The quality of higher vocational nautical English teaching is not only related to the student’s vocational ability and job competence but even related to the safety of the ship and personal safety during the voyage. In this paper, we design a reform plan for higher vocational nautical English teaching based on the Hadoop-MapReduce distributed system framework, design the reading and writing algorithms of teaching resources, use a genetic algorithm to improve Pick-KX dynamic load balancing algorithm and construct a nautical English project-based teaching resource base. The effectiveness of the improved Pick-KX dynamic load balancing algorithm in this paper is tested through experiments with 200 to 1000 concurrent users. Finally, two senior nautical English classes are selected to conduct a semester of controlled variable experiments on project-based teaching reform and analyze the changes in performance. It was found that when the number of online users increased from 200 to 1,000, the IO and memory occupancy increased by 60% and 458M, respectively, and the average time taken increased from 0.8 to 5.8 seconds, which was in a reasonable range, and the repository was able to run smoothly. After one semester of experiment, the average score of the experimental class increased by 10.88 points, and the distribution of scores changed towards the high end of the range, while the scores of the control class did not change significantly. This paper’s nautical English project-based teaching resource library is effective, and the project-based teaching reform is a significant improvement in students’ nautical English scores. This study provides unique ideas and feasible methods for the reform of nautical English teaching, as well as the application and innovation of project-based teaching.