For cooks going aboard, and chefs already there
You are usually the only cook aboard. One person running a whole department: you order weeks of food before you leave, feed the same fixed group three times a day, and do it in a room that does not stay level. When it goes wrong there is nobody to send out for anything.
Nobody's country decides whether you're qualified to do it. The flag on the transom does — and it usually asks for less than the schools do.
← Where to learn itThis is the reading. The places to learn it, and who teaches there, stay on the craft page.
This craft is alive in four ports and two months of the year, and everywhere else it is quiet. Antibes and Palma from spring, where the Mediterranean's crew are actually hired. Fort Lauderdale and the Caribbean from autumn, when the fleet crosses. Turn up in the right port in the right month and the whole trade is standing on the quay — the boats, the agencies, the chefs coming off a season and the ones going on.
Which is the honest first instruction: go to the dock before you buy anything. If you want a room and a teacher first, there are three ways in and one of them costs nothing but paperwork.
This is a trade, not a tradition. Thousands do it for a living, and nobody hands it down: there is no old workshop and no line of teachers. It passes between chefs who overlap for a season, aboard — which is why the people worth learning from are working chefs who decided to teach, not heirs to anything.
It is also why this sheet has no master on it. On most crafts in the Atlas we would name the person you go and stand next to. Here that person is whoever is in the next galley when you get there.
If you want to know more before you go — each of these opens on its own:
With no lineage to apprentice into, what there is — and it counts — is two working yacht chefs who came off the boats to teach their own trade, under their own names, on published dates. The third route is not a school at all.
What we could not establish is Anchor & Apron's room. Their pages say the exact venue goes to students two weeks before the week starts, so from the outside we cannot tell whether the teaching kitchen is theirs year-round or taken for the fortnight. That is an open question, not a mark against them — and it is the sort of thing we would rather leave open than guess at.
Three to five days of assessment. It is not a school's award: passing it is one of four things the MCA wants before it issues the Ship's Cook Certificate of Competency — the others being food-safety training, the five STCW basics and an ENG1 medical. That certificate is the document no flag will argue with.
The part nobody says out loud: it only counts at a centre the MCA has approved, and that list changes. On the most recent list we could find — an MCA reply reproduced publicly, accurate as of summer 2023 — the approved centres were Leiths School of Food and Wine (London), City of Glasgow College, Dumfries and Galloway College (Stranraer) and Entier Ltd (Westhill, Aberdeenshire). Tante Marie (Woking) still has a website that advertises the assessment, but the school no longer runs courses. Its Woking site passed to new owners in 2021 (The Caterer, 9 February 2021), and on 1 October 2026 the person answering its contact address told us the website is a historic copy. Do not book there.
Two weeks with Cara Whiteman and Amber Colle, working yacht chefs who teach it themselves and publish their own backgrounds. Galley management, provisioning, menus, etiquette and deck duties — plus three days and nights aboard a catamaran, which is the part that matters and the part almost no classroom has.
A Cayman document, for Cayman vessels — read that first, because everything below depends on it. If you already cook for a living it is also the route easiest to miss: there is no course attached to it, so nobody has a reason to sell it to you. You send Cayman copies of what you already hold, and they send a document back. There is nothing to attend and nothing to sit.
The order of things is the useful part. Cayman's own guidance says a chef holding those qualifications is already entitled to serve as a ship's cook on a Cayman vessel. The document does not grant that — your certificates did. On its face it is one page instead of a folder. Whether a captain, a manager or a surveyor ever asks to see it, we have not established. Proof, not permission.
A week buys a taste and an orientation — enough to recognise later what real acquisition would feel like. It does not buy the craft. Nobody has shown that a week with a teacher beats the same hours practised alone, and we are not going to be the first to say it.
Three questions decide it. Most people never ask the first one.
"Qualified" is not one thing. It means something different on every transom.
Our order, not a flag's — the order they bite in. Not one of the six is the thing sold as a career, and three of them expire: the two STCW refreshers, and the medical.
STCW basic training. Four certificates under STCW A-VI/1: personal survival techniques, fire prevention and fire fighting, elementary first aid, personal safety and social responsibility. This is the floor for working aboard at all, before any question of cooking arises. Where this page says "the five", that is the four plus security awareness — how the schools sell it as a package; four is what the convention names. Cayman asks, under A-VI/1.3, for evidence that personal survival and fire prevention and fire fighting have been refreshed within the last five years. Those two are the ones that lapse.
A seafarer medical. The ENG1 under the UK; elsewhere one meeting MLC 2006 Standard A1.2 or STCW Regulation I/9. Cayman will not take one with less than three months left to run on the day you apply, which is worth knowing before you post an application against an expiring certificate.
Food safety — and this is the one that catches people. Level 2 is the floor for handling food and it is what most chefs hold. Cayman's checklist asks for food hygiene and handling "at managerial level" without naming a level; in UK terms that is usually read as Level 3, and we have not had Cayman confirm it. Ask them what they will accept before you buy a course — and note Cayman also says that where the training is not named on your certificate you must send separate evidence of it, such as the syllabus.
A professional cookery qualification — or the years that stand in for one. An NVQ Level 2, City & Guilds 706, or a diploma from a shore-based school, provided that school sits in a country on Cayman's Shipping Notice 05/2011. In its place, Cayman will take confirmation that you have served as a chef in a professional kitchen, commercial yacht or passenger ship; the MCA will take twelve months in a catering establishment (MSN 1846, read 22 August and not re-read since). This is the door the self-taught walk through, and route three above is what it opens onto.
Sea service. The MCA wants one month, in any capacity — deckhand, stew, anything. Not one month as a cook. Cayman's checklist asks for no sea time, only a CV that evidences the experience you are claiming.
A passport, signature page included. Named here only because it is its own line on Cayman's checklist, under a form that warns in capitals: "failure to do so may mean that we will have to return your application to you." It is not queried. It is sent back.
It all comes from the ILO's Maritime Labour Convention 2006 — a seafarers' welfare instrument, which is why the trigger counts crew and not tonnage. Then each registry writes its own version.
Ten or more seafarers, on voyages over three days or more than 36 hours from a safe port.
"Qualified" can be met by an NVQ Level II — or simply confirmation that you have served as a chef in a professional kitchen, commercial yacht or passenger ship, plus hygiene, storage, stock-control and health-and-safety training.
They will also issue a Recognition of Qualification as a Ship's Cook on request — voluntary, their word, and not a Ship's Cook Certificate. It is route three, and it is the only one of the three that is paperwork alone.
The regulation is short: cooks "shall be at least 18 years of age and documented as competent for their positions."
No certificate is named. The standard is delegated, not spelled out — the owner, the manager and the flag's guidance fill the gap.
The strictest of the three, and the only one naming a document: the Ship's Cook Certificate of Competency.
Age 18, one month of sea service in any capacity, the five STCW basics, an ENG1. It replaced rules that once demanded five years at sea.
The threshold is ten seafarers, master included — and most yachts run fewer.
On two of the three biggest yacht flags, professional kitchen time plus a hygiene qualification is the standard. No school required.
Under the UK's stricter route, the entry price is one month at sea in any capacity — not five years, and not a diploma.
A ten-day or two-week "superyacht chef course" awarding a house certificate or an industry one — GUEST, IYT. Useful. No flag requires either.
Recruitment support and industry contacts. Real help, worth paying for. No school can promise a job, and the honest ones say so.
Remaining-places counts. We do not verify anyone's, here or anywhere.
The con is not a fake school. It is the slide from useful to required — and nobody arrives having read their own flag's notice.
Cook only for guests and the law doesn't call you the ship's cook. MLC regulates whoever feeds the crew — which on plenty of boats is not the person with "chef" on the crew list.
Five years at sea became one month. In any capacity. The trigger also stopped being tonnage and operating area and became, in the MCA's own words, "the number of crew carried on the ship."
The legal ceiling is a Level 2. The UK pegs the outcomes no higher than QCF Level 2; Cayman names an NVQ Level II. The law that governs feeding a ship sits below a culinary diploma.
Which pan gets a wet cloth, how full is too full, where you stand when she rolls, which knife cut you don't attempt on a beam sea. The variable is the swell, and the swell is not in the book.
The same faces, three meals a day, for weeks. The judgement being trained is not "is this good" — it is "is this the fourth time this week."
On day three, what is the one error that destroys the service? Not yet put to a teacher in this craft. When it is, their answer goes here in their words. A school that cannot answer it has told you everything.
Nobody pays to be here — an honest blank outranks a plausible name, and every blank on this page is marked as one rather than filled.
The certificate is a door. The sea is the teacher.
Write me a note about this one. Not a form — a note, and I read every one myself. If you have cooked at sea and something on this page is wrong, that is the note I want most.
Or find your people — the Circle is how these skills become real trips: the community first, then the place.
Join the Circle →Grouped by hand, not by an algorithm — same hands, same instinct, a different craft. Drag, or use the arrows.