#i'm not familiar with the pnw in particular but it does seem that the schooner zodiac out of bellingham

[charminglyantiquated]

Hello! I love your sailing posts and have started trying to work towards my long time goal of working on/with ships. I took a sailing class, started volunteering with historic wooden boats, and am planning to work towards my keelboat certification in the coming year. I would love to eventually work on a schooner but I have a cat and would just need to do day trips or shorter week long trips and not live on board. If you have any tips or advice around finding a space like that I would greatly appreciate it! I've found one schooner on Lake Superior that looks attractive and a few sailing education orgs here in the PNW though they don't have schooners...

Oh congratulations! And good luck with the certification!

Day sailors are probably the way to go, whether commercial or educational - they’ll be back at the docks every night. (Windjammers have to fit as many multi-day trips as they can into the season, so living on board is mandatory and the turn around between trips is about ~24 hours max).

My experience with day sailing is that the hours more forgiving (you often start at 9-10ish), you can go home at night, and you have days of/work a specific schedule/ can potentially get a day covered if you have to. I had crew who worked one day a week and crew who worked five; some were full time career sailors and some had picked it up for a fun summer job or a side gig. It seems like that might be a good fit!

Finding boats that could work: in addition to searching ‘location you’d like+tall ships/sailing tours’ (usually my go to lmao), check out Tall Ships America Billet Bank! Filter by Deck Unlicensed for deckhand/educator jobs that don’t require official certification, which is the majority of deckhand jobs on day sailors. Marlinspike Magazine has job postings too. This is a good time of year for it, since everyone’s working on getting a 2023 crew together! I know in New England especially, just about every coastal town with some tourism draw has a few traditionally rigged boats that do day tours.