Yacht stewardess makes a job of cruising in style

Posted 8/6/14

The series has been described as “Upstairs-Downstairs” at sea and that’s not a bad comparison. For people who are fed up with the excesses of the super-rich that have dominated tabloid …

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Yacht stewardess makes a job of cruising in style

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The series has been described as “Upstairs-Downstairs” at sea and that’s not a bad comparison. For people who are fed up with the excesses of the super-rich that have dominated tabloid journalism for decades, here is a series that focuses on the working stiffs. Remarkably, one of the folks featured on “Below Deck” is 30-year-old Kat Held from Warwick.

“Over the top and free spirited, this 29-year-old has been traveling as a yacht stewardess for the past five years,” according to a press release from Bravo, the cable network that presents the second season of the show starting on Aug. 12.

“Kat began a career in yachting after a summer of recreation sailing in her home state of Rhode Island. Shortly after graduating from the University of Rhode Island, she gained an interest in discovering more of what the outside world has to offer. Tired of watching mega yachts sail in and out of Newport Harbor without her, she purchased a book on how to become a yacht stewardess. Following the tips of the book led her to finding her first job as a yacht stewardess in Miami, Fla. Kat is always looking for a new adventure and believes freedom is one of the most rewarding feelings in life.”

“Below Deck” this season features a 153-foot mega-yacht called the Ohana, which sails the seas surrounding the British Islands in the Caribbean. But this time, the cameras follow the adventures, tribulations and emotional collisions of the working crew as they deal with the often-petty demands and whims of the rich folks who charter the boat.

At least that is the impression I got when I watched parts of the first season. The basic premise of the show is that the young, attractive crew members took on this way of life because they are free spirits looking for a lifestyle that offers them romance and travel to exotic locales that they could never afford to experience on deck. We always knew that someone had to make and deliver the mimosas and cosmopolitan cocktails to the lolling drones in deck chairs, but this show allows you to see just who and how this is accomplished. As Kat found out, it’s not a question of becoming a waitress or maid at sea.

“I decided I wanted to do it so I got a book, an insider’s guide,” she said, from Newport, R.I. this week. “I also had to take a training course that included first aid, CPR, and I even attended the Connecticut Fire School.”

Kat said she has not had to do any CPR or many of the other things she’s trained for but, in spite of the party atmosphere of a luxury yacht, most of the crew members take their jobs seriously, as when Kat found a quantity of cocaine in one of the bathrooms in the passenger section of the boat.

“Some of the crew was disappointed that I told the captain about it,” she said. “It meant that we were heading back to port and they would not be getting the tips they expected, but others thought it was the right thing to do. I was very unhappy about it myself, but in the end we did the right thing.”

Kat said she doesn’t think that the guests who brought the drugs got in trouble with the law, because “I think they got rid of the evidence.”

In any event, they were not particularly attractive guests - “absurd,” in fact, according to Kat.

Kat has been stewarding on yachts for about five years now.

Collectively known as “yachties,” these people live, love and work together and apparently think that the opportunities offered by this calling are worth putting up with an often obnoxious and thoughtless clientele. On the one show I saw last season, a particularly toxic group had taken over the yacht. They were demanding, snobbish and rude, and I almost found myself cheering when the crew decided not to look the other way but turned the boat around and threw them off the boat.

Aside from that sort of tension, the crew has the additional strain of navigating the shoals of the tense relationships that are inevitable in such close quarters. There are jealousies and rivalries and a viewer eventually takes sides with one or the other. That is the essence of reality television. Some viewers live for that sort of psychodrama; some find it boring. But the disdain for the passengers is probably universal. They don’t display much to love.

“It’s a good thing the Earth is flat, because that means the Honor, the yacht that is the focus of the new Bravo reality series ‘Below Deck’ is bound to sail over the edge someday," according to a review of the first season that appeared in the New York Times last year. “That would presumably relieve us of the obligation to pay any further attention to the people on it … It’s not actually the crew members - the stars of this series - who are unbearable. It’s the clients who rent the Honor out for what we can assume are absurd fees. The word ‘insufferable’ was invented for these people, whose response to the blessing of having enough money to rent a yacht is to be obnoxious and pretentious.”

Kat said that most people are bearable, but the cruises are filled with petty annoyances, like guests who think the crew should be on call all the time.

“Some of the demands are a bit strange,” said Kat, but in general, “they think we provide an all-night buffet. When you have a chef like ours, who thinks everything he makes should be a work of art, making hamburgers [at all hours] is annoying.”

But, what quickly becomes apparent, especially to people who don’t especially like any kind of work, is that there will come a time when the exotic locales and balmy atmosphere will be outweighed by the long list of below deck duties that simply can’t be avoided. In the first season, the chief steward presents the crew with binders filled with rules and regulations and the right way to set silverware.

As much as the initial appeal of beautiful locales and the eye candy of luxury everywhere above decks, “Below Deck” is essentially a show about working, and there’s no telling how long viewers will be interested in watching people work, no matter where they toil.

As for Kat, she’s hoping she can get another season out of the show.

“I have met some wonderful people on the show, I’ve made a lot of valuable connections and I would love to leave the show with something I can market,” she said.

Kat said she is already looking at schools and thinks she will take her medical knowledge to a higher level.

“I would love that, to combine finance and the medical field,” she said.

Right now, Kat is living on a 120-foot motor yacht in Newport and expects to make stops at Martha’s Vineyard and other Atlantic ports as the boat makes its way south for the winter.

“I’m thinking of giving it another year,” she said, and reminded us of the independence that made the job so attractive to her in the first place. “If I can’t stand it, I’ll quit. American stewards are in demand and I can easily get another job.”

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