“We need a new chef,” the mate said.
Damn.
It wasn’t uncommon to lose a chef in the yachting world. Chefs, in general, are nomadic, temperamental, chaotic, unconventional, and rebellious. They tend to be nocturnal, working all night, partying once the job is done until the sun starts to rise, and then sacking out until the next shift. They’re like vampires who roll out their own pasta.
And that’s just your garden-variety chef, the kind that works in a city and rents an apartment. But yachting chefs? That’s another breed. Those are the group that say, “I love the nights and the chaos and the fast-moving knives, but I’d rather have no fixed address.” This sect particularly embraces the kind of pirate life that one gets working on a boat, moving from one Caribbean island to the next, from one coastal town in Florida to the next.
This is to say, even if they were talented and hardworking, you couldn’t exactly pencil these guys in for forty years of service and a gold watch at the end.
The bad news was that it meant that I needed a replacement chef.
Even worse, this happened right in the middle of a situation.
I was the captain of a 120-foot Broward. The owner, Doug, had very generously offered his financial consultant, Fredrick, the use of the boat for two weeks for his wedding and honeymoon. We were in Maine for the wedding, but we had only a couple of days to get everything prepared before the big event. Then we were going to Boston the following day to pick up the bride and groom and start their honeymoon cruise. Not sure why they weren’t going to stay aboard. Could have been they needed to see some family, or return some gravy boats, or whatever it is newlyweds might do after the big ceremony.
So, I had only a day or two to find a chef who would be diving right into the deep end of the pool.
Picking a chef was part of the job, and the first thing I did was go through my Rolodex of competent people to see if I could find someone who wasn’t currently committed. But that’s the problem with keeping a list of good people—they were in high demand. It would have been a lot easier to find a total fuckup with an open schedule, but who wants a total fuckup grilling your steaks?
I came up empty. Then I started asking other captains, other owners, other brokers if they knew anyone who might be a good fit. I finally struck gold when I talked to Matt. I’d worked with him in the past, and, if I’d been able to make him a better offer, would have loved to have him running the galley. He was a talented chef who got along well with everyone and really brought everything to the table that a captain would want. But even if he was committed to another job, I still trusted his advice.
“Matty, how’s it going?”
“No complaints,” he said.
“I’m going to be doing a honeymoon cruise in a couple of days, and I’m in desperate need of a good chef. Know anyone who’s looking?”
“Actually, yeah, I know a guy who’d be great. Luke. I’ll get you his number.”
Under ideal conditions, I like to provide a pretty comprehensive screening process for a new chef. I’d interview him, talk to his references, maybe ask him to cook a meal for the crew to see what kind of food he could make and see how he could get along with everyone else. But time being short, I barely had time to call him up, find out that he was available, and fly him up to Maine.
“If you can get to the boat before the wedding, you’re hired.”
Problem solved.
But, like everything in life, solving one problem just gives you opportunities to notice new ones.
The new chef, Luke, seemed great. He had plenty of confidence, told me of all the big yachts he’d worked on and the famous clients he’d cooked for, yadda yadda yadda. Chefs have been known to be a wee bit, shall we say, arrogant. Heard that spiel a few times before. Now I was hoping he would deliver and not be just a big bag of wind. I didn’t need my sphincter tickled by him blowing smoke up my ass—I just needed a competent chef.
He arrived with a duffel bag full of clothes, a laptop, and a pretty nifty case holding his chef’s knives. A chef’s knife kit is like a portable résumé and is often the most expensive thing he owns. Luke’s laptop probably cost about $800 or so, but I’d wager that knife case held over $2,000 in high-quality steel.
I shook his hand and gave him a quick tour of the boat.
“When do you want me to get started?” he asked.
“Why don’t you get settled. Stow your gear, take a look at the galley, get accustomed to where things are and where you want them to be. We’ll get underway right after the wedding, so why don’t you figure on making breakfast for the crew tomorrow morning, and then we’ll talk menus for when the guests arrive.”
“Breakfast for just the crew? No guests?” he asked.
“The bridal couple aren’t coming on board until two days after the wedding, and we’re picking them up in Boston.”
“Sounds good.”
There were going to be, eventually, a lot of guests. The honeymoon party that we’d be hosting was going to be twelve strong. It was a big boat, with six staterooms for guests, but twelve people was still going to be a mighty strain on the crew. We had only enough real estate to bunk seven crew, unless we started adding new people to sleep on the decks or double up in other people’s bunks, and I would have to veto that first idea, and my wife, Mary Anne, would undoubtedly veto the second one.
Usually, you wouldn’t want to have more than a 1:1 ratio of guests to crew. We didn’t know exactly how hard these guys were going to party, but if they were up all night, the crew would have to be there with them. And no matter how late the diehards went, the crew would have to be ready, bright and early, to greet the first early riser with coffee or tea. Being able to have some crew tasked with late night and some with early morning would put less strain on everyone involved, but for this pleasure cruise, we were just going to have to make the best of it. To handle all twelve guests, it was just going to be me, the first officer, the chief stew, an engineer, the first stew, a deckhand, and the new chef.
The trip from Maine to Boston was uneventful, and Luke did a good job at breakfast. Nothing extraordinary—just bacon, eggs, sausage, toast, and English muffins, but he worked quickly enough, and everything tasted good. He didn’t bark at the crew, and nobody played any practical jokes on him, like insisting that the meal include vegan bacon or some shit. Though that would be a great way to haze the chef, not to mention the bacon-loving skipper.
That is something that drives me absolutely nuts, and something mostly on display in younger crew, this weird aura of entitlement. I would interview prospective crew, stews, or deckhands or what have you, and usually, I’d want to see two things: knowledge of the job and the right attitude. But I don’t care how much knowledge you have if your attitude revolves entirely around you getting exactly what you want all the time. Yachting may be plush, but it’s still a service industry. We serve at the pleasure of our owner and the clients. And it’s a lot harder to do that when you have people who insist on serving themselves first.
When I ask someone if they have any special needs or considerations, I’m prepared for things like “I’ve got asthma” or “I’m allergic to bees” or other things I can deal with. But I sure as hell don’t need comments like “I’ve decided I might be gluten sensitive, so I don’t want any bread around me” or “I’m vegan and so I’d prefer that all the crew meals be vegan.” That’s not how it works. If you don’t eat meat, then by all means, don’t feel pressured to do so, but we’re not tailoring the menu to the junior stew’s demands. You’re on a raw food diet? Whatever floats your boat, but pack your own carrots because the guests are going to be enjoying grilled salmon. I’ve had a vegetarian chef work for me, and she made some killer steaks, because cooking for other people is the job. Not everyone gets that. Those that do can work for me. Those that can’t—there’s always beauty school.
I was glad that Luke seemed capable of doing the job, and on such short notice. After breakfast, he came up to me with a sheepish look on his face.
“Cappy, is it okay if I leave the boat to get rid of some garbage?”
I guess he could have asked the deckhand, but I was glad he wasn’t afraid to do his own dirty work. “Fine by me,” I said.
He smiled, nodded, and I saw him a few minutes later, walking off the gangway with a couple garbage bags in hand.
That was the last time I saw him. And I do mean the last time. I’ve never seen him since.
Around six, the first officer came to see me.
“Captain, do you know when chow is?”
“Why don’t you ask the chef?” I asked.
“I would, but the thing is . . . I can’t find him.”
Shit.
There could be lots of reasons why the chef wasn’t in the galley at dinnertime, and none of them good. Maybe he was sacking out in his bunk, drunk off his ass. It could happen. Maybe he was the kind of guy who liked to put a lot of product in his hair and ended up snapping his neck after slipping on his own hair gel. Maybe he fell overboard. Maybe he hanged himself in a botched attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation. With chefs, it could be anything.
“Let’s search the boat,” I said.
First, we looked in his cabin. His clothes were still hung up in the closet, still had his duffel bag there. But no sign of Luke. I didn’t see his computer, either.
“Okay,” I said to the first officer, “what did you do to piss him off?”
“What? Nothing.”
“How about anyone else? He make a pass at someone? Get hazed? Lose some money at cards?”
“Far as I know, everyone got on fine with Luke.”
I nodded. I certainly hadn’t seen any grab-ass or beefing. And there just hadn’t been any time for something like that to explode. We’d only picked him up eighteen hours before, and half of that time he’d been sleeping.
We expanded the search and looked in every cabin, every workspace, every crawlspace. Nothing.
Now things were serious. If he wasn’t on board, things could have gone really wrong. Even though he had just left the boat to drop off the garbage, it was a bit of a hike from the boat to the Dumpster, maybe a ten-minute hump. There was a chance that, on that long walk, he got injured, maybe mugged. Hell, guys see a nice 120-foot boat come in to the dock, they might think everyone coming off it is rich.
That’s when we started making calls.
We called police stations, hospitals, and morgues. Anybody see a skinny Caucasian male with brown hair and a few tats, probably carrying a couple bags of trash and willing to talk at length about demi-glaces and the difference between a coarse chop and a brunoise?
Nobody.
It was a mystery, but not one I could allow to occupy all of my time. Hell, it had already been a crisis when I first hired him back in Maine. Now we needed a second replacement, and with even less time to fill the vacancy! I sent word out to the grapevine, and quickly got a recommendation.
Did this new chef candidate follow his grandma’s recipe for delicious handmade ravioli? I had no idea. Shit, I didn’t even have time to check if he had a criminal record for sticking a meat thermometer into his last boss’s Adam’s apple. He had a recommendation, he was available, and he had a pulse. As far as I was concerned, he was perfect. We were getting close to starting the honeymoon cruise, and I had to get someone ASAP while the guests were still off the boat checking out Boston.
Chris, the new Luke, showed up, and impressed the hell out of me by not vanishing in a puff of smoke.
“You take a look at the galley?”
“I sure did. Everything looks good.”
“You got all your gear?” I asked.
He held up his chef’s knife kit to indicate he did.
That made me think.
“Did you find another one of those lying around the galley anywhere?” I asked.
“I thought someone had.”
That’s when I realized what happened to Luke. His clothes were still on board, but his knives weren’t. The only explanation I had was that someone stole them after they figured he’d gone, or he’d taken them off himself. And there was only one good reason why he’d have taken his knives and equipment off the boat: he wasn’t planning on coming back.
“That son of a bitch jumped ship,” I said. A classic case of someone writing a check with their mouth that their ass couldn’t cash.
“What’s that?” Chris asked.
“Nothing. Why don’t you start getting things squared away the way you like them in the galley, because things are about to go from zero to one hundred.”
He nodded, left, and, hopefully, remained on the boat.
I figured Luke had taken a new job. That’s why his knives were gone. That’s why his computer was gone. He took the expensive stuff, left the thrift-store threads, and bounced.
What an asshole.
These things happened. A guy takes a gig, gets offered more money somewhere else, and he jumps at the chance to make more dough. After all, the best negotiating position one could have was as a man already employed. “Yeah, I’d love to take the job, but I’m already getting paid a fat wad to cook on another boat, so you’d really have to make it worth my while . . .”
It probably would have been more convenient to employ a full-time chef, but a lot of those guys preferred being freelancers. In part, it was for the freedom, but it was also partly because the money was a lot better that way. If a chef took a salary, he might make $75,000 to $100,000 a year, which wasn’t bad considering he might not have to pay for rent or food. Still, that broke down to about $200-plus a day. Now, if that same guy wanted to work freelance, he could make up to $500 a day. If a chef got steady work, he could stand to bring in almost $200K per year. Not a bad living, if you could do the work.
And that work wasn’t a piece of cake. When you’re the chef on a boat, you’re working constantly. If the guests plan on being up at 6:00 a.m., then you’d better wake up at 5:30, fire up the cooktop, and have flapjacks and sausages ready by 6:15. When breakfast concludes for everyone around 9:30, that gives you plenty of time to clean the entire galley and start prepping for lunch, served promptly at noon. After the guests depart for a digestive stroll or nap around 2:30, you get to clean things up and prep for dinner, so lobster and filet mignon are ready to go at 6:30. And then, once the last guest finishes her final bite of chocolate lava cake and raspberry sorbet, then you can call it a night, right?
Nope.
After the chef cleans the galley for the final meal, he still has to be on call for the rest of the night. If one of the guests wants a lobster roll at midnight, then the chef has to pry himself out of bed and make it, served with a smile. If a guest has a few drinks and maybe a hit or two from a joint, not that we allow that, but shit happens, and gets the munchies at 2:00 a.m. and absolutely has to have some fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, then the chef would be more than happy to accommodate that request. And then breakfast is just a few hours away . . .
So, I was pretty relieved when Chris said that he’d be able to fill in at the last minute.
I just hoped he managed to actually stay on board for more than twenty-four hours.
On our last day in Maine, our owner, Doug, arrived to check out the boat, introduce the guests of honor, and attend the wedding. As soon as the wedding was over, Doug would take off, the happy couple would zoom off to Boston, and then we’d pick them up there a few days later. Doug was a pretty big wheel. He sold his business for about a billion dollars. He was a good owner, and clearly a sweetheart of a guy, since he was just gifting his boat to his financial advisor/friend for nothing. If we had sold that as a charter, it would have cost about 250K. Not a bad wedding present.
“Lee, I want you to show my friend Fredrick a great time. Whatever he wants, he gets,” Doug said.
“Can do,” I said.
Doug was willing to let them have the crème de la crème, and that was fine with me, since I expected it to be a fairly easygoing sail. Sure, it was two weeks, and the twelve guests would stretch us to full capacity. But Fredrick and his bride, Deborah, were around fifty years old, so I wasn’t anticipating twenty-four-hour party people.
Guess you’re only as old as you feel.
Fredrick and Deborah married in a traditional Scottish ceremony, with kilts and everything. He seemed a perfectly good sort, the kind of guy who liked to have a good time, but I severely underestimated how much a man in his fifties might like to party. When we got to Boston, I would find out just how much I underestimated the situation.
It was all action all the time. From the moment Doug passed the command to Fredrick, it was nonstop boogie. We took a tour of New England, every day a new city. I had to assume that Fredrick must have been a hell of a financial advisor, because if his vacationing was anything like his work, he did not take days off.
And such was his right. He had command of the boat, could do with it as he pleased. But it would have made life a little easier for me and the crew if he were to take a couple of days at Cape Cod (or Portland or Block Island or Newport or Martha’s Vineyard), then the crew could take a little bit of a breather. But when every day meant striking out for a new town, it required sixteen-hour days for everyone on board.
At least everyone was eating well. Restaurants often have the “family meal” they offer as a perk to the staff, a time before the main dining times when the chefs use (often) leftover or unused ingredients to make a meal everyone can enjoy. For that kind of meal, it’s typically not the best-of-the-best in terms of what’s available. But on this boat? Everyone ate like kings. If Fredrick and Deborah were getting surf and turf, then the crew got surf and turf. If Fredrick and his guests got black truffle risotto, then so did the rest of us.
In part, this was because Doug was a good owner who liked to treat his people well. And in part, this was because it was just logistically impractical to keep two separate menus—one for the guests and one for the crew.
It was delicious, and Chris did a good job. But I have to confess, living high on the hog can get old. Don’t get me wrong—I love steak and lobster, but after a dozen meals or so, I find myself longing for some comfort food: some mac and cheese, some chili, some burgers and dogs. Variety is the spice of life.
Fredrick, however, didn’t have the same appetites that I did. His tastes ran to the more indulgent, and he never seemed to get tired of it. This was not limited to lobster and filet mignon. He also showed a great love of Cristal champagne. The way Fredrick and his guests were downing that bubbly, you’d have thought he was an investor in the company. And that stuff isn’t cheap. Sure, Doug made it clear that Fredrick was to get anything he wanted, but I’d check in with him pretty regularly, just to let him know how the trip was going. As the honeymoon continued, and proceeded at the same breakneck pace, he started getting a little concerned.
A bottle of Cristal usually goes for at least a couple hundred per, and we were getting the good stuff, tipping the scales at about $1,200 per bottle. We’d buy it by the case, and each case would be six bottles, so every case was over $7,000 in champagne. When Doug saw how much of it was getting consumed, he started feeling a little less hospitable.
“You sure Freddy’s drinking all that champagne? Any chance someone is just billing me for the Cristal and blowing the money on personalized Patriots jerseys or something? Or does Freddy really have a problem?”
I didn’t think Doug was serious. Though, for some people on a boat, even one with internet and a gym and a SatPhone, liquor could be a tempting way to entertain and escape. Sometimes, a chef would buy something for himself and try to pass it off as ship’s stores. If you found a bottle of vodka behind the corn flakes, you knew you had a problem.
Those kinds of problems could really spiral out of control. I was once going on a quick run to pick up a boat, called the Sea Ghost, a nice 135-foot Fed ship. This particular vessel had been owned by Nicolas Cage, but Nic had run afoul of the IRS, and in order to pay the taxman’s bill, he’d been forced to liquidate some islands and castles and boats. Motivated seller. It was my job to report to Connecticut and captain the boat over to Florida, where I’d deliver it to the new owner.
We were just operating on a skeleton crew since we didn’t plan on doing any fancy sightseeing or chartering. Just pick up the boat, move it from A to B, drop off the keys, and mission accomplished. Unfortunately, even though it was a skeleton crew, one of the bones on that skeleton had at least a few fractures in it.
One of the engineers, Dick, was a drunk. And I don’t mean that he liked to have a few too many glasses of wine with dinner, I mean that he’d pour himself a tumbler full of vodka and then pass out with the drink still in his hand. Just because vodka looks clear as water doesn’t mean I didn’t figure out his little game. My first clue, of course, was that he was unconscious during the day. Always a red flag. Another red flag was his eyeballs, almost literally. His eyes looked like a road map of the Chicago business Loop. He really saw the world through rose-colored eyeballs.
He wasn’t my hire, and I couldn’t fire him. It wasn’t my job to staff the boat, just to get it where the owner wanted it. The problem was, I couldn’t have Dick stand watches, so everyone just had to take on more work and more responsibility. Instead of him standing a four-hour watch, everyone else would just have to add an hour to his own watch.
I tried to make some kind of dent in the damage that Dick could do by policing up his cabin. The room looked like a recycling plant. Just bottles everywhere. I don’t think the guy even had any clothes, just the ones he was wearing on his back, because all the available space he lived in was devoted to vodka bottles in various stages of emptiness. The guy didn’t have a drinking problem—the only problem he had was when he couldn’t find a drink.
The only job that I’d allow him to perform was to top off the oil and swap over the generators. It wasn’t brain surgery, but it was still important, because if he screwed up, he could overfill the tanks, and then we’d end up trailing oil and have to deal with the Coast Guard on our ass. As a safeguard against him confusing the oil tanks with his mouth and the oil canisters with vodka and just dumping it all in, I always ordered the first mate to accompany him and make sure he was doing it properly. That’s why I usually had a drinking rule on the boat: eight hours from bottle to throttle.
At first, I tried to talk to Dick, explain to him that he was endangering the boat and the crew and that he was destroying his own life, but he just wouldn’t have it. He was one of those drunks that would just talk over everyone. He was a man immune to logic, impervious to argument, blind to reason.
“Dick, you have to get a hold of—”
“I do my job, and my job is to be an engineer, and not to be the head of the damn Women’s Christian Temperance Movement.”
“I’m not saying that you need to have some kind of religious—”
“You can’t tell me how to live my life! I can eat what I want and drink what I want and read what I want and watch whatever shows I want! Because this is America! In case you forgot!”
“I know what country we’re—”
“It’s not Russia! You can’t be Big Brother! When I was . . .”
And so it went. I couldn’t get him to stop drinking, so I put a babysitter on him and reduced the scope of the damage he could do. Four days later, we slipped into the docks, and I handed over the keys.
The manager and broker took possession of the boat, and I took the opportunity to tell them about Dick.
“I know, I know,” the broker said. “He’s always like that.”
They knew?! They knew and they hadn’t fired him? It was like they were begging for a catastrophic accident or a catastrophic lawsuit. But hey—not my circus, not my monkeys. We went from point A to point B, everyone lived, and it was a good crossing, so I just had to chalk it up as a W.
This is a long way of saying that hitting the bottle could be a big problem, either from the perspective of having someone on a boat you couldn’t trust or from the perspective of keeping someone as your financial consultant that you couldn’t trust. But from what I saw, our bridegroom Freddy wasn’t a drunk—just a guy who liked to party.
“I guess Freddy just really takes his leisure time seriously,” I said.
“Maybe see if you can taper things down a bit,” Doug suggested. Doug wasn’t cheap, but there are limits to how far you can push a host’s generosity before you have to reclassify that as taking advantage of someone.
Maybe that was just the kind of guy that Freddy was. That’s what I’d started calling him. Because Fredrick is a cultured, sophisticated professional, and Freddy is an aging adolescent mooch. Maybe that’s how he became a successful financial guy in the first place—he was never going to set limits for himself if no one was going to impose them on him. He certainly seemed comfortable asking for the moon.
After we’d cruised around New England a bit, Freddy decided he didn’t want to miss fireworks on the Fourth of July. That sounded reasonable, so I asked him where he might want to check things out.
“Let’s motor back into Boston Harbor. They put on a good show.”
There’s no denying that. Still, it was kind of a big ask. Thousands of boats flood those harbors to watch the fireworks show, and it was a real bitch to navigate through it. Boats weren’t allowed to drop an anchor, so we would have to be constantly running the engine and trying to maneuver so we didn’t drift too far or run into any of the other ten thousand boats.
But what really held me back was that we just displaced too much water, and it was too shallow right up close to the fireworks. We couldn’t get to where he wanted us to be, and Freddy didn’t like that too much. But I wasn’t going to beach the boat just so he could get a better view of the fireworks. It pissed him off, but it probably saved us a lot of ill will from the rest of the boating world. We were a big boat at 120 feet, and I was glad that I wouldn’t have to suffer with the guilt of dozens of other smaller boats hating our guts because we were this huge yacht blocking their view. We were able to snuggle up right next to the docks at Yacht Haven Grande, and Freddy still got a great show, so he had nothing to complain about, even if he sure gave it the ol’ college try.
Finally, we’d made it through the honeymoon. We’d visited four states, consumed a vineyard’s worth of champagne, a cove’s worth of lobster, and shown the newlyweds a pretty good time. And how did they thank us for our hospitality and our sixteen-hour days?
They stiffed us.
As Freddy was headed off the boat, he said, “Let me just go get the car and pull it around.” Well, maybe there was something magic about that particular gangplank, because Freddy must have fallen into the same twilight zone that Luke had also disappeared into. Never saw either of those guys ever again. He got his car, Deborah ran to catch up, and then he was gone.
This was a first for me. While I’d received some shitty tips in my time, I’d never been given the total bagel before. Now, a trip like this would normally cost a client, as a high-end charter, about 250K. And while Doug wasn’t billing Freddy for the trip, I’d assumed that he understood that tipping was customary. If someone provides an open bar at a party, you still tip the bartenders. If you use a gift certificate at a restaurant, you still tip the servers. And even if you didn’t pay for the charter, we were still hoping for a standard gratuity, which in the yachting game was somewhere between 10 percent to 20 percent. But we didn’t get the $50,000 at the high end, or even the $25,000 bare minimum. And that 10 percent tip is something you’d get even if you really screwed up, serving PB&Js for dinner, not knowing how to get to certain ports, that kind of thing. And this guy was getting first-class everything! Turns out that bare minimum can be a lot more bare than 10 percent, and we got the total shaft. Thanks for the cruise—now you can all go fuck yourselves.
Some might argue that Freddy shouldn’t have had to pay the gratuity because he was gifted the cruise in the first place and, therefore, shouldn’t have to pay anything. But if you can’t tip seven people who busted their asses 24/7 without a single day off for two weeks, then you just have to say “no” to that cruise. It’s a gift you can’t afford.
It made me want to run down that road to try to warn Freddy’s new bride that she might want to rethink this partnership. If he was going to show as much generosity to her as he did to my crew, it might end up being a short marriage. But, hey—he did wear a kilt to the wedding, so maybe she had some inkling of what she might be getting into.
That was a pretty bracing splash of cold water.
Maybe we weren’t the only beneficiaries of Freddy’s lack of social skills, because Doug stopped working with him not too long after that. At least he got a nice cruise as his severance.
Still, all’s well that ends well. And once we finished the honeymoon charter, we finally got confirmation on what happened to our missing chef. I got a call from Matty, the guy who had referred him in the first place.
“I found your boy,” he said.
“Who?”
“Luke. The disappearing chef.”
“Aliens get him?” I asked.
“He said he had to run away. Said everyone was making life miserable for him and he couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Couldn’t take it? He was only on the boat for less than a day! And half of that was sleeping.”
“Yeah, it’s obviously bullshit, but a man needs to protect his reputation. He ended up taking another job for more dough.”
“If his reputation was what he was worried about,” I said, “then he shouldn’t have walked off my boat without a word of explanation. Guy gets a wild hair up his butt crossways, not much I can do about that. Total lack of integrity. He definitely let his mouth write a check his ass couldn’t cash. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never work with him again,” I said. And I’m not shy about telling the truth about someone like that when I’m asked.
“You and me both,” Matty said.
Not the best cruise I ever had. A chef disappeared, the clients stiffed us on the tip, and my boss saw all his Cristal go down the toilet. But sometimes, that was just the way of things in the glamorous world of yachting. You can have sunny days that still kill you. You can work alongside talented people who still make you want to throw them through the window. It may be an interesting line of work, but a lot of the time, it’s still work.
And thank God for it.