Capt. Brian Muston is the founder of Savvy Maritime Academy, a training center that offers comprehensive courses for yacht crew in Fort Lauderdale. Muston’s father grew up on the sea with his family, and he instilled in his son a passion for training and preparedness — a passion that he uses to give back to the industry by helping train new crew. How and when did you get into yachting? I started captaining when I was 17 in the Caribbean. There was a yacht in St. Martin in 1991 that didn’t have a lot of crew who had transit experience, so the captain asked me to help him deliver the yacht to France. I jumped on board and helped him deliver the boat and just fell in love with it — I really fell in love with the technical aspect of it. When did training crew become something you were interested in? I grew up on the water and on a boat, and I realized there is a big lack in experience. My brother, my sister, and I grew up on a sailboat [and compared to] the experience of people who did weekend sailing and decided this would be a nice job — I realized the shortcomings of [training]. When I was on the yacht, I realized we’ve got these guests coming on and you have these crew who are entrusted with huge responsibilities, but they have no experience. I just remember early on saying, “This is not going to fly on my boat. I need to make people feel safe.” On the boats where I was captain, we did extensive training. What is Savvy Maritime Academy? Savvy is a platform where we help you get a start in boating or yachting, teaching you practical knowledge and practical skills. Savvy is essentially a place where we like to give you the foundation to start a boating or yachting career. We keep it very grounded to the important things — safety and everyday knowledge — just so you can get a foot in the door and have a fighting chance of surviving and thriving. It’s also about navigating your way around crew and captains, but if you’re on a boat with an arrogant captain, a bad chief stewardess, or a tough owner, you also need to know how to navigate that. So, we try to create that balance of helping you learn both in a short amount of time. What was it like creating an academy? It was hard because I got very sick with COVID. Right when I started, I was in the ICU for 34 days and they basically told me I was going to die. They said, “Say goodbye to your kids, we expect you to be gone.” I guess when I was still there the next morning, they said to me, “Okay, you got a fighting chance.” I was home for four months on oxygen and then I said, “I’ve got to keep moving.” I had a portable oxygen machine, and I would go to the warehouse every day and build up the school, build up the dock, and I would do that every single day with our team over here. Nicholas Gray was instrumental in starting the academy with me, because I was on my deathbed. He wrote most of the course syllabus and then when I came out of the hospital, I was able to work. Douglas Norden was a very big part of that too, and Jeanne Agami was instrumental. It was my idea, and I founded it, but the four of us were really such an amazing team when we launched Savvy — I need to give them a lot of credit. What are your biggest success stories? It’s absolutely helping. Mostly it’s been young people who were just lost in college, didn’t know what to do with their life, didn’t like the schooling system, and their parents had a hard time not knowing what to do with their kids. When they were done, especially in the early days with our 60-day course, their parents would call us and say, “We can’t thank you enough. Our kids have a purpose. We’ve never seen them this happy. They have such a zest for life.” And that is the most rewarding thing ever. Most of those young people are still at their very same job three years later. Can you tell me a bit about this new day working program, Crew, that you’re starting? I’m not from the United States, my kids are American, but I’m really patriotic. I’ve always hated the stigma of “don’t hire Americans,” I never understood it. We have a bunch of people in the U.S. who have no direction and need direction. You couple that with the immigration issues where these crew come from foreign countries — their work has always been illegal; it was just never enforced. Now they’re sending crew away and holding the yachts and marinas responsible. What I am putting in place is recruiting either American citizens, green card holders, or people who can legally work in the U.S., preferably young men and women who want some direction in life, and we will train them at Savvy at our cost. We will give them credentials, uniforms, and take their ID so we have full information on who they are, and we’ll try our best to do background checks. We want to send them out to do day work. For a lack of a better description, it's kind of an Uber for dayworkers. When a captain or chief stew comes into town and needs dayworkers, they message us, and they can select from a few people. They will have proper deck shoes, sun protection equipment, and credentials. They’ll be clean and sober. We just want to make yachting safer, more positive, and kinder by informing crew how to do the right thing and providing them with tools. They may not want to be a permanent crewmember, they may want to be a yacht broker or a chef — we just give people a window to the entire world of yachting and see what they can do.