[QUOTE=tugsailor;140562]The TV show is mostly fictionalized drama set on Bering Sea crab boats.
They are fishermen and actors. They are NOT merchant mariners. 99 percent of fishermen are NOT required to have USCG licenses or take any drug tests.
The medications that you see them taking come from the ship’s medicine chest. The captain can lawfully prescribe those medications.[/QUOTE]
I am familiar with the ship’s medicine chest.
The Captain can only dish out the dope upon a shoreside doctor’s orders.
That type of medicine chest is usually only found on boat sailing Internationally.
Perhaps they do have a medicine chest but in any trauma I have ever seen take place on the episodes the Captain has never been under the direction of a shoreside Doc unless the CG was involved.
Additionally I did not see any morphine being doled out when deckhands were badly injured in other episodes.
All the aforementioned is beside the point.
Are these “unlicensed” hands required to at least have an OS or an STCW?
We see them in gumby suits and using liferafts.
Licensed or not, operating a vessel under the influence of narcotics is no different than a DUI.
That doesn’t matter whether you are rowing your canoe down the creek or driving a fishing boat.
Going out on deck messed up on dope or whatever is also a no no whether you are licensed or not.
The Elliot fella says he is driving a boat financed by a bank.
The bank is going to require insurance.
The insurance company is going to require suitable crewmen usually meaning the captain is licensed and the deckhands at least have an OS to go past the Line of Demarcation.
I saw some nasty posts in regards to my thread.
Stow it.
This is a real thread with a real question posed to the people that are supposed to be protecting us from dummy’s like these guys or anyone else that should not be in a Safety Sensitive Position.
Someone said Sig was licensed.
He should then know it is a Violation to work more than 12 hours in a 24 hour period (excluding emergencies).
Fishing or not.
I started as an unlicensed deckhand on the rivers. We were still not allowed to smoke dope or whatever.
We got drug tested all the time and if you popped positive you were lucky to get a bus ticket home.
End of story.
A lot of us deal with the shrimpers in the GOM. We all know they don’t know squat about the Rules of the Road or anything else for that matter.
Maybe if you are running your own shrimp boat you can sort shrimp with one hand and keep a frosty Bud in the other but seems to me if you were running a brand new shrimp boat owned by a corporation or a bank that there would be some type of vetting.
That is all…