Travelling is better by sailboat

Report on the Ocean Sailing Association of South Africa. By Pete Sherlock

Ihave been lucky enough to have spent the last few weeks travelling for business and I am due to continue this for the remainder of the year. Normally one would be excited by travel: the idea of visiting foreign places and experiencing the world through the eyes of different cultures promises to be a stimulating experience. Not so much anymore. The allure of foreign places still remains, of course. The diffi culty is in the physical journey to and from the destination. Gone are the days of Stuyvesant-style travel. It is now an endless ticker-tape parade of health forms to be fi lled in, questionnaires requiring recent destinations, documents and more documents duly stamped and declared offi cial, long shuffl ing queues, (mostly) irritated offi cials, mask-on, mask-off, herding, waiting, and undecipherable South African QR-coded vaccination forms. You arrive at your destination exhausted and quite frankly done with the thought of ever leaving home again. Unless you’re a sailor. Sailing, it seems, is the answer. Especially if you are a sailor entering South African waters. It really is much simpler because the process was lobbied, negotiated and facilitated by the Ocean Sailing Association of South Africa (OSASA). The details are contained in Marine Notice 50 of 2020, a victory achieved after several months of lobbying. Post-Covid-19, OSASA is still relevant, further evidenced by the Pre-arrival Notifi cation (PAN), updated via Marine Notice 4 of 2022. This, for me, is the absolute pure heart of our function as an association. To lobby, negotiate and, where necessary, facilitate processes for cruising and the cruising sailor in Southern Africa. OSASA is averse to legislation for the sake of legislation; our mandate is to keep legislation and control from becoming onerous for the cruiser. It gives me great pleasure to expand upon the endeavours of the association over the past year. However, before I do so, I would like to state that OSASA is only able to create space within the informal marine sector because the association is supported and partnered by our affi liate clubs, South African Sailing, the South African Boatbuilders Export Council (SABBEX), the Department of Transport and the many individuals who roll up their sleeves and jump straight into the trenches. You all make it possible, and OSASA’s achievements can only be celebrated because of our strong partnerships and allies. Our main focus over the past year has been to secure tenure for yacht clubs within ports, to negotiate with the Department of Transport regarding passage within national waters for non-SOLAS vessels, and to develop our website into an informative and helpful portal beyond just registering for PAN. In addition, we have been meeting with governmental organisations to acquire the necessary fi nances to explore, research and publish a Cruising Guide to South African Waters. OSASA has been widely invited to participate in government initiatives within the Oceans Economy and Marine Transport sectors and we have also run our own seminars for government. OSASA has been approached by other sailing entities for advice and input and we have also acted in partnership with South African Sailing on a few of their initiatives, specifi cally with regards to tenure. In terms of OSASA’s challenges for the year ahead, I think our biggest restriction is the lack of available manpower. As a fl edgling organisation, we cannot afford to employ anyone, let alone a person who is adequately trained with the institutional knowledge required to fulfi ll the myriad roles we have to adopt when dealing with the challenges that present themselves. This is, unfortunately, not sustainable. There is only so much our small and dedicated team

can attend to, especially given the fact that all OSASA work is done on a voluntary basis. In September last year the Department of Transport initiated a process off the back of our lobbying efforts that would allow yacht clubs within port precincts to enjoy security of tenure at sustainable rates via a Directive. We are now all waiting on the Minister to respond to our application for this Directive. It has been a long journey since the Deneysville Access to Water Launch, which breathed new hope into this initiative. We formed a task team to deal with the matter, lobbied aggressively, had two really significant negotiation meetings with key role players from the Department of Transport, partnered with Senior Council Advocates to write up proposed legislation, arranged and submitted all the required financial data to back up our claims, re-submitted our proposal with suggested amendments from the Department of Transport and finally sat back and waited for the honourable Minister to sign the Directive. It’s a little bit like travelling currently, oodles of paperwork and slow forward shuffling from somewhere at the back of a long queue. Having said that, OSASA believes that there will be no impediment to the Directive being signed. Just recently I was in contact with one of our colleagues in government and I believe the Directive is imminent. But I have no idea, of course, if this information is valid, a little like the foreign health official trying to decipher the QR code on my vaccination form when his scanning machine keeps on showing ‘code unreadable’! Contrary to the QR-code scanner, you can rest assured that OSASA is giving its all for cruising in South Africa. We have robust relationships with government, are dialled in to the Ocean’s Economy and have brilliant support from South African Sailing, SABBEX, almost all the coastal yacht clubs and marinas and, most importantly, the cruising sailor in South Africa.