Crewed, Skippered or Bareboat

Three arrangements

The three words describe who is aboard, and everything else follows from that.

Crewed. The yacht arrives with its own captain and crew, employed by the owner. They run the vessel, cook, serve and maintain it. The charterer is a guest on somebody else’s boat, with the run of it.

Skippered. A professional skipper is put aboard a yacht that otherwise has no crew. The skipper navigates and takes responsibility for the vessel; the guests do everything else themselves, including the cooking.

Bareboat. The yacht is handed over empty. One of the party is named in the contract as skipper, and that person takes command of the vessel and everything that comes with commanding it.

Who is in command

This is the part that matters, and it is not a matter of etiquette.

On a crewed charter the captain commands. They decide when the yacht moves, where it can safely lie and what weather it will and will not go out in. A charterer proposes a plan; the captain decides whether the sea permits it. That is not a service failing — it is how command works, and it is the arrangement the charterer has paid for.

On a bareboat charter that authority transfers to the named skipper, and so does the exposure. The deposit, the damage, the decision to cross a strait in a rising meltemi and the consequences of getting it wrong all sit with the person whose name is on the paperwork. In Greece, in August, that is a real responsibility rather than a formality — see the meltemi.

What Greece asks a bareboat skipper to show

Greek port authorities — the limenarcheio — check the paperwork before the yacht leaves, and they do check.

Three things are asked for in practice.

A recognised certificate of competence for the person taking the boat. Certificates issued by the established training bodies are accepted; a lifetime of sailing without one is not.

A second competent adult aboard. This is the well-known two-person rule, normally satisfied by a signed co-skipper declaration naming that person. Whether the co-skipper must hold their own certificate is applied inconsistently between ports, which is a reason to establish the answer with the operator well before arrival rather than at the quay.

A radio operator’s certificate for whoever works the VHF.

The consequence of arriving without them is not a fine. It is that the yacht does not leave, on a day nobody has spare.

What licences the yacht itself needs

A yacht carrying paying guests is a commercial vessel in Greek law, whatever it looks like.

The framework is Law 4926/2022, which replaced the earlier regime and governs professional pleasure craft, their registration and their charter permissions. A crewed charter starting or ending in Greece runs on a yacht licensed for it, and a foreign-flagged yacht faces a further set of conditions again — set out in foreign-flagged yachts in Greek waters.

For a charterer the practical question is short. The licence exists or it does not, and it can be shown.

What the crewed week actually buys

Comparing the three arrangements on price alone misses what separates them, because the difference is not really the crew’s wages.

A captain who has worked the Cyclades for 15 years knows which bay is tenable in a north wind at 25 knots, which quay has water, which harbourmaster answers at nine at night, and where the yacht can lie while a guest has a tooth seen to on a Sunday. None of that is in the specification of the boat.

The other half of it is domestic. On a crewed yacht somebody else provisions, cooks, cleans, moves the tender, briefs the next port and washes the towels. On a bareboat the party does all of it, which for some people is precisely the holiday and for others is the reason the week does not work.

Which arrangement a brief actually needs

Two honest tests.

Does anyone aboard want to be responsible for the vessel? If the answer is no, the question is settled — a bareboat charter puts that responsibility on somebody whether they want it or not.

What is the week for? A party that wants to sail is well served by a bareboat or a skippered yacht. A party that wants the Aegean brought to them, with the sailing as the setting rather than the activity, is describing a crewed charter and will be disappointed by anything else.

Neither is the better arrangement. They are different holidays that happen to share a vocabulary.