December 2025 | By Sharon Geltner
LAUREN COTTON has never strayed far from the water. She grew up at Lighthouse Point, a coastal town near Fort Lauderdale known for its bustling boating scene. Every summer, her family would vacation at their cottage on Lake June in the town of Lake Placid near Sebring, where they enjoyed fishing and watersports. “We were always on boats,” she recalls.
After earning her degree in 2006 at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a small private Christian College in West Palm Beach, Cotton landed a gig as a concierge at Rybovich, a local superyacht marina that until 2021 was owned by Wayne Huizenga Jr. It was there she learned just how many people it takes to keep a superyacht afloat — it can run from four to 40, depending on the size of the boat — and what it takes to keep the captain and owner happy.
In 2011, Cotton moved into the sales arena, joining the marketing and brokerage team of Worth Avenue Yachts. When she suggested the company should branch into crew staffing for its customers, her boss demurred — so Cotton decided in 2013 to hang out her own shingle.
Eleven years later, Cotton Crews has placed thousands of captains, chefs, deckhands, stews, mechanics and other staff aboard yachts from South Florida to New England, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean.
The company recruits through an app drawing anywhere from 10 to 50 applications for each position posted. Salaries, she says, can vary widely depending on the customer and the position. “A junior deckhand, for instance, might earn $2,500 a month, if he’s inexperienced,” Cotton says, whereas a lead deckhand can pull in $4,000 to $6,000 a month. While a yacht chef can expect to make about $5,000 to $10,000 per month, the industry magazine Dockwalk has reported monthly chef salaries exceeding $15,000 monthly in its annual salary survey. “A Michelin star on a big boat could do it,” Cotton says.
When speed is of the essence, Cotton contacts crew members that she knows prefer a certain destination or those who are earning their next license and need sea time and are motivated to get hired fast. Some are placed within 24 to 48 hours of the owner’s request, although Cotton Crews prefers three days. “We check references. If someone doesn’t list a previous employer, we find out anyway because the yacht world is so small,” Cotton says. Her company earns a commission equal to one month’s salary for the crew person for each one placed. She offers a 90-day warranty on all permanent workers. “We know in three to four days if someone is not working out and quickly replace them,” she says.
Florida’s peak season for yacht charters is December through March — but there’s no off-season for Cotton, and few geographic boundaries. She networks in Newport, R.I., every summer to find crew and clients and has reached across the Atlantic to France and Italy to build up her database of 18,000 names.
Cotton Crews is one of a half dozen or so boutique yacht staffing companies in South Florida. Some yacht brokerages also supply crew. “They sell the boat, and there is a management agreement to staff the new stewards, engineers, take care of refueling service,” says Andrew Doole, president of U.S. Boat Shows and Informa Markets. Example: Fraser Yachts’ The Crew Network has placed crew around the world for more than 35 years, its website says.
Even when they operate their own staffing services, yacht brokerages will still contract with boutique agencies that specialize in hard-to-find talent, such as Michelin chefs, says Chuck Cashman, chief revenue officer of MarineMax. While yacht sales boomed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in the insurance industry are driving up demand for crew. Many insurers are requiring that boats as small as 60 feet must have a full-time, dedicated captain. That’s because of so many hurricane losses in the U.S. — and specifically Florida — Cashman says.
Ten years ago, Cotton says, she might get 250 inquiries each year from captains and owners wanting to hire crew. Today, she’s entertaining more than 400 inquiries per year. The number of resumes she’s getting has also doubled, thanks in large part to Bravo’s hit reality television series “Below Deck.” But the show, which documents the lives of crew members working aboard a luxury charter yacht and focuses to a large degree on workplace drama and extracurricular shenanigans, has been a mixed blessing for the industry, Cotton says. “The exposure has been great all over the world, but people get the impression that crews really behave that way.”
In fact, she says, the crew will probably be too busy to get into too much trouble. “If the owner and guest are aboard at sea, the crew will likely be working 12- to 16- hour days. If the boat is on dock, maintenance would still be a 40-hour work week.”
Amid Florida’s affordable housing crisis, Cotton and her husband, Matt Woodbury, have launched a side venture — crew housing. When yachts are going through major refits or yard periods and crew can’t live on board, they can rent a room in one of the 20 homes Cotton and her husband own in nearby Martin and St. Lucie counties. “We buy one or two homes at a time, renovate and rent,” Cotton says — and there’s an advantage to playing landlord. Housekeepers who maintain the properties keep an eye on crew behavior, helping Cotton to head off any potential problems.
At the end of the day, Cotton says, yacht crew placement is mostly a matchmaking endeavor and that understanding the personalities and motivations of those involved is what keeps her services a cut above her competition and keeps her clients coming back for more.
“Yachting is a small world and much of it is relationship-based. I’m not selling 6 million parts here,” Cotton says. “I am in it for the long haul. Some of my clients will be with me for 10 to 20 years.”
Economic Ripples
Recreational boating had an estimated $31.3-billion economic impact on Florida in 2023, accounting for 109,000 jobs and 7,100 individual businesses, according to data from the National Marine Manufacturers Association. While it’s unclear how many of the 1,004,420 boats tallied in the Sunshine State are yachts — statistics don’t differentiate between superyachts and dinghies — luxury vessels can have some big economic ripples. The Fort Lauderdale-based U.S. Superyacht Association estimates that the typical 180-foot vessel generates $4.75 million in expenditures per year. The biggest chunk is crew salaries — estimated at $1.4 million. Maintenance and repair spending rings in at another $1 million, with fuel costing about $400,000. Other expenditures include dockage and port fees, at $350,000, and vessel insurance, which runs about $240,000. Guests and crew inject another quarter of a million dollars into the local economy. “When you’re holding a costume party or theme night at sea, you aren’t sourcing fabrics and accessories in Monaco. Instead, you bought them at Walmart or Costco in Fort Lauderdale and have them (brought) aboard,” says Julie Perry, a board member at the U.S. Superyacht Association.