COMMENT
The Easy Option W
ould you like to become the Captain of a superyacht but cannot be arsed to properly gain the qualification? Do you find that getting in your sea time and then sitting the exams a bit of a bore? Or maybe now that you are the Captain of a 50 metre, you yearn to take command of those megaliths in excess of 3000gt that have been coming out of shipyards recently. If any of these is your goal then read on because I am going to tell you how to get them without any of that faf. All you have to do is cheat.
I am not saying it’s easy to cheat but it is possible and if I do not persuade readers to follow my advice, hopefully someone in authority will be moved to make sure the options I am about to be put forward no longer exist.
In order to get your Master Yachts less than 3,000gt it greatly helps if you are Italian. If you are not Italian then you have to go the extra mile by finding an Italian partner and shack up with him or her and learn some local phrases.
Having mastered the art of being an Italian, get your self a job on a small fishing boat. Don’t worry, you do not have to do it for long! Just long enough to get a seaman’s identification card, which if you act dumb, the fishing boat skipper will get for you.
Now you need to buy yourself some yachting clothes and dress the part. White trousers and a dark blue double-breasted blazer with brass buttons works well I am told. It helps apparently, if you can sew a yacht club badge onto the breast pocket because this adds to the air of presumed competence.
The next step involves setting up a meeting with the local harbour master. At this stage I have been advised, it is easier if the harbour master is in his twilight years and the harbour is not very busy. Needless to say if the Harbourmaster is a member of your family or a very close friend then you can skip the fishing boat and fancy clothes stages.
Here the process can get tricky but if you rehearse it well enough you can pull it off.
All you have to do is ask for a Captain’s certificate explaining that your dad wants you to drive his new yacht. Sometimes you may need to pay an issuing fee (at least that’s the wording used when it was described to me).
Once you have your Italian Captain’s certificate all you now have to do is rock up at an MCA office prove that you speakada inglish and hand over your Italian certificate and ask for an MCA issued CoE (certificate of equivalence).
So now you have your CoE and can command yachts up to 2,999gt but maybe that’s not enough. Ever since the MCA issued concessions that allowed officers to hold yacht specific qualifications, they have insisted that the upper tonnage limit would be restricted to 3000gt.
They say that above that tonnage, only officers holding unlimited certificates can serve in yachts of such magnitude. Despite their good intensions and with 50 or so yachts over that limit already in service, it seemed inevitable that at some stage one or other of the FoC states would find a way around that.
Now they have. Following an announcement by representatives of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) Registry, they and the Cayman Islands Shipping Registry have agreed to break ranks with the MCA. The Cayman Islands has announced that they will recognise a new Unlimited Tonnage Certificate of Competency (CoC) issued by the RMI to those officers who attend a US based training school. In other words you can have got from zero to hero without having to sit a written exam or worry about facing an examiner for orals.
A marine training centre in Florida has created a five day training and evaluation course that includes a multiple choice exam and simulator assessment in order to determine the candidate’s knowledge and experience in command of large yachts. The message is clear: attend the course and the certificate is yours. You will need to pay a course attendance fee (at least that’s the wording used when it was described to me).
Michael Howorth asks how and why it is still possible to get a Captain’s licence by passing a multiple choice exam and knowing the right people
ONBOARD | AUTUMN 2017 | 7
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