Your owner boards in Palma on Friday with eight guests. On Wednesday the shore laundry tells you the delivery has slipped to Monday. You open the linen locker and count: four king sets, two of them stained. Whether this is a crisis or a shrug depends entirely on a number you should have set months ago — your par level.
What a par level is
A par level is the quantity of an item you hold so that normal operations continue without resupply. For linen it is usually expressed in sets per bed, not raw sheet counts.
A common working model for guest bedding is three par:
- One set on the bed
- One set clean in the locker
- One set in the wash or at the laundry ashore
Boats doing back-to-back charters, long passages or remote itineraries often carry four or five par because the third set never gets back in time. Boats with in-house laundry and short hops may run leaner. The right number is a function of turnaround time, not of tradition.
Setting the number
Work it out rather than guessing:
| Input | Question |
|---|---|
| Usage rate | How many changes per bed per week? Owner trips and charters differ. |
| Turnaround | How long from stripped to back in the locker — including a bad day? |
| Resupply lead time | How long to replace a damaged item with a matching one? |
| Risk | What happens if you run out mid-charter? |
Par = usage during the longest realistic turnaround, plus a buffer for damage.
Categories to hold pars against
- Guest bed linen — by bed size; a 200x200 sheet is not interchangeable with a 180x200
- Guest bath and pool towels, bathrobes, bath mats
- Table linen — cloths, runners, napkins, by service setting
- Crew linen — leaner par, but still a par
- Uniform — per crew member, by rank and by season
Uniform par levels
Uniform is a par-level item that people forget is one. Per crew member, hold enough that nobody is ever in a stained or wet uniform:
- Day polos and shorts: enough for the wash cycle plus a spare
- Formal service uniform: at least two, so one can be pressed while one is worn
- Sizes recorded in a uniform register with issue dates and replacement dates
Record who has what. Uniform issued and never logged is uniform that walks off at the end of the season.
Onboard Notes
- Buy linen in matched dye lots where you can. Replacing one pillowcase from a new batch gives you a whiteness mismatch that reads instantly under cabin lighting.
- Log every item removed from service — stained, torn, greyed — in the same breath as replacing it, or your par silently erodes.
- Par levels only work if linen is stored by set, labelled and countable at a glance. A locker you have to unpack to count is a locker that lies to you.
- Do not set par from the previous chief stew notes without checking the itinerary. A boat moving from Med charters to a Caribbean crossing has a completely different resupply picture.
- Rotate stock. Always issue from the back of the shelf so wear spreads evenly across the set rather than destroying your favourites.