It is day six of a ten-day charter. Guests want a 06:30 breakfast on the beach and a late dinner ashore, and one of your three stews has come off nine hours of laundry and cabin turns. You still have to publish tomorrow's rota tonight — and it has to be legal as well as workable.
What a rota has to do
An interior rota balances four things at once:
- Guest coverage — someone awake, dressed and available for every hour guests are up
- Task load — cabins, service, laundry, bar, flowers, provisioning
- Rest — every crew member must get their required rest, recorded honestly
- Fairness — the early and the late shifts rotate, or the team fractures
If a rota can only be delivered by someone skipping rest, it is not a rota. It is a fiction that will show up in an audit.
Common interior shift patterns
| Pattern | How it works | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Split shift | Early service block, mid-day break, evening service block | Long guest days, small teams |
| Straight watch | Continuous block, then off | Passages, quiet owner trips |
| Early / late | One stew opens, one closes, overlap mid-day | Two-stew boats |
| Rotating on-call | One nominated stew answers night calls, rotates nightly | Charters with late guests |
Planning the day backwards
Build the rota from fixed points outward:
- Fix the immovables: guest wake-ups, meal times, tender movements, departure and arrival.
- Attach the tasks that must happen before each: cabin turns before guests return, table set before service.
- Place the flexible tasks — laundry, polishing, stores — in the gaps.
- Only then allocate names, and check each name against their rest requirement.
Handover notes
A handover is the transfer of live information across a shift boundary, a crew change or a leave rotation. Weak handovers are where standards go to die. A usable handover note covers:
- Guests: who is aboard, current mood, anything asked for and not yet delivered
- Open loops: the shirt at the laundry ashore, the spare key, the promised bottle
- Faults: the cabin aircon, the coffee machine, the drain that smells
- Stock: what ran out, what is on order, what was borrowed from another department
- Next 24 hours: what the incoming person must do first
Write it as you go, not from memory at 23:00. A shared handover document beaten out over the day is worth more than a perfect one written after the fact.
Onboard Notes
- Hours of rest are governed by MLC 2006 and implemented through your flag state. Do not build a rota against half-remembered numbers — check the boat's rest-hours policy and the flag-state guidance, and speak to the captain if the plan cannot be made to fit.
- Never record rest that was not taken. Falsified records are a serious matter for the yacht and for whoever signed them.
- Publish the rota where crew can see it and give as much notice as the itinerary allows. Last-minute changes are sometimes unavoidable; unexplained ones are not.
- On a leave handover, do a walkthrough with your replacement rather than emailing a document. Show them the stores, the safe, the laundry quirks and the guest file.
- Escalate early. If guest demands and legal rest genuinely conflict, that is a captain's problem, and the captain would far rather hear it at 18:00 than at 06:00.