Steady at sea · calm within
Clear decisions under pressure. Faster recovery after a hard day. Still being good with the crew in month six. All of it runs on the same system — and it can be trained.
Libby Pickett · Palma de Mallorca · Pilot study begins November 2026
The commercial case
Crew turnover is one of the most expensive unaddressed problems in yachting, and the cost falls on owners, management companies, captains and agencies alike.
annual crew turnover on a typical yacht
crew currently experiencing poor mental health on board
have considered leaving the industry
have never had any training for it
Replacing one junior crew member costs a minimum of €15,000, rising in multiples for a head of department. Two yachts that ran their own numbers came out at $21,000 and $30,000. On land, replacing a technical hire is costed at 100–150% of annual salary, and a director at over 200%. Then come the retraining hours, the errors, the tension, and the cost of a crew that keeps starting again.
Crew rarely leave because they can't do the job. They leave because they ran out of capacity to keep doing it.
Sources: Quay Group, The true cost of crew turnover, 2023 — turnover range and replacement costs · Quay Crew and MHSS crew mental health survey, 2021, over 1,000 crew across more than 50 countries — the remaining three figures.
The load
Crew arrive qualified, trained and motivated. What no qualification covers is what sustained load does to the system underneath.
Guests, standards, close quarters, and no natural gap in the day. The system stays switched on because the job asks it to.
Split watches, irregular hours, a shared cabin. Recovery is the first thing the schedule takes.
Family, home, weather, a walk. The ordinary regulators are several thousand miles away, for months at a time.
None of that is a weakness in the person. It is load — and a trained system carries more of it, for longer.
The training
One short practice a day, in Libby's voice, downloaded to the phone before you sail. Eight weeks of it is what moves the baseline.
The core breath is a longer exhale than inhale — and the longer exhale is the part that does the work. It needs no equipment, nobody can see you doing it, and it fits a bunk, a night watch and a bad connection.
Training only counts if it happens on the days it is hardest to do. The whole eight weeks lives on the phone — no streaming, no server, nothing to log into at three in the morning, mid-Atlantic.
Deciding is part of the load. So the training never adds to it. It opens on tonight's practice, and that is all there is to do.
No individual data goes to a captain, a company or to us. That is not a courtesy — it is how the training gets used honestly, and honest use is the only kind that builds anything.
What gets better
Not a mood. A set of things you can feel in the way the work goes.
The judgement that goes first when you are running on empty, and the decisions that follow it.
Not avoiding hard days — coming back from them quickly, instead of carrying one into the next three.
You live with these people. How you are with them in month six is a professional skill, not a personality trait.
More in reserve, later in the season, when the reserve is what the job is actually asking for.
Getting down quickly when the window is short, which is most of the time.
The difference between leaving because you chose to and leaving because you ran out.
Where we are now
We are not going to tell you this builds capacity until we have measured whether it does.
From November 2026, around forty crew across six to ten vessels run the full eight-week programme as a formal pilot study — validated measures at four points, an independent clinical advisor, and results that will say what they say.
A 2022 systematic review of the maritime mental-health literature found sixty-three studies. Two of them tested an intervention. None tested breathing. Being first is a real claim, and it is the only one we are making until the data is in.
The course opens to crew after the pilot. The waiting list gets in first.
Who it's for
The same training, read differently depending on where you sit.
For the deckhand, stew, engineer or chief who intends to be good at this for a long time. The part of the job nobody trains you for, trained.
You carry the vessel's load and your own, and you are the one everybody else reads for weather. Steadiness at the top is the cheapest thing a boat can invest in — and it is trainable rather than innate.
Capacity across a whole crew, held through a full season — measured rather than assumed, and cheaper than the turnover it prevents.
Crew who arrive with more in reserve and stay in the placement. Retention is your reputation, and it is decided in month six, not week one.
The founder
I'm Libby Pickett. I teach nervous-system regulation, and I live in Palma — the busiest superyacht hub in the Mediterranean.
Through my work with Branagh Marine Composites I sit inside this industry rather than outside it looking in. Calm Crew comes out of five years of one-to-one practice, group work and retreats, with yacht crew and industry people among them — built on polyvagal-informed breath, somatic and sound-based methods, developed alongside functional medicine practitioners.
What I kept hearing was not people asking for help. It was people asking how to keep going at this standard — how to still be sharp in month seven, and still be themselves at the end of a season.
That is a training question, not a character one. The system underneath is trainable, and almost nobody is taught how.
Get involved
Crew
The training opens to crew after the pilot. Join the list and you'll hear first.
Join the waiting list →Captains, vessels & management
A handful of vessels are contributing crew to the November pilot. Named founding status, the programme at no cost for participants, and a first look at what the study finds.
Start the conversation →Industry
One or two senior voices — a management lead, an agency principal, a captain of standing — helping shape what this becomes.
Explore advisory →Get in touch
Whether you're crew, a partner, or someone who wants to shape this — start here. I'll reply myself.
I'll come back to you myself, usually within a couple of days.