Gloucester Daily Times
Wednesday July 18, 1984
By Kevin Sullivan
If the light above your license plate doesn’t work, you can’t legally drive your car on Massachusetts roads. But, if you have a fire extinguisher, a horn, a flare and life jackets for everyone aboard, you can take a leaky bathtub to sea and call it a fishing boat. In fact, you can take 199 tons of boat to sea, even if you’ve never so much as paddled a canoe and no one can legally stop you.
In the United States, there are no safety inspections required for vessels under 200 gross tons, no mandatory construction standards, and no license required to be a skipper.
That lack of standards leads to unsafe boats, prone to sinking, some marine safety experts say. And in a city where 35 commercial fishing vessels have sunk in the 1980s, that’s a concern not to be taken lightly.
If your boat us more than 200 gross tons – no Gloucester fishing boats are – you must have a licensed skipper at the helm and your boat must be inspected annually by the Coast Guard. But if you’re 7 years old, at the helm of a 95-foot, 199-ton dragger 150 miles from shore on the Georges Bank with no one else aboard, what can the Coast Guard do?
“Nothing,” says Lt. Commander Douglas Cameron, chief of the commercial vessel safety branch of the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Office in Boston.
That is, he said, as long as you have a lifejacket, flare, horn and fire extinguisher aboard: “They are the most basic requirements.”
“I don’t think there’s ever been a real, full-blown effort to bring your currently uninspected vessels under inspection,” he said. “It would probably be very disastrous to the Industry as a whole. A lot of these vessels probably couldn’t pass inspection.”
Some documents are needed to go fishing, but they are a matter of money, not seamanship. Commercial fishermen must get a $200-a-year license from the state, and all boats must have their official numbers registered with the state or federal government. And most fishermen have radios, which require a Federal Communications Commission license.
Fisheries Commission Executive Director Anthony Verga said the fishing industry would welcome mandatory safety standards: “Why would they oppose it if it would be a safety feature for them?”
But Benkamin Chiancola, owner and skipper of the Serafina II, had doubts about mandatory inspections.
“It’s pretty hard, because everybody is in a different situation,” he said. “I don’t think some of us could go fishing if that was the case.”
Mark Godfried, owner and skipper of the Stella G., said, mandatory safety standards “could be an answer, as long as the federal government didn’t do it.” Godfried said fishing industry leaders should get together and propose “practical” standards that would not put fishermen out of business.
“I, certainly would not mind a more stringent set of things on my boat, provided the insurance company gives credit for it,” he said.
The Massachusetts Inshore Draggermen’s Association (MIDA) has a group insurance plan used by Godfried and about 50 or 60 other inshore boat owners.
It gives premium discounts for items like survival suits and automatic fire-extinguishing systems, said Joseph Sotddard, the New Bedford insurance agent who handles the MIDA plan.
