• e-mail

In 2008 Tim Schulz, a 28-year-old junior deckhand on a £100million superyacht, was driving a tender (the little motorboat that serves the larger vessel) between Corsica and Sardinia. He was ferrying the yacht’s 60-something tech-boss owner and a ‘rent-a-crowd of Hollywood celebrities’, who wanted to snorkel around the rocky island outcrops.

+4

View gallery

Tim Schulz, superyacht deckhand

‘We dived in and spent about 20 minutes swimming around, having a great time,’ Schulz remembers. ‘Until we heard an engine whirring and the tender suddenly whizzing off.’ It turns out that the snorkel mask of the yacht’s owner had a loose strap, and some water had leaked into it. This sent him into such a mad rage that he abandoned his guests – and the three crew members leading the trip – in the middle of the Mediterranean. ‘I had to take refuge on a rock with a lovely actor and we passed the time chatting about his next blockbuster,’ Schulz says. It took about an hour for the on-board crew to calm the owner, retrieve the tender and rescue the A-listers.

For four years, Schulz, now 45, was employed as one of eight deckhands on this 100-metre yacht, sailing around Australia, the Pacific, Caribbean and, most frequently, the Med. The boat, whose billionaire owner he won’t name, slept 12 people and was so huge that just flicking the engine on and off would burn around £1,750 worth of fuel. Schulz, who worked for blocks of up to three months, sometimes with just one day off, first got the job when he was 26 and says, ‘I was seen as a grandad, everyone else was in their early 20s.’

He was drawn to the role by a childhood love of sailing and a deckhand’s starting salary of £3,000 a month, plus bonuses and all expenses (including accommodation, private chef-cooked food and lots of booze) paid for.

However, yachties, as they’re known, do plenty to earn their wages. They live in two-person bunks and clean and prep the boat overnight while the guests sleep. ‘A lot of the job involves polishing things that have already been polished,’ he says. The owner also expected them to lift drain covers to buff covered pipes, and he was once told to dust the grooves of a screw. ‘We used to play a game before the owner arrived, where one of us would walk around the gleaming boat and put ten smudgy handprints on the deck. Then the crew would go around with cloths and whoever found the most won.’

But the real challenge of yacht life wasn’t polishing: it was predicting and reacting to the whims of the super-rich owner and guests. ‘One time, a celebrity couple with yogi vibes was using the boat,’ he says. ‘The wife was a strict vegetarian and, supposedly, a huge animal lover.’ Chartered guests could have the yacht reupholstered however they saw fit and the woman in question, somewhat ironically, chose brown suede cushion covers for the saloon area. ‘However, once we put the covers on, she walked over, ranted that they were the wrong shade and tore them off. So we had to order 50 more in a slightly different brown. All I could think was: “You’re a vegetarian and you’re sitting on a sofa made from 50 cows, while there’s another 50 cows you have had chucked in the bin.”’

Guests would often make nightmarish demands at sea. Schulz recalls one family who chartered the billionaire’s yacht having particularly outlandish requests. ‘Once, we ran out of cherries and this particularly awful group insisted the kids needed more immediately. We were in the middle of the Med and the only solution was to get 15kg – the minimum order – helicoptered in and lowered on to the tender attached to the yacht. It was, hands down, the craziest thing I’ve ever arranged.’

Schulz was well accustomed to tantrums, too, given the yacht owner’s antics. He once invited his ‘supermodel girlfriend’ aboard with her celeb pals, and after a few drinks they headed to shore for a night out in St Tropez. ‘It was dark, the jetty was badly lit and had uneven wooden planks and this, combined with the owner’s bad ankles, resulted in him tripping and falling into the water. Cue absolute mayhem as we tried to fish him out. All the while, he’s shouting at his girlfriend that he fell because he was distracted by her sexy outfit, which sent her into a crying fit. He then told everyone that the party was off and to head back to the yacht. Well, the guests took umbrage at this and went to St Tropez anyway and I, after ferrying the owner back to the yacht, was ordered to pack their bags and drop them on shore. I can only imagine they found them when stumbling out of the club.’

Then there was what Schulz refers to as the ‘coffee incident’, which saw off the young second steward (next in command on the boat). ‘Our owner had these crazy expensive coffee beans from the Amazon, made from, I kid you not, civets’ faeces. The second steward got him a coffee using his beans, then got herself a drink using the crew’s beans. When the owner came downstairs and saw her coffee he went ballistic, accusing her of stealing his beans. This is after she’d worked for him for two years. She said she couldn’t put up with his mood swings, packed her bags and left,’ says Schulz. ‘The strangest thing was that we’d go to St Tropez and he’d put his credit card behind the bar at some swish club and let us spend tens of thousands of pounds on drinks. And then suddenly, he’s worried about coffee beans?’

There were, however, some more serious issues to contend with than appropriated coffee beans. Schulz’s fellow crew were conscious of pirates, an anxiety that worsened after the owner revealed one of the paintings in the yacht’s living area was a real Picasso worth about £20million. Because of the risk, on one occasion, while sailing around the Horn of Africa, the crew had to brief guests on what to do if pirates boarded, which included hiding below deck. ‘It was a small group of tech guys, who said it was more important to hide their computers than the girls they’d brought on board with them,’ Schulz says. ‘When I objected to this, one told me I couldn’t relate because I didn’t know how it felt to have a swanky laptop.’

It’s clear why superyacht life is prime reality TV fodder. Below Deck, a series following crew members, is in its 12th season, pulls in 3.5 million views weekly and has half a dozen spin-offs. When it began casting in 2012, Schulz had just moved back to London for drama school. ‘Everyone told me I should apply,’ he says. ‘But I was done with the industry. My husband did make me watch an episode, but I switched it off when they turned the charter around because a guest had been doing cocaine in their bathroom. You don’t stop a charter for that. You just hope they don’t send you out on the streets at the next port to buy more. I once hosted a group that did a load of magic mushrooms and then wanted all the lights off on the boat to stargaze. They stayed up all night – which played havoc with my cleaning schedule – and insisted I make them cheese and ham toasties.’

Schulz also says, unlike on the TV show, crew members don’t usually start relationships. ‘Our team had an unspoken rule, “don’t s**t on your own doorstep”,’ he says, ‘and it made things easier’.

With all the helicoptered-in cherries and coffee bean-related hissyfits, you might wonder why Schulz stuck at it. ‘It was a mad, wonderful time in my life,’ he says. ‘For someone who wants to see the world, it’s perfect. I did some incredible things.’ The most incredible? ‘Sailing to West Papua in Indonesia, getting in tiny tenders and going five hours up a river to visit a tribe only discovered in the 1980s. They’d been visited just three times, and we were part of a mission to photograph their traditional wear and buy some of their carvings. When they did a full two-hour ritual to welcome us, we watched, in the middle of the jungle, with jaws dropped. Who gets to say they have done that?

‘Being a yachtie adds and takes away from your life. But getting to experience that? On balance, it gives so much more.’