After an exchange with industry and business representatives, the Federal Ministry of Transport is planning not to punish violations of the radio certification requirement for ship masters for the time being with fines.
The transitional regulation expired on September 30, according to which the skipper of a ship without a radio certificate corresponding to the VHF system will not be fined. Since then, the regulatory offense has been punished with a fine. This hits the charter industry particularly hard, the majority of their customers do not have this certificate (the YACHT reported several times). Now a compromise seems to be in sight - the exception regulation is to be extended.
The Federal Association of the Water Sports Industry announced: “Agreement was reached that a further transitional regulation is required until the desired degree of penetration with radio certificates is achieved. According to the charter industry, only around 50% of the charter skippers in the sea sector have a radio certificate so far. The BMVBS is currently examining how exactly this transitional regulation might look. However, a solution should be found by the start of the 2008 water sports season."
Reinhardt Klemme, the chairman of the Charter Boat Working Group (AKC) explained: “Without this regulation, we fear that customers will migrate to neighboring countries. This would call the existence of the charter operations into question. We are confident that we can significantly increase the number of radio certificate holders through supporting measures within this period. ", The Association of German Yacht Charter Companies also took a stand: “According to the information provided by those affected, around half of the charter skippers were Charter company in possession of a radio certificate in the past season. Not least because of the dedicated training courses offered by the charter industry. That is an increase of 20 percent compared to two years ago. However, this percentage is not yet high enough to prevent charter guests from moving to countries such as Denmark and Holland. For this reason, some companies had already threatened to remove the radio equipment on yachts below 12 meters, which had led to uncertainty among the guests. "