Hi guys, i’m new to the forum and i have a question.
So i worked a charter season with a captain(500gt uscg license). Anyhow i’ve been working on Yachts for the past 10 years. And that guy had pretty much no clue about anything. No managment skills, bad boat handling skills, couldn’t drive a boat with an outboard engine or jet engine. No idea about meteorology, couldn’t tie basic knots or a line to a cleat. He was pretty dangerous specially in towning maneuvers and deploying and retrievering anchor.
How can i report somebody? I mean he definitely faked his seatime somehow
Don’t waste your time. Until he kills someone or sinks the boat, no one cares.
I worked for one of the biggest yacht management firms in the world and discovered we had an engineer in the fleet with a faked license, we had full documentation of the fact and reported it to flag. They would do nothing. The reason they gave is the the license was issued by another flag state with whom they had to deal with at IMO and the risk to them for exposing the fraud was more of a threat than the fraud itself.
Faked licenses and falsified sea time records are endemic in the yacht industry. If you have been in it for 10 years you should be immune to outrage by now.
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I have observed it on near coastal ferries, water taxi, public transit vessels and just about anywhere as far as small tonnage licenses and endorsements go. I have seen companies writing up deck service time for people who have only ever worked at the bar just so they can get their pathetic 100 ton licenses. I have seen daddy tug master document fake sea time for his son too so he can get this AB ticket. That’s not my job to even care, just a lesson to stay the fuck away from certain parts of the industry. Let the USCG do their job.
You have a high opinion of & put too much trust in the USCG licensing system if you believe a complete idiot can’t obtain a 500gt license without faking seatime. The guy could have spent a few years putting bait on fishing hooks & cleaning puke from a tourist head boat then enrolled into a week course to obtain his first license. USCG exams & USCG approved courses aren’t intelligence tests. There’s uscg license-mills all over the place.
Do not bother. You might well earn yourself a worse rep than the clueless captain and you do not KNOW for a fact he faked anything.
There are plenty of legitimately licensed captains I would not loan my Whaler to and plenty of licensed pilots I would not let put gas in my airplane, let alone fly it.
AFAIK the kids that serve drinks on the local tour boat get a ton of “sea time” and probably know all about Coke vs. Pepsi issues 
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A dear friend is a former yacht captain and sailed corporate yachts. She and I are members of the same rescue squad. I helped her out with a student. He was a rich guy who decided, in his 70’s, to buy a 70 foot inboard and sail it to the Bahamas.
Except he couldn’t maneuver it in and out of its slip in our local rich fatcat inlet. So he hired my friend to teach him and the guy was just straight up hard headed. She asked me to come in one day and help him with his small engine room and distribution system. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to get his 24V system up and running. But one look around told me that he really needed to hire a crew for his intended trip to the Bahamas. One school of jellyfish f*****g up his simplex raw water strainers and that 74 year old would be on the hotline to SeaTow in a NY minute.
Yachties come into two categories. 1, they know their shit inside and out and most have the credentials. 2. Dilettantes. You figure out how much of each
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People doing a lot of complaining about 6-pack and 100-ton licenses.
I’m not sure what their alternative is (these licenses exist for a reason), but they sure love to complain.
Faking sea-time is a felony, and you can be sure that if a fatality occurs on a boat under your command, and you are using a license acquired with faked sea-time, you are going to prison. People falsely signing off on your time are also committing a felony.
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