An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Gov­ern­ment is look­ing to re­duce the pa­per­work in­volved in en­ter­ing this coun­try by yacht, as moves to in­tro­duce the Sail­Clear Sys­tem.

Speak­ing at the of­fi­cial launch of the Yacht­ing Ma­rine Ap­pren­tice­ship Pro­gramme, on Tues­day at UTT’s  Ch­aguara­mas Cam­pus Au­di­to­ri­um, Gopee-Scoon said the Sail­Clear Sys­tem is al­ready in use in over 30 coun­tries glob­al­ly, in­clud­ing many in the Caribbean.  

Sail­Clear is an on­line plat­form, which is op­er­at­ed by the Cari­com Cus­toms Law En­force­ment Coun­cil (CCLEC). The sys­tem pro­vides pre-ar­rival and pre-de­par­ture no­ti­fi­ca­tions from ves­sels ar­riv­ing or de­part­ing from any port in the re­gion.  

Fur­ther, Gopee-Scoon said da­ta from the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion re­vealed ar­rivals ris­ing from 431 in fis­cal 2022 to 578 in fis­cal 2023 and in 2024, over the past nine months, this up­ward trend con­tin­ues.  

“While we are thank­ful for this, it is cer­tain­ly not at the lev­els that we are ac­cus­tomed to. At the peak of the sec­tor’s per­for­mance, we at­tract­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,500 yachts per an­num. There­fore, to boost ar­rivals, we must al­so re­spond and adapt to emerg­ing trends in the glob­al yacht­ing sec­tor,” the min­is­ter stressed.

Re­fer­ring to da­ta from a 2023 re­port from Grand View Re­search, a US-based mar­ket re­search firm, Gopee-Scoon said the de­mand for yachts has grad­u­al­ly ex­pand­ed over the last few years, ow­ing to ris­ing dis­pos­able in­come, in­creased fo­cus on leisure and recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ties and grow­ing pref­er­ence for lux­u­ry tourism.

She not­ed that man­u­fac­tur­ers al­so fo­cus on in­clud­ing lux­u­ry in plea­sure crafts for im­proved per­for­mance and en­hanced cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence.  

These de­vel­op­ments in­di­cate that the yacht­ing sec­tor is be­com­ing more so­phis­ti­cat­ed and this coun­try must re­view its prod­uct of­fer­ing.  

Al­so, Gopee-Scoon said the Glob­al Strate­gic Busi­ness Re­port 2023, pub­lished by Re­search and Mar­kets, not­ed that the val­ue of the glob­al yacht­ing sec­tor was es­ti­mat­ed at US$9.1 bil­lion in 2022 and is pro­ject­ed to ex­pand to US$13.7 bil­lion by 2030.

The 150 trainees in the Yacht­ing Ma­rine Ap­pren­tice­ship Pro­gramme will be trained for six months in one skill iden­ti­fied.

The pro­gramme is ex­pect­ed to cost $7.5 mil­lion.

The ten spe­cial­i­sa­tions, the trainees will be ex­posed to, are; ma­rine air-con­di­tion­ing and re­frig­er­a­tion, ma­rine elec­tri­cal and elec­tron­ics, wood­work­ing for the ma­rine in­dus­try, ma­rine weld­ing and fab­ri­ca­tion, ma­rine ma­chin­ist, ma­rine me­chan­ic, ma­rine plumb­ing, sail re­pair, re­new­able en­er­gy sys­tems for the boat­ing in­dus­try and ma­rine clean­ing, paint­ing and re­pairs.

Trainees are to iden­ti­fy one skill they wish to ac­quire and to have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to con­sult with sub­ject mat­ter ex­perts and in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­als.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia fol­low­ing the launch, vice pres­i­dent of the Ma­rine Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion Jesse James sees this pro­gramme as an ex­cel­lent ini­tia­tive and the way for­ward in de­vel­op­ing the ma­rine in­dus­try.

James said the Sail­clear Sys­tem would great­ly as­sist and en­cour­age more yachties to come to Trinidad in­stead of the long-form process to en­ter that cur­rent­ly ex­ist.

“We saw for Hur­ri­cane Beryl that about 200 yachts came from dif­fer­ent is­lands to shel­ter and about 80 per cent of them nev­er sailed to Trinidad, so this is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to get back to our pre COVID num­bers, but the process of en­ter­ing our wa­ters must be smooth,” James stressed.