Thanks for the advice. Yeah I’ve been applying to GOM jobs and will likely start applying to east coast positions this week. I’ll go anywhere as long as travel is paid. Do dinner boats, day boats, etc usually provide lodging still?
Dinner boats no and usually day boats no but it depends. Those are usually jobs for wherever you’re local to. You’re in the Seattle right, there’s gotta be something there but maybe not. Workboat magazine, 10ure, LinkedIn, and even indeed are good search tools. Picking up the phone and calling often does way more in this industry, just food for thought. Email doesn’t usually do it. If you can’t get in that way, try using LinkedIn to find people that work for a company that would be willing to talk to you.
Curtin Maritime has an ad on LinkedIn for a hiring event on the 29th. Call em up. 28/28. They do some cool stuff, an old coworker of mine is there and very happy…
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You don’t need to leave Seattle to get a good entry level deckhand job.
Crowley
Foss
Dunlap
Western
Centerline
DeForge
Seattle companies prefer to hire local. If you don’t have any significant undesirable characteristics and you apply to those six companies you’ll probably find at least two jobs.
There are many other boat operating companies in the Seattle area. The hiring process is easiest and fastest at the smaller companies.
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As an OS you need to be able and willing to be the cook to get hired. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was out there the cook is the only OS billet any of these companies have.
Don’t know why.Now is when we schedule our mariners for 2024 so they know when they will work. On paper, except for summer trainees we select in spring from MMA, and a summer relief cook, we are full in 2024. We have already selected our winter hires. We are sailing two or three mates on 80% of our voyages when legally only 20% of our voyages need two mates.
Can simply be a fluke. May all fall apart in a couple of months. People will quit and others will be hired. But we keep careful track of hiring stats and something shifted to the positive mid-year. I’m knocking on wood…
On the other hand, it has been a rough year for relief cooks. Hired some marvelous ones. Hired some villains too…
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Not quite Seattle, 2.5 hr inland which is why I need something with lodging included. Thanks for the advice, I’ll check Curtin out.
Curtin has a long and very slow hiring process. Most of the report I get are that Curtin is good to work for.
Watch out for getting stuck with high California state income tax. California really chases non-residents for taxes that they don’t owe.
I was getting quite a few calls wanting to know if I was available, or if I knew of anyone, up to about the end of October.
Somebody I know called a few days ago looking for a mate with a Canadian pilotage waiver, but that’s the only thing recent.
If something came along this winter that paid quite well, or sounded interesting, or preferably both, I’d probably do it. However, I’m happy to just take the winter off.
Cooking is a key skill for a tugboat deckhand at most companies.
Although some companies wrongly assume that anyone can cook.
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I interviewed for them probably two years ago, and the whole process took maybe a month. I ultimately went in a different direction but maybe things have changed…
Well, the chef from that movie ratatouille says anyone can cook.
All kidding aside, anyone who gives a shit enough to read a recipe should be able to cook. Sure, some people like to, some people don’t, and some are indifferent to it. The best boats are those that have crews that all share the duty. That way no one gets burned out on it. A deckhand that can and will cook and is decent at it, those folks are very special and I see a lot fewer of those these days.
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It’s not the actual cooking but the meal planning that most people can’t do.
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Cooking:
Provisioning
Meal planning (in a perfect world this would come first)
Cooking tasty, healthy food from scratch (no reliance of highly processed fast foods and crap that can be microwaved).
Proper food storage
Good use of leftovers
Disposal of leftovers before they go bad
Proper cleaning so that galley looks, and actually is clean.
Proper handling of waste.
Be cost effective.
This is why a handful of companies have actual cooks.
I prefer a cook that can help out on arrivals, departures and cargo. Not a dedicated cook that cannot do any other work, or a deckhand that is a halfass cook.
I find that it’s best to put one person in charge of cooking, maybe with others that like to cook doing a few meals. Shared cooking usually results in chaos with a lot of waste (an important issue on a long voyage) and a lot of bad meals that I cannot eat. (Which results in me foraging for something else).
On a tugboat that is in good condition, sometimes an engineer that controls his own schedule , and knows how to cook, is the best choice.
Companies that mostly crew up 14/14 or 30/30 usually do a particularly bad job of providing deckhands that can provision and cook for 60-90 days. They often don’t give it a thought.
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Hey OP, I am in the same shoes a year later. I was set on going the Washington State Ferry route through an apprenticeship but after multiple rounds of application review, I was denied. Moved to Seattle to pursue a maritime career this past week.
I’m checking in to see how the process went and if you got your foot in the door. Where are you at now, in terms of work, location, and vessel type?
Hearing from those who traveled a similar path is extremely helpful - thank you.
Go knock on the door at centerline logistics
@windy Have you got any credentials? MMC with OS and a TWIC?
If you do, just about any tugboat company will hire you.
Boyer, Island, Western, DeForge, Dunlap, are all smaller companies that will hire with little to no experience. There are also plenty of larger tug companies too, the might be a bit more picky about credentialing and classes.
Figure out how to cook for 6 guys and figure out how to provision for at least 4 weeks. Most of the time the difference between a lousy deckhand and a great deckhand is cooking. If you can cook well consistently you will get leeway on a lot of other things.
So I ended up at MSC after applying to probably 50 different companies last fall. Haven’t sailed yet as I ended up doing their surface rescue swimmer program which took a lot longer than I had expected. I’m back in my regular job training now so I’m hoping to be on a ship by the end of next month.