Captain's license requirements

I cant see MLC 2006 applying to private vessels as in yachts or there will be a few flags moving

 

Very few private Megayachts. They are all company, offshore , commercial registered.

I dont know much about it...I just hear the complaints

 

company still means private, commercial means solas, cant see why one would do that except to get more than 12 guests?

 

the catch I can see is many vessels dont have enough crew accommodation to have 3 shifts for bridge and engine room and with area based rules you might not be able to just shove more bunks in each cabin

 

Dont know...I undestood MLC covers 24 meters plus and greater than 200grt engaged in international trade. This covers many yachts

 

Back in.

 

Do not confuse the standard of EDUCATION (STWC-95) with skipper/master/captain RESPONSIBILITIES/REQUIREMENTS at sea (SOLAS) - "sea" meaning: international waters.

Your country does not have to be a signatory of, to be compliant with STWC-95. It however must be a signatory of SOLAS for your licence to be accepted in a IMO (STWC-95 AND SOLAS) signatory country. If it isn't you are most likely not going to be allowed into the country. As I said before, it is a decision of local maritime authorities whether they will let you in or not, and in my experience it is really how the port captain making a decision is feeling on the day.( But if you are on a merchant ship, you WILL be refused the entry. Your company and you personally would pay a penalty.)

IMO manages both, so that becomes a nice after-dinner subject for wannabe seafaring captains to rant about endlessly.

A skipper/etc. must be SOLAS certified. How s/he will get there is not of importance as much. STWC-95 is mostly a minimum requirement standard for education of maritime personnel.

The para from wikipedia shows the greyness of the issue:

"One especially important feature of the Convention is that it applies to ships of non-party States when visiting ports of States which are Parties to the Convention. Article X requires Parties to apply the control (abovementioned penalties for non-compliance) measures to ships of all flags to the extent necessary to ensure that no more favourable treatment is given to ships entitled to fly the flag of a State which is not a Party than is given to ships entitled to fly the flag of a State that is a Party."

What they are trying to say is that all parties to the IMO STWC-95 (as I wrote earlier) can refuse the entry, or slap you hard with "control measures", if your certificates are not up to the standard. What does not seem obvious is that that refers to the responsibilities and requirements of SOLAS. That greyness in understanding comes from the fact that 90% od STWC-95 regulates the training of maritime staff. But, in essence, the training is just a pretext to having SOLAS. If you are a first officer (or any other officer, including mechanics in the dungeons) but do not have the SOLAS cert. you cannot set your foot on a ship that will go to another country.

As complex as appears thanks to the stupid masons who had infiltrated international institutions and polluted the world with their stupid ideologies, it is actually that simple. To be a skipper of a vessel that goes abroad, irrespective of its' size, you must be SOLAS certified. To recieve the cert, you must be trained. STWC-95 provides the minimum training requirement for you to get the licence and SOLAS cert.

As a few have confirmed here previously, one can, apparently, go between usa and Canada with just a local recreational paper but that is only because of the agreement between the countries that they will treat each other citizens as their own - territorial water sailors.

That removes the need for you to get the full, SOLAS-compliant, skipper cert.

It is (almost) the same as in EU, where you may be able to go from France to Spain with just a recreational skipper cert. and then from Spain to Italy. The condition for that is that you never leave the territorial waters.

Under the convention (STWC-95 and SOLAS), you may even be arrested by the IMO signatory country for endangering the lives of people on board if you leave the 12 mile limit and venture into the open seas.

And then we, yet again, have the ****** in the usa government who ALWAYS ******** about international "co-operation" but they always have their own rules and laws. Despite signing all the international conventions and agreements. So, while the convention creates the environment for unification (not necessarily a good thing), the usa agrees to it and then goes its own way...

That only creates confusion and eventually a mistrust and a fricken lot of work if you are a maritime officer in charge of documents on a merchant ship. This has been streamlined in the last decade or so but I am not going to go into that side of alumin I um now.

 

But then he would need a tug to drag him around. And tugs need even more complex certificates on top of everything required for the crew.

Jokes aside, let us remember that the original question was at which point one needs a captains's certificate for a personal (leisure) vessel, and the answer that there is no such thing as captain's certificate for a leisure vessel. If the leisure vessel is yours, you simply promote yourself into a captain, but your official paper will be for a skipper or whatever is the official nomenclature in your country. The sweet irony (that hurts the ego of many a captain of a real ship) is that you can then get yourself an uniform and slap the captain's stripes on your shoulders!!!

In the real world captain's exam does not make you a captain of a real ship. You become a captain once you pass the exam and you get your first ship to command from the company you work for. Until you get your first ship, you are not a captain. However, it is a tradition, fueled by vanity, that as soon as you pass the exam your colleagues (up to your rank of the First Mate) call you a captain. The actual captains will never call you a captain if you did not get your first ship. Until then you are merely a First Mate.