How Much to Tip a Deckhand

The mate is the person whose income you are actually holding at the end of a charter, and almost nobody realises it until somebody tells them. The captain runs the boat and is paid for the trip. The mate runs the deck, and on a great many boats is paid mostly by what the party hands over at the dock. Every other question about paying for a guided day sits under the hiring hub.

Why does the mate get the larger share?

Because the trip fee is not paying them the way it pays the boat.

The fee covers fuel, bait, ice, tackle, insurance, maintenance and the captain's own time, and there is not a great deal left in it.

On many operations the mate's arrangement is explicitly built around gratuity rather than a wage.

Which means the customary total tip does not split evenly, and the person who did the most visible work usually receives most of it.

Some operations say so on their booking page, in writing, before you ever arrive.

Ask if you are unsure, because the answer is not embarrassing to give and the question is not rude to ask.

Oahu Fly Fishing, HI

What is the customary amount?

A percentage of the trip fee, with the mate taking the bigger part of it.

The convention on charter boats is a percentage of the total rather than a flat sum, and it scales with the length and price of the trip.

Fifteen to twenty percent of the charter is the figure most parties work from, and more where the crew has genuinely earned it.

Of that, the mate customarily receives the larger share and the captain the smaller, which reverses what most people assume.

On a boat with no mate, the whole thing goes to the captain and the arithmetic gets simpler.

Where the practice differs is worth a single question at booking rather than a guess at the dock.

What does the work actually consist of?

Everything on the deck, from before you arrived until after you left.

Rigging and re-rigging, baiting, watching a spread, clearing tangles, gaffing or netting, and unhooking.

Then the part nobody sees: washing the boat, breaking down tackle, and cleaning and bagging your fish.

Before you arrived there was ice to load, bait to buy or catch, and a deck to make ready.

On a busy boat that is a fourteen hour day around a six hour trip.

What the trip looks like from your side is described in the offshore day piece.

Is there anything written about paying people at sea?

There is, and it is unusually forceful.

Federal statute provides that a seaman's entitlement to wages and provisions begins when the seaman begins work, or when the agreement specifies that they begin work or be present on board, whichever is earlier.

At the end of a voyage the master shall pay each seaman the balance of wages due within twenty four hours after the cargo has been discharged, or within four days after the seaman is discharged, whichever is earlier.

And then the sharp one. Where payment is not made as provided without sufficient cause, the master or owner shall pay the seaman two days' wages for each day payment is delayed.

The section is 46 U.S.C. 10313, at the Office of the Law Revision Counsel.

Two days for one is a deliberate multiplier. It exists so that delaying somebody's pay is never the cheaper option.

None of that reaches a charter mate, and nothing here suggests it does. It is quoted because it puts a very old principle in writing: the person who did the work gets paid promptly, and lateness costs the payer rather than the worker.

What else does that scheme protect against?

Being charged for the privilege of having a job.

Federal statute provides that a person may not pay a seaman wages in advance of the time when the seaman has earned them.

It also provides that a person demanding or receiving from a seaman, or from an individual seeking employment as a seaman, remuneration for providing that employment is liable to the government for a civil penalty.

And it closes the obvious loophole: a payment made in violation of that subsection does not relieve the vessel or the master from the duty to pay all wages after they have been earned.

The section is 46 U.S.C. 10314, at the Legal Information Institute.

Nobody is being accused of anything here and no arrangement on any boat is being described.

The reason it belongs on a tipping page is that both provisions point the same way: what somebody earns for a day's work should reach them, in full, without anybody taking a cut on the way.

Is a tip a fee?

No, and one federal rule is very precise about the difference.

Under a federal rule on unfair or deceptive fees, the total price is everything a consumer is obliged to hand over for the thing itself plus any add-on they cannot decline.

Government charges, shipping charges and fees for any optional ancillary good or service are excluded from that total.

Which puts a voluntary gratuity on the other side of a bright line from a mandatory charge. One belongs in the advertised total and the other does not.

Anything left out of that figure has to be spelled out before the customer agrees: what it is, why it exists, how much it comes to, and what the final payment will be.

The sections are 16 CFR 464.1 and 464.2, published at eCFR.

That rule covers particular categories of good and service, and a fishing charter is not asserted to be among them. It is quoted because it draws the exact distinction a client needs: anything mandatory should have been in the price you agreed, and a tip is not mandatory.

What if a gratuity has been added automatically?

Then it is a fee, and it should have been disclosed before you agreed.

Some operations add a service charge to larger parties, which is entirely legitimate and entirely different from a tip.

What matters is that you knew about it before you consented rather than discovering it on a card slip.

The same federal rule prohibits misrepresenting the nature, purpose, amount or refundability of any fee, and the identity of what it is for.

Where a service charge exists, ask plainly whether it goes to the crew, since the answer determines whether anything further is expected.

Most operators answer that question in one sentence and think nothing of being asked.

How does that change what you do at the dock?

Hand it over directly, in cash, and say what it is for.

Cash reaches the person it was meant for, immediately, with nobody in between.

Handing it to the mate rather than the captain removes any question about how it gets split.

Say a sentence with it, because a tip handed over silently reads as a transaction rather than as thanks.

If there are two mates, ask how they would like it divided rather than deciding for them.

If you genuinely cannot manage cash, hand it to the captain and say plainly who it is for.

Why cash rather than an app?

Signal, timing and simplicity, in that order.

Dock signal is unreliable and card readers dislike salt, damp and cold.

Payment apps work when they work and are a nuisance when they do not, which is at exactly the wrong moment.

Cash also lets you split between captain and mate without an awkward conversation about proportions.

Take it out the day before, because there is no cash machine at a marina at five in the morning.

The wider argument about payment method is set out in the cash or app piece.

What if the fishing was poor?

The mate's share should not move much, and here is why.

A blank day means the mate rigged, re-rigged, cleared tangles and worked the deck for nothing to show at the end.

The one thing they did not do is decide where the boat went, which is the captain's job.

So the effort was identical and the outcome was not theirs, which is a poor basis for reducing what they receive.

Judge it on whether the deck was worked properly, which is visible all day if you watch for it.

The whole argument is worked through in the bad day piece.

MarshOnTheFly, LA

What if the service was genuinely poor?

Then reduce it, and say why, quietly and once.

A mate who was rude, absent or careless with the fish has not done the job, and the convention does not require you to pretend otherwise.

Reducing without a word teaches nobody anything and leaves everybody worse off.

One sentence to the captain afterwards is more useful than a silent decision at the dock.

This is genuinely uncommon, and most complaints turn out to be about the fishing rather than the service.

Be honest with yourself about which of those you are reacting to before you decide.

Does the length of the trip change it?

Yes, because the percentage does the scaling for you.

A half day charter produces a smaller tip than a full day one, which is exactly right, because it was less work.

Where the percentage breaks down is on very long or multi-day trips, where a straight percentage becomes a large number.

Most parties on those trips work from a per-day figure instead, agreed in advance among themselves.

Ask the operator what is usual on a trip of that length, because they have seen a thousand of them.

Nobody will think less of you for asking and everybody would rather you did.

What about a shared or head boat?

Different arithmetic, same principle.

On a boat selling individual seats, you are one of many and the crew are working for the whole deck.

A per-person figure is customary rather than a percentage of a charter fee, and it is smaller.

The mates on those boats work extremely hard, because they are untangling and unhooking for twenty people rather than four.

Ask at the counter what is usual, because head boats generally have a plain answer.

The comparison between those two products is set out in the offshore packing piece.

Does a group split it or does one person pay?

One person hands it over, and everybody contributes beforehand.

Four people each producing a separate handful of notes at the dock is awkward for everybody including the crew.

Agree the total in the car park on the way out rather than on the way back.

Nominate one person to hold it and hand it over, which removes the whole negotiation.

If somebody in the party fished less, that is a matter between you rather than something the crew should see.

How to run that conversation without it being awkward is covered in the fly fishing tipping piece.

Is the tip really their whole income?

On some boats close to it, and on others not at all.

Arrangements vary enormously between operations, ports and seasons, and none of it is your business to interrogate.

What is fair to ask is whether the mate is tipped separately, which is a normal booking question with a plain answer.

Beyond that, assume the work you watched all day is worth paying for and act accordingly.

The convention exists precisely so that nobody has to have a conversation about somebody else's wages.

Which is the practical case for following it rather than trying to reason from first principles at a dock.

Does the boat or the operator take a cut?

Not on a well-run operation, and it is a fair thing to want to know.

The convention only works if what you hand over reaches the person you handed it to.

On the great majority of boats it does, straightforwardly, and nobody thinks about it.

Where a service charge is collected centrally, asking whether it goes to the crew is a normal question with a plain answer.

You are not auditing anybody. You are checking that your intention and the outcome match.

If the answer is vague, cash handed directly to the person solves it entirely.

What about the person who cleaned your fish?

Frequently the mate, and occasionally somebody else entirely.

On many boats the mate does the cleaning as part of the day, and it is included in what you were already going to give them.

At some marinas a separate cleaning station charges by the fish and that person is not crew at all.

Ask which arrangement applies before the fish are handed over rather than afterwards.

Where it is a separate service, it is paid separately and does not come out of the crew's tip.

Where it is the mate, the work is substantial and it is worth remembering when you decide the amount.

Does it change with the size of the party?

The percentage handles most of it, and the workload handles the rest.

Six anglers is more than twice the work of three, because tangles and hook-ups multiply rather than add.

Which is a reason for a full boat to lean toward the upper end of the customary range rather than the lower.

It is also a reason to agree the total among yourselves before the trip rather than at the dock.

A boat that carried a large party well has earned more than one that carried two people easily.

How to organise the money conversation in a group is set out in the inshore day piece.

What is the one thing people get wrong?

Handing everything to the captain and leaving.

Most first-time clients assume the captain is the person to pay and that it filters down, which on many boats it does not.

The fix costs nothing: two envelopes, or two handfuls, and a sentence about which is which.

The second most common error is having no cash at all, which is fixed the night before.

The third is tipping on the catch rather than the effort, which is the wrong measure everywhere in this business.

What that measure should be instead is set out in the offshore cost piece, which explains where the trip fee actually goes.