Kesi Irvin’s summer side job has taken her all over the world.

The New Jersey native gets paid to taste ice cream in Italy, ride jet skis in the Mediterranean and stroll through open-air markets in Croatia.

Between June and August, Irvin, 34, works as a private chef on yachts sailing in Europe. This summer, she was hired for five week-long charters.

“It’s been so much fun seeing the world,” says Irvin, a full-time travel blogger and digital nomad.

Irvin is expected to earn more than $10,000 after the season ends – last year she earned about $15,000, according to financial documents obtained by CNBC Make It.

Irvin planned to spend her career on Wall Street – not traveling the world.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, she moved to New York to work as a financial analyst.

But “there was no work-life balance at all” when I was working on Wall Street. “I started to really crave the life aspect,” Irvin says.

In 2015, she quit her job with the intention of taking a year off from work and traveling around the world.

That one year turned into two, then three, and now Irvin continues to live and work in various countries, taking breaks between her travels to stay with her parents in Bluffton, South Carolina.

To finance her adventures abroad, she started working on yachts in 2015.

Her travel blog “Kesi To and Fro” has 17,000 followers on Instagram and is now Irvin’s main source of income – but in the first few years of her travels, Irvin had to rely on her savings and the income from her culinary side job.

In 2015, a few months after being a guest on one of their charter boats, Irvin applied for her first seasonal job with Yacht Week, a company that organizes week-long sailing tours in the Mediterranean and Caribbean.

“I had no experience as a professional chef, but in my application I said I was a great home cook and a quick learner,” she says.

As luck would have it, a Yacht Week crew member canceled a charter a week before departure – and called Irvin to step in.

She worked as a charter host, planning and cooking meals, cleaning the kitchen and entertaining the 10 guests on board. On most charters, Irvin says, she works in a two-person crew: her and a skipper who steers and pilots the boat.

That first job quickly led to other opportunities: Irvin says guests recommended her to their friends who owned yachts, and fellow Yacht Week crew members introduced her to Facebook groups and online job boards for seasonal boating jobs.

Irvin continues to work as a yacht chef during the summer months with Yacht Week, The BucketLust and other private yacht charter companies.

On most charters, she follows the same routine: she gets up at 7 a.m. and works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.

Preparing meals for a large group in a cramped boat galley requires a lot of “creativity, patience and quick thinking,” Irvin says.

Some trips dock in a new city each day, allowing her to visit a bakery, grocery store or farmer’s market and purchase fresh fruit, meat and fish. However, other charters require her to buy all the ingredients and supplies she needs for the week on the first morning.

In those cases, Irvin says she freezes the meat to make it last longer and uses more non-perishable foods like pasta and rice, since there is limited refrigerator and pantry space on boats.

She says some of the most popular dishes she has prepared for her guests include tuna poke bowls and brunch spreads of pancakes, eggs and bacon, along with a Bloody Mary bar.

In the afternoons and evenings, Irvin explores the town where they dock, either on a rented moped or with a coffee in a local café.

Irvin is often asked if her job is similar to that of the crew on “Below Deck,” a Bravo reality series that follows the lives of crew members working on a superyacht.

“It’s not like Below Deck at all,” she says. “We’re not working 24/7 or isolated from the guests. It’s more relaxed, we’re encouraged to interact with them and make sure they have a positive experience.”

Irvin says working on yachts is a “nice addition” to her full-time job.

As a travel blogger, Irvin has multiple sources of income, including organizing and running group tours, paid travel writing, affiliate marketing, brand collaborations, and advertising revenue from her website. These various sources of income can earn Irvin between $20,000 and $40,000 per year, according to financial documents obtained by CNBC Make It.

But earning a decent, reliable income as a content creator can be an uphill battle, she adds. “It’s nice to have a steady, secure job to fall back on,” Irvin says of her culinary side hustle. “And when I work on the yacht, I have no expenses, so I save money while I earn.”

If you want to make money while traveling the world and have half-decent cooking skills, “the job couldn’t be easier to sell,” says Irvin. “You get to live on a boat, get a nice tan, make friends from different countries… it might be hard work, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not a hard job.”

Disclosure: Bravo is owned by NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

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