Day in the life of
Divemaster – Morgan Oughton
I’m a Cruise Director / Divemaster on luxury liveaboard dive yachts in different countries.
We basically run a floating hotel, restaurant, and dive shop that run week long charters with 14-20 guests on board with only 6 crew, so you have to really be a team player and ready to do anything that needs to be done which includes being a deckhand, mechanic, prep cook, waiter, bartender, plumber, diver, and chambermaid.
We are up at 5:30-6am every day, prep cook, and serve 5 meals a day, facilitate 5 scuba dives a day which has jobs both in and out of the water, and it’s 5-star customer service for anything the guests could need.
Typically we don’t get to bed until around 9pm so your days are 15-16hrs of work with a few minutes to shovel food into your mouth a few times. The Cruise Director is also in charge of paperwork, billing, supplies, briefing, and is the point person among the crew for the guests to come to with any issues onboard.
My typical day
A normal day is drastically different between a land-based operation and working on liveaboard yachts. On the yachts, we have a pretty strict schedule and it’s very go go go most days.
- 6am: Wake up
- 6-7am: Move boat
- 7am: Breakfast/Housekeeping
- 8-9am: Dive 1
- Serve snacks
- 10:15-11:15am: Dive 2
- 12-1pm: Move boat while serving Lunch
- 1:30-2:30pm: Dive 3
- Serve Snacks
- 3:30-4:30pm: Dive 4
- 6:00-7:00pm: Dinner
- 7:30 – 8:30pm: Night Dive
- Serve drinks and clean up everything from the day
- Somewhere around 9:30-10pm: Bedtime
We are up at 5:30/6am every day. The engineer starts the engines and the rest of the crew works in sync to untie the boat and pull all the lines (ropes) to get underway to our first dive site.
At the same time, 1 person is delegated to start up the compressors and start readying tanks and equipment for the dive operations for the day.
The guests wake up around 6:30-7 which is when breakfast begins so you are either in charge of serving the food, helping with dishes or cleaning the empty rooms, and do general housekeeping.
When we arrive at the dive site we all sync back up to handle the lines and secure the boat to the mooring.
Once breakfast is done we all congregate on the dive deck and one of us leads a briefing about the site and the plan for the dive and that person generally leads the dive. Underwater we are tour guides and are there to provide a safe and fun experience for the guests which depending on how fast they breathe all their air can be anywhere from 20-60 minutes long. As the professional videographer, I would also jump in several times a day to capture our guests’ experience underwater and hopefully capture all the cool animals they see. This video is optionally sold to them at the end of the week for a commission but takes an additional 12+ hrs to shoot and edit on top of our already crazy schedule.
The rest of the crew when not diving is surface support that watches bubbles and assists anyone that might surface unexpectedly or put to another task like helping prep lunch.
As the divers come out of the water, we assist them in any way possible which sometimes means carrying their 60lbs of gear for them, then we start refilling their tanks using high pressure compressors which can take up to an hour to fill all of them, just in time for the next dive and to help everyone back in.
After the 2nd dive, we serve lunch and fill tanks again then move the boat and go through the mooring process again, some of which are more complicated and involve jumping in the water again. Generally, everyone in the crew is a divemaster/instructor so we all rotate in the water (except the chef!) and also rotate prepping and serving food and filling tanks. We are on call 24/7 in case anything goes wrong with the boat or if the guests need absolutely anything as it is considered a 5-star luxury service. We all have to have fire safety training as well as first aid and oxygen provider training in case anyone has a medical emergency while at sea.
Pros
We are “living the dream” and wake up everyday to a sunrise over the ocean.
It’s our job to show people amazing animal encounters in beautiful locations around the world. We get paid to experience all these wonderful things that other people are spending thousands of dollars to do once a year on vacation. Since conditions and animal encounters are always going to different week by week, we get to witness the best and the worst of it all. In Hawaii, I got to swim with 12 different Whale Sharks, play with Dolphins all the time, and know the names of some of the Manta Rays we would see on a regular basis. Sometimes you would jump in the water at dawn to unhook the boat and there would be eagle rays or dolphins or turtles just hanging out and you get to have these one on one encounters as part of your daily routine. I especially love creating the video and knowing that these guests are going to bring this home and show it to everyone they know and get to relive the experience over and over again through something I created. It’s honestly a very fulfilling job if you can handle the rest of it.
Since you have a chef on board that cooks all your meals you have no real bills or expenses at all. Every boat is a little different but our schedule was usually 8 weeks on (no break or time off at all) and then 3-4 weeks off.
It’s also a great lifestyle for unattached younger people looking to work hard, make a bunch of money, and then have extended time off to be able to travel. For someone that doesn’t have the money or time to pursue these passions otherwise, the trade-off is very appealing.
Cons
The cons are it is HARD work. You have absolutely no time to yourself or privacy while on the boat. The crew quarters are usually very tiny and you share them with at least 1 other person if not many more. Living with your boss, all your coworkers, and a bunch of guests, in general, can be very tedious. You are on 24/7 so if anything goes wrong on the boat at 3am, you are now up and that is the start of your day. It’s easy to burn yourself out when there’s no time to catch up on lost sleep. The guests can vary so much week by week and some can make your life a living hell, but you still have to do your sleep-deprived jobs with a big smile on your face! 🙂
We are also paid very little for usually around 112hrs/week of work (16hr x 7 with no breaks other than sleep) – very dependent on what country you are in but on the boats, I worked for it was $400-$500/week, some places like Indonesia are much much less than that. The tips are generally supposed to make up for the lack of pay, which it did most of the time where I worked but can vary so much week by week depending on the guests. If we have 20 Americans on board, we can potentially make $1200 per person in tips in a week (splitting it evenly between us) but if you get a boat of Europeans or maybe the weather is bad and people are disappointed in the trip by no fault of the crew, many people will leave us nothing. We had a few weeks where we made under $300 each which would bring our total weekly income to making $6 an hour.
