Bearings
Three sessions to work out where you actually are, what is genuinely in your control, and what you are going to do about it — built around the fact that you cannot go home at the end of the day.
Yachting is not an ordinary job
You live where you work. You share a cabin with the person you had a difficult conversation with at breakfast. Your reputation travels the docks faster than you do. And there is nowhere to go and cool off.
That environment is the thing most people are actually struggling with — not the work, and not their ability. It just gets mistaken for a personal failing, because nobody names it.
How it runs
Three 90-minute sessions over four to six weeks, scheduled around charters and time zones, plus three 20-minute check-in calls within 90 days.
Where you are
An honest position fix. What is actually happening, what it is costing you, and what you have been carrying that is not yours to carry.
What you control
Separating what you can change from what you cannot, and choosing the one thing worth working on. Most of the relief is in this session.
What you do next
A plan you can run in a busy season, and the tools to hold it when the boat gets difficult.
- Exercises to use between sessions — yours to keep
- Session notes after every call
- Scheduling that works around charters, guests and time zones
Who it is for
Anyone in the boat world going through a change. The programme is the same — what we work on is not.
- New to the industry — first season, first crew mess, first time living aboard
- Newly promoted — leading people who were your peers last week, with no HR and nowhere to cool off
- Facing an exam or a ticket — the head of the person sitting it, not the syllabus
- Deciding what is next — stay, step up, come ashore, or leave altogether
- Carrying a difficult crew — the conversations you keep not having
- Running out of road — still capable, no longer sure it is worth it
Nothing you say reaches your captain, your crew or your management company. Not what you discussed, and not that you booked at all. In an industry this small, that matters more than anything else on this page.
The founding cohort
Clarification Services is moving onto a professional footing. The first five people through this programme get it at a founding rate — in exchange for honest feedback at the end, including the parts that did not work, and an introduction if it was genuinely useful.
About Clare
Clare Nel spent more than ten years working aboard yachts before she ever coached anyone. She knows the demanding schedules, the close quarters, the way a crew changes when one person is struggling, and what it costs to be the person everyone else relies on.
For the past two years she has lectured Human Element, Leadership and Management at Professional Yacht Training in Fort Lauderdale — the leadership course officers and management-level seafarers are required to take. Her teaching covers communication, situational awareness, decision-making, teamwork, conflict, stress and leadership styles, and the question underneath all of them: why good people sometimes make poor decisions.
Behind that sits a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Education and a Master's in Teaching. She began her career as an educator, went to sea, and came back to teaching with a decade of lived experience no syllabus can supply.
Coaching is what happens after the classroom. A HELM course gives an officer a framework in a week. It cannot follow them back to the boat, and it cannot help with the conversation they are dreading on Thursday.
She coaches the person, not the syllabus. She teaches the technical side of leadership for a living and deliberately leaves it in the classroom: no navigation, no stability, nothing that appears on a ticket, and no preparation for the technical part of an oral. What she works on is the person behind the qualification.
Based in Fort Lauderdale, working by video with clients wherever they are in the world.