Yacht Delivery: Who You Need in the Crew, What It Costs, and Where People Get Burned

A delivery is when a vessel has to be moved from point A to point B under its own power: from the yard to the owner, from winter storage into the season, from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic and back. It's routine work for thousands of people and completely opaque to anyone encountering it for the first time.

Let's break it down from both sides: what the owner needs, and what a person is signing up for when they join a delivery crew.

Who you need on board

Delivery captain. The main person, and often the only one paid a full rate. What's needed isn't just a license but experience specifically with passages: night watches, weather windows, dealing with port formalities in a foreign country.

Mate or a second licensed person. On a passage longer than a day, someone has to cover the watches. Two days straight without relief isn't heroism — it's risk multiplied several times over.

Deckhands. Usually two. What's needed from them is stamina, freedom from severe seasickness, and the ability to stay out of the way. Experience helps, but being quick to learn matters more.

Engineer — on larger motor vessels and long passages. On a sailing yacht up to fifteen meters, the captain usually takes on this role.

The classic crew for a 12–15 meter sailing yacht across the Mediterranean: captain plus two or three. Fewer, and the watches get brutal; more, and there's nowhere to put the extra people and food.

How the money works

Three schemes, and they shouldn't be confused.

Paid crew. The captain gets a day rate, deckhands get a smaller rate or nothing beyond expenses. The owner covers fuel, marina fees, food, and the crew's travel to the port of departure and back from the port of arrival. Travel is the item most often forgotten, and it's comparable to the rate itself.

Miles for work. The person sails for free, paying only for their own travel and sometimes a share of food, and in return gets miles logged toward their sea record. This is how people build experience before a license exam. For the owner it's cheap crew; for the newcomer it's the only way to log miles.

Paying for miles. The reverse scheme: the person pays for the chance to sail. Normal for training passages with an instructor-skipper, not normal when it's used to sell free labor to yourself under that guise.

Separately: insurance. Most policies have requirements on crew qualifications and on the cruising area. A passage the insurer didn't know about can turn out to be uninsured exactly when it was needed.

What the owner should check before departure

1. The captain's documents and their experience specifically with deliveries, not charter weeks along the coast.
2. Policy terms. Area, crew composition, night passages — all of this is usually specified in the policy.
3. Technical condition. A delivery is not the time to discover the vessel sat unused for two years. Engine, steering, rigging, pumps, navigation, signal lights.
4. Spares on board. What to bring is covered in a separate article. There won't be a shop on the passage.
5. A written agreement. Rate, who pays for what, what happens if there's a weather delay, who decides on ducking into shelter.

What someone joining the crew should check

• The vessel exists and is in order. Photos, name, home port, vessel documents. Ask for video and contact with the owner, not just with an intermediary.
• Who the captain is and what experience they have. Name, years of experience, past passages.
• Who pays for the trip back. The most common source of resentment.
• What happens if the passage falls through. Weather, breakdown, yard delays — all common.
• No deposits, ever. This needs to be said plainly: "transfer a deposit to secure your spot in the crew" is a sign of fraud. A legitimate delivery doesn't ask a deckhand for prepayment to a stranger. If it's a paid training passage, payment goes to an organization with an invoice and a contract, not to a private person's card.

How long it takes

Along the Mediterranean coast — from two days to a week. From Turkey to Spain — ten to fourteen days with stops. Across the Atlantic on the trade winds — eighteen to twenty-five days.

Plan for a third extra: weather window, breakdown, port formalities. People who book their return ticket too tight are the main source of stress on a passage.

Why we're writing about this

We find and ship vessel spare parts, and half of the urgent requests come precisely from deliveries: a component fails in a foreign country, the vessel is stuck, the crew is waiting, and home is a thousand miles away. You can bring us that kind of request any time — send a photo of the nameplate, we'll identify it and find it.

And next, this journal will get its own board for deliveries and crews: where an owner looks for a crew, and a captain and deckhands look for a passage. With vetted people, not "DM me."