Inland shipping deckhand vacancies in Limburg, Belgium

An inland shipping deckhand helps manoeuvre and maintain inland vessels that carry passengers or goods. You start the engines and pumps, keep watch over the navigation, couple and uncouple vessels and handle the mooring. You load and unload the ship and carry out daily maintenance, and you take emergency measures when an incident occurs, following the shipping regulations and safety rules.

An inland shipping deckhand in Belgium usually earns between 14 and 19 euros per hour gross. Your experience, certificates and the type of transport determine where you sit in that range. Living on board and long trips can add allowances to the package.

With experience and the right certificates you can grow into a helmsman and later a skipper of an inland vessel. Deckhands who prefer land based work often move into related transport and logistics roles such as crane operator, forklift operator or warehouse worker. The route you take depends on the certificates you obtain and where you want to work.

You work in the transport and logistics sector as sailing personnel in inland navigation. Your workplace is the vessel itself, on the rivers and canals of the inland waterway network. The work is outdoors and physical, in changing weather, and often involves living on board for several days at a time.

In practice both names point to the same profile. Inland navigation crew member is simply a broader way of describing the person who works on deck of an inland vessel. The daily tasks of manoeuvring, mooring, loading, unloading and maintaining the ship stay the same whichever term the employer uses.