enjoyed being a guest for Yacht Week so much she took a sabbatical from her job on Wall St and set about getting a job below deck
‘My job is to give people the best holiday of their lives and feed them extremely well,’ writes Kesi. She picked up her cooking skills from fellow crew members
When I’m working on board, I have no expenses. I live on the boat and eat the food that I cook for the guests. My job is to give people the best holiday of their lives and feed them extremely well.
After a nervy beginning at Yacht Week, I quickly learnt how to cook on the job, picking up skills from fellow crew members and testing out recipes along the way.
In those days the hosts were usually attractive women who liked to have fun – the sector has since transitioned to being much more professional – although I’m still known for being a particularly wild host (hence the apron-only cooking outfit).
By ‘wild’ I mean I encourage games like ‘truth or dare’ to get guests out of their comfort zones – which can go in many directions…
Once, I had a boat full of conservative-minded nurses. One night, they asked me to show them how to do ‘body shots’ – pouring alcohol into someone else’s belly button and then drinking it. It became quite lively and I was proud of the atmosphere. I’m all about encouraging camaraderie among those on board.
On New Year’s Eve, for example, I always have a five-way kiss at midnight with all my guests.
I’ll be the first to admit that this lifestyle can catch up with you and I struggle with the balance between partying and professionalism.
But then the more time a host spends with their guests and bonds with them the better the tips will be.
Kesi never imagined a life on the sea becoming her profession, or that she would end up a business owner, but says she is very thankful
‘I’ve been travelling for a decade and can only thank Yacht Week for introducing me to this lifestyle,’ writes Kesi
Kesi has now been travelling for a decade, and runs tours all over the world
On the other hand, this usually means getting only five hours of sleep in a cabin that is so small it looks like a coffin.
I wake up at 7am to clean and usually serve breakfast by 8.30am. Out of the 80 weeks I’ve worked on charters, I’ve only had one hangover (despite what you might imagine with my partying antics). That particular occasion was after drinking Fireball whiskey, something I won’t forget quickly. While making breakfast the following morning I felt dreadful, but I had to carry on cooking.
As well as developing a strong stomach, working on yachts has helped me develop a high tolerance for tricky personality types.
There have been plenty of lows. Once, a drunk guest vomited on me and while I was cleaning it up another guest jumped in to help me. But his girlfriend looked at him and said: ‘What are you doing?’ It made me feel like cleaning up their friend’s mess was beneath them and I hate being treated like a servant.
It’s very much a faux pas to hook up with your guests but there’s still plenty of flirting on board.
On one sailing journey, an attractive couple really wanted me to have sex with them. Every morning, the woman asked why I hadn’t joined them the night before. It was flattering, but I wasn’t up for it.
During my first season, though, I got together with lots of people. So in my second season, I took a pledge of celibacy – but that didn’t last very long.
Beyond sexual attraction, love does spark up on board. I helped introduce one guest to her husband and as a result she invited everyone on the trip to her wedding in India, where we had a mini Yacht Week reunion.
We aim to make real friendships on board and I’ve visited many former guests around the world. One even invited me to Nigeria, all expenses paid, and gave me a stack of money when I arrived.
I also met my only long-term boyfriend during Yacht Week in 2018. He was from Germany and seven years younger than me, and was working as a skipper on another boat. We locked eyes while doing body shots.
We ended up living together in Europe for two years and were monogamous – apart from when we were working on boats.
Over the years working on charters has given me the perfect skill set to be a good host, bringing people together and making sure they’re enjoying their holiday. That knowledge helped me build my current business as a group-travel host.
I’ve built a network of wealthy clients who like to spend their money on travel. Many charter guests have been doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs and now about 20 per cent of my clients on group trips are people I met on yachts.
The first trip I hosted to Uganda for gorilla trekking sold out in a week. Then I hosted an Antarctic cruise and brought 63 guests.
I’ve been travelling for a decade and can only thank Yacht Week for introducing me to this lifestyle. I never imagined this would be my profession, or that I’d become a business owner, but I’m very thankful for it.
Kesi works full-time in the travel industry as a blogger at Kesi To and Fro (@kesitoandfro) and as a group-trip host at Follow The Fro Tours.
As told to Lola Méndez
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