Happy New Year to you all! I am putting my paperwork together for my captain’s license and wondering if I could use the time I spent on fishing vessels as an observer. I was contracted by NOAA and mostly observed fishing ops, but did a lot of wheel watching and used the SSB radio regularly to contact our office from high seas. These vessels were all under 200 tons USCG registered and inspected. Thanks !
[QUOTE=DeeperSea;193933]Happy New Year to you all! I am putting my paperwork together for my captain’s license and wondering if I could use the time I spent on fishing vessels as an observer. I was contracted by NOAA and mostly observed fishing ops, but did a lot of wheel watching and used the SSB radio regularly to contact our office from high seas. These vessels were all under 200 tons USCG registered and inspected. Thanks ![/QUOTE]
DeepSea - Nobody has replied to your post, so I’m just bumping it back to the top.
Interesting question. Do you have a sea service letter, and how was it worded?
Traffic on the forum is down, likely due to the downturn in the oil patch, as well as glitches in the forum software. Apparently it works on iPhones, but many of the rest of us need to clear our browsing history in order to see new posts.
waits for the now inevitable crackdown from USCG on said fishing boat captain for having an observer with no MMC standing a watch at the wheel
I wouldn’t count on getting sea time for that bud.
Fisheries observer…I knew it.
If a cook can get an AB Unlimited for cooking 3 squares a day, surely a fisheries observer can get a captains license. Go for broke and ask for one of those nifty OSV 10,000 tickets while you are at it
I was in school with a female AB who worked at MSC as. Forklift driver, going for their 3 rd Mate and had never even been on a bridge before
Hey man, no worries there. After all, a newly minted academy grad 3M UL has very little bridge experience, but the still drying ink in their MMC says OICNW.
[QUOTE=skycowboy;193956]I was in school with a female AB who worked at MSC as. Forklift driver, going for their 3 rd Mate and had never even been on a bridge before[/QUOTE]
You Americans have the weirdest system for certifying mariners in the world. (My opinion only)
It all comes down to the integrity of the officers who are signing off on the stcw assessments and I would guess how they sign them into the vessel.
For example does a forklift driver for MSC need an AB ticket? Or did they simply have one and they got time as AB because the they were signed on as AB. Even though they were performing the duties of something g else. What is good for the individuals mmc isn’t always good for the industry as a whole.
My outlook is that this kind of thing wouldn’t be much different than the thread about athe guy giving out fake DP certificates
[QUOTE=skycowboy;193956]I was in school with a female AB who worked at MSC as. Forklift driver, going for their 3 rd Mate and had never even been on a bridge before[/QUOTE]
That’s a bunch of bull. There is no such job classification as a forklift driver aboard an MSC ship. CIVMARS drive forklifts and operate other equipment as part of their AB duties.
Doesnt seem outside the realm of possibility that an AB with MSC might spend all their time dayworking on deck and never do any watchstanding in the wheelhouse. But it was probably an exaggeration.
[QUOTE=Slick Cam;193975]Doesnt seem outside the realm of possibility that an AB with MSC might spend all their time dayworking on deck and never do any watchstanding in the wheelhouse. But it was probably an exaggeration.[/QUOTE]
Some maintenance ABs don’t get near the bridge but I don’t think you can make that jump without STCW which means getting signed off on bridge watches.
I’ve also heard of ABs getting most of the qualifying time for their 3rd mate ticket while sitting on the hook in Diego Garcia but I don’t know how true that is.
In my experience…you can obtain sea time towards a license with sea time accrued on a USCG documented fishing vessel. Depends on your position aboard vessel as to what good it will do for you.
As owner/operator of my own FV back in the day I was able to use all my seatime that I could verify with letters that backed my own personal logs. Letters from Fish companies actually worked. Time from Alaska to Samoa and a few seasons fishing albacore for Starkist in Pago Pago worked for me. After my return to the states after three seasons down south…the CG allowed me, after passing needed tests, master 100 ton Mate 200. An AB unlimited and move to master 200 with additional sea time, no testing.
I did turn in 2300 days of verifiable seatime as captain …from years of fishing… likely wouldn’t work that way now. And like I say…depends on position and verification.
All this other stuff you guys are talking about, Ab on a fork lift, or looking out the window at anchor on watch…doesn’t make much sense to a real hawspiper.
“and that’s all I have to say about that”
[QUOTE=DeeperSea;193933]Happy New Year to you all! I am putting my paperwork together for my captain’s license and wondering if I could use the time I spent on fishing vessels as an observer. I was contracted by NOAA and mostly observed fishing ops, but did a lot of wheel watching and used the SSB radio regularly to contact our office from high seas. These vessels were all under 200 tons USCG registered and inspected. Thanks ![/QUOTE]
You haven’t given enough information to answer your question. It depends on what you did on fishing boats, and what you are applying for.
[QUOTE=jdcavo;193988]You haven’t given enough information to answer your question. It depends on what you did on fishing boats, and what you are applying for.[/QUOTE]
Considering that you guys hand out unlimited master’s tickets to mud boat drivers, does it really matter if a fisheries observer is anointed as a master?
It really does look like the “ladder” of increasing experience and responsibility that leads to the top has been replaced by a pogo stick.
Time in service is a horrible measurement of competence. HORRIBLE. You know in the military, 23 yr olds command/fly fighter jets and hug c5 planes with fewer than 200 hours of time in the seat?
Why can’t the system just test on ability with real practical tests (or at least give the option). Make the test hard…and even expensive if you want. “Hey bud, you can park a tanker and prove it. You can do all the other tasks in this hard practical test. Here’s your license” Why requiring a million days at sea doing the same shit is required is beyond me.
I think requiring the completion of an assessment sheet was aimed at mariners demonstrating practice competence. What hasn’t happened is any reduction in the often monotonous sea days required. Steam from Pulau We to the BIOT, get about 4, 5 or 6 days of sea time (depending on vessels speed), each watch being EXACTLY like the other. Steaming from S’pore to Yokohama, longer and not quite as monotonous. Maybe in some cases we could be credited for serving on a particular voyage instead of a number of days involved. Different voyages being a different point value, etc.
Airline frequent flyer programs give credit for miles flown OR number of segments flown, something like that, details could be worked out. (This of course could create a whole new industry for folks that keep track of all this!) 
BTW Happy New Year to all !!
That is why there are more than 50 military aircraft lost due to accidents (mostly related to deficiencies in training and inexperience) every year.
“Hey bud, you can park a tanker and prove it. You can do all the other tasks in this hard practical test. Here’s your license” Why requiring a million days at sea doing the same shit is required is beyond me.
Sure, park it a thousand times and drive it for a million days because we can’t afford to have 50 tanker wrecks every year. Parking it one time on one day is hardly a demonstration of skill and knowledge and you know it.
The real issue here is actually the acquisition of “good” judgment, however anyone might define the term.
Can one be fully “competent” without possessing good or sound judgment? I would argue that they are 2 sides of the same coin and are therefore inseparable. Possessing technical competence that cannot be effectively applied consistently because of a lack of judgment, to me, falls under the definition of incompetence.
The acquisition of “good” judgment can only come through experience, but how much experience (and of what kind) a given person needs to acquire it is highly variable. Sea time-requirements are simply a somewhat arbitrary minimum standard that we use because, well, we have to start from somewhere and bureaucratic systems require it.
As always, mileage can and will vary. Some people need a lot more experience (read: practice) than others to acquire an equivalent level of judgment, some much less, and for others no amount will ever be enough.
It is not a 2-way relationship. Experience, whether a lot or a little, is absolutely necessary to learn good judgment. But having lots of experience in no way guarantees, or even remotely implies, that any given individual will have acquired the good judgment that true competence requires.
[QUOTE=captjacksparrow;194041] Experience, whether a lot or a little, is absolutely necessary to learn good judgment. But having lots of experience in no way guarantees, or even remotely implies, that any given individual will have acquired the good judgment that true competence requires.[/QUOTE]
I’ll go along with that and add that it takes many examples of bad judgement to learn good judgement. The trick is to live and work long enough to learn from their mistakes and make more good judgements than bad. That is why 23 year old military pilots and cereal box license holders frequently come to a sticky end, they were not lucky enough to to reach the point where luck was not the only reason they still exist or have a job.