Homeward
Eighth Man
Add crew and make the boss happy.
A4 Where do you call home? The latest yacht crew survey. Vol. 4, No. 1
Meet your host Bellingham hosts the April 4 networking event.
A5
A13 April 2007
www.the-triton.com
Yacht crew can’t switch jobs, yachts on B1 visa By Lucy Chabot Reed It is accepted practice among megayacht crew that once they have a B1/B2 visa, they can find work on a foreign-flagged vessel in the United States. Many captains even require it before hiring someone for a job. But that behavior is wrong, most likely illegal, and could possibly get the individual in trouble with U.S. immigration authorities.
At The Triton’s third annual customs and immigration seminar in March, immigration official Jack Garofano outlined the way the B1 visa is designed to work – and it’s not at all the way most yacht crew think. The B1 visa is issued to foreign nationals to visit the United States for business. While there are no written regulations that expressly say yacht crew should have the B1 visa, it is “the most appropriate” visa for the work they
do, said Garofano, assistant director of field operations with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Miami. The snag is that anyone who applies for a visa to enter the United States for work must already have a job. “You cannot be hired on a yacht on a B1/B2,” Garofano said. “You need to have the job to get the visa.” And while for many crew this is the case, there are also many who leave a yacht once in the United States to join
another, which is not allowed. “This is a major issue in the industry: Someone offers them a job and they just go to work,” Garofano said. “In all honesty, this is one of the more serious issues for that individual. Basically, they are working illegally in the United States.” A person is admitted entrance to the United States as a crew member with a
See SEMINAR, page A20
Crew with gun lands yacht’s captain in jail By Lucy Chabot Reed A female crew member aboard a megayacht in St. Maarten brandished a weapon in February, scaring her crew mates and threatening to take her life. Police and security officers at Isle de Sol Marina in Simpson Bay diffused the situation before anyone was hurt, but the lingering impact was still being felt on megayachts a month later through more strict and direct enforcement of weapons rules. The woman was put on a plane and delivered to authorities in the United States, according to Mario Biabiany, company security officer and manager for Island Global Yachting, which operates Isle de Sol. The captain, who was not on the island at the time, was arrested and fined for not declaring the weapons on board and for permitting a crew member access to them, Biabiany said. “If she had hurt anyone, he would have been charged with manslaughter,” he said. “She’d be going to jail, too, but he’s the one responsible for letting her get to the gun in the first place. “He has a little angel on his side that no one was hurt,” he said. According to Biabiany, the woman became distraught during the afternoon after a phone call with the captain. She started drinking and at some point retrieved a gun from the captain’s cabin. At about 1 in the morning, she stood
See GUN, page A26
Chef Brennan Dates was not quite halfway on his 20,000-mile ride to raise money and awareness for Parkinson’s Disease when he ran into a pedestrian with his motorcycle and broke his collar bone. Read more on page A28. PHOTO COURTESY OF BRENNAN DATES
Solution to immigration woes: Be consistent With the whirlwind of immigration information still swirling through their heads, we rounded up seven captains to participate in our monthly roundtable discussion immediately after our annual seminar on U.S. Coast Guard, immigration and customs regulations. [For more on that event, see the story above.] And just as the seminar zeroed in on immigration issues, so did the captains’ lunch. The main problem these captains said From the Bridge they have with government regulations is Lucy Chabot Reed the inconsistency of enforcement. “God forbid anyone comes in through a non-yachting port,” one captain said. “The left hand doesn’t even know the right hand exists, much less what it’s doing.”
As always, individual comments are not attributed to any one person in particular so as to encourage frank and open discussion. The attending captains are identified in a photograph on page A18. “People at the top appreciate yachts,” another captain said. “It’s the inconsistencies that arise at the entry level because of the lack of training.” “We’re a very small portion of what they have to deal with,” said a third. “One indication to me that they don’t even recognize us is that there was no U.S. Coast Guard representation at the Ft. Lauderdale boat show,” a captain said. “Here it is, one of the largest boat shows in the world, and the Coast Guard doesn’t have a presence. That tells me they don’t take us
See THE BRIDGE, page A18