How Long Does It Take to Become a Yacht Chef? (And Can You Do It in 3 Weeks?)

Straight answer: it depends entirely on where you're starting from. Here are the honest timelines I've seen play out over 14 years in this industry.

If you're already a working chef

You're closer than you think. STCW Basic Training takes about a week, the ENG1 medical takes a morning, and a food safety cert if you don't have one. Add a yachting-format CV and travel to a crew hub at the right time of season, and experienced chefs can realistically be working on boats within 1–3 months. The cooking skills transfer; what you'll learn on the job is provisioning, guest preference sheets and cooking in a moving box.

If you can cook but haven't worked professionally

Plan for 6–18 months. You need real kitchen hours first — restaurant work, catering, a season somewhere busy — because the galley of a charter yacht is not the place to discover you can't handle volume. Then the same path: tickets, hub, daywork, first boat. Smaller boats and crew-chef roles are your entry point.

If you're starting from zero

A proper apprenticeship takes 3–4 years and is honestly the best foundation this role can have — it's what I did, starting at 15 in Noosa. But it's not the only road. Some people spend a year cooking anywhere they can, get on as a stew or deckhand, help in the galley and grow into the position. Slower on paper, but you're at sea earning while you learn.

So what about the "become a yacht chef in 3 weeks" promises?

You can complete the certificates in a few weeks — that part is true. But a certificate doesn't make you a chef, and captains aren't hiring certificates. They're hiring someone who can feed twelve demanding guests and ten crew, alone, for weeks. If a course promises the galley of a superyacht in 21 days with no cooking background, keep your money.

What a good course can legitimately compress is everything else: knowing which tickets to get and in what order, where to be and when, how to build the CV, which agencies matter and how the hiring actually works. That's months of trial and error you can skip. The cooking hours, though — nobody can gift you those.

My advice

Don't rush the foundation. My path went dish pit → apprenticeship → Europe → outback pub → dive boat → 30m yacht — and every unglamorous step made the next one possible.

Skip the guesswork, not the work: Become a Yacht Chef gives you the exact roadmap. Module 1 is free.