Reginald Allen White

Docket Management Facility (—30) U.S. Department of Transportation West building Ground Floor Room W12-140 1200 Jersey Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20590-0001 RE: USCG-2007-0030 Passenger Weight and Inspected Vessel Stability Requirements; Proposed Rule Sir; My name is Reg White. I am vice president, project development, for Paradise Cruise, Ltd. in Honolulu, Hawaii. I have worked for Paradise Cruise since January, 1982. I have been a licensed U.S. Merchant Marine officer for the past 54 years. Paradise Cruise, Ltd. operates four inspected small passenger vessels and has been in the passenger excursion and passenger ferry business in Hawaii for 51 years. Today the fleet consists of four vessels: One 65' aluminum power catamaran built in 2002 and certificated for 149 passengers under sub chapter T for service on partially protected waters, operating daily from Lahaina Harbor on Maui doing daytime snorkel tours and whale watch in season as well as dinner cruises at sunset each evening. One 65' aluminum power catamaran built in 2007 and certificated under sub chapter T for 149 passengers on partially protected waters, operating daily from Waianae Boat Harbor on Oahu making Eco tours such as Dolphin Watch and reef snorkel tours each day, as well as whale watch in season. One 130' steel monohull built in 1970 and certificated to carry 400 passengers on partially protected waters under sub chapter T, operating on snorkel/reef tours and evening dinner cruises operating daily from Kewalo Basin, Honolulu, on Oahu, and one steel monohull 232' vessel built in 1991 certificated under sub chapter T to carry 1500 passengers on partially protected waters, making luncheon coastal cruises featuring cultural education and sightseeing as well as whale watch in season and dinner cruises each evening operating from Honolulu Harbor on Oahu. Our fleet carries approximately 534,000 passengers per year amongst the four vessels and 18 products offered each day. Learn more about us and our operations at www.starofhonolulu.com I have read the introductory explanation that tries to justify the need for this new, expensive rule making. I find it hard to concur with your reasoning in light of the cold hard facts of life. For the past 50 or so years we have operated the US passenger vessel fleet under the same, unchanged, stability rules. In all those 50 years there has not been one life lost from the instability of a vessel inspected under these rules. The ETHAN ALLEN, as loaded, would not have passed these rules and was not a part of the US Inspected Passenger Vessel fleet. The pontoon boat, LADY D, that capsized in Boston Harbor was blown over by a freak blast of very heavy wind, it had nothing to do with the vessel’s stability compliance, or any shortcoming in the present stability rules, it had mistakenly been given sistership approval by the Coast Guard when in truth it wasn’t a sistership at all, but had been seriously modified. Then we have this proposal claiming untold $TRILLIONS$ of dollars in lives to be saved by revising these rules that have had no failures nor oversights in some 50 years of testing in service at sea! Why don’t you spend your time and energy where it is so sorely needed. Look at the safety records in this country! Lawn mowers are killing an average of 75 Americans each and every year and seriously injuring another 20,000! Over those same 50 years this comes to 3,900 deaths while our industry has had none! Look at lightning. In the US alone 73 people die each year from lightning strikes! 9.6 people are killed in the state of Florida each year by lightning, yet we are doing nothing to require folks living there to wear pointy metal hats and drag a grounding strap behind them everywhere they go. Why, then, when there have been no lives lost at all in the past 50 years because of boat stability problems under these rules, why then, oh why, must we suddenly rewrite these fine rules??? Because a boat that wasn’t under these rules had a problem? Because a boat that had been mis-measured and mis-certificated got into a freak storm and was blown over? No, I’m sorry, but you simply have not justified a need to remake these rules! Your ideas that this industry can absorb, over and over, more regulation and again more regulation and still remain a viable industry is flawed thinking. Look at your own personal finances for a brief example here. You can afford a modest mortgage to buy a home. You can qualify for the loan because you meet the financial responsibility guidelines. Now try to finance another home, and then another home, all at the same time and under the same income. The banks won’t lend you the money because you simply cannot afford yet another mortgage payment each and every month. Well, we are the same way as an industry. Government repeatedly studies the economic impact of their rule making as if this was the only rule we ever had to comply with. This study here completely ignores the fact that just a few years ago you justified the costs of fees for annual inspections and individual licensing fees as very affordable for the average small business. Then came drug testing and education as if they were the only costs we have to pay. We pay $42,000.00 each year for drug testing and training. Then followed MTSA 2002 with the addition of facility and vessel security plans, documentation, training and surveillance. Then to our daily costs of operations, you added the burdens of STCW endorsements for our staff and now TWIC, then adding ARPA and GMDSS and now AIS to the costs of certification for our crews and the purchase and maintenance of the equipment for our vessels. Add to these the costs of Non Tank Vessel Response Plans, Garbage Logs, 60 minutes of unspecified supervisor training under DAPI, ongoing First Aid and CPR training and re-certification for all crew members, Emergency Drills and training for all crew including specialized training for rescue boat operations, and on and on... The education and record keeping requirements of each of these regulatory actions is yet another non productive burden that each of our companies must finance for you. Add to this the training we must conduct for crew members in order to comply with the ADA regulations as applicable and you have one heck of a pile of added on tasks. Each one affordable in it’s own right, but the accumulated burden begins rapidly to tax the ability of a small business to compete within the industry. Sometime very soon you must be required to add up the cumulative costs of all of this additional regulation that you have forced upon us and then, and only then, can you correctly consider if we can carry yet a heavier burden or not. Try to justify that in the light of your own circumstances vice trying to carry three home mortgages without an increase in your income and just maybe you can get some idea of what I’m talking about here. This proposed rule making is far too expensive for the industry to assimilate, especially in light of the fact that you have shown no justifiable need for this burden to be accepted. For myself, we have a vessel that needs to redo it’s stability calculations under Subchapter S as we have been forced to add equipment and machinery in order to assure dependable service to our market under ever more stringent rule interpretations requiring more layers of redundancy in order to operate. I have just received three bids to do the calculations for the inclining. All are open ended in that there will be add on costs if weather should delay us or if the calculations should require refining etc. Of course we must also add the costs of transportation, meals and lodging for the architect’s crew to do the job which comes to about $2,600.00 per person required. We then must take the vessel out of revenue service for a day, a cost that varies with the time of year that we must do the test. From a low of $8,476.00 to the high season’s $15,600.00 for an average of $12,038.00 per day lost revenue. Then we must arrange a dock in quiet waters, rent weights and a truck to carry them and have their weight certified within 24 hours of use, provide crane service and, of course, man the vessel to move her to the test location and back. The bids from the three naval architects have come in at a low of $10,000.00 for the calculations to a high of $20,000.00. The cost to rent the weights, certify their weight, rent the truck to transport them to the required sites, hire a crane to do the loading and moving, pay our crew to man the ship and run the project is about $9,000.00. So using the mean of the three bids received, and allowing only one day for working the job we can safely say the average inclining under Subchapter S is going to run us about $38,638.00. To redo this exercise each ten or less years is not practical if we have not changed the characteristics of the vessel. The deadweight survey should not be not required at frequent intervals if a minimum freeboard mark (loading mark) has been installed at the tipping point on each side of the ship. In this case then, neither is a constant re-regulating of the number of passengers allowed aboard called for due simply to the fear of per person weight change. Using the minimum allowable freeboard "loading mark" the vessel may carry 40 sumo wrestlers or 200 school children or all the spare parts the chief engineer wants to hide in the crevices of the bilge, just not all of the above at the same time. It makes no difference where the weight comes from, you just may not ever submerge the "loading mark". Passenger count then really comes from such valid considerations as the number of life jackets, primary lifesaving devices, escape routes and subdivision. You do not need to repeatedly micro manage the passenger count based only on a fear that Americans are getting fatter. That said, we have no problem with acknowledging the increasing weight of the average passenger, or the increasing weight of vessels over time, but there is a better way to handle it and at once guarantee that as passengers and the vessel gain weight we will always be in compliance, rather than waiting for the next periodic correction. That solution is simply to install loading marks on our vessels. We have them on our newer vessels and we, therefore, should need no further re-calculations on those vessels. No, this entire proposed rule making project is misdirected and needs to be limited to just accommodating the fact that Americans are getting larger over time, and this can easily be solved in perpetuity by the installation of the loading marks. No other parts of this proposal can be justified as worth the expense added on to an exceptionally safe industry that is full of small Mom & Pop organizations that work on single digit profit margins, often times less than 5%, to continue in business. In our business our dinner cruise operations do not compete for our customers with other boat operators but rather with shoreside establishments that have none of the added costs of operations mentioned above and required of us by you. This is not a level playing field, and you continue to try to make the incline steeper for us by refusing to note the cumulative costs to us of your constant rule making and fee inventing. Under paragraph (c) of 71.25-50, 115.505 and 176.505 why do we have to resubmit all the original designs and calculations again each ten years. Can’t you remember where you put them?? I have grave concerns about the math used to re-figure the stability calculations proposed here. This insecurity comes from the math demonstrated in your justification numbers. In your Regulatory Evaluation you say the industry consists of 6073 certificated passenger vessels carrying 655,000 passengers per year. Shucks! The Washington State Ferry System alone carries over 26 million passengers each year. If you start counting the real number of passengers that our industry has carried since the origin of these rules, without a single stability related incident, you will find its a number that goes to the moon and back. In the interests of simple fairness, please back off and stick to the original goal: How do we account for the fact that passengers and boats weigh more with the passage of time. The answer is simple and self adjusting over time so that it is always current, never out of date: install the loading marks. Respectfully, Reg White Vice president, project development Paradise Cruise, Ltd. 1540 S. King St. Honolulu, Hawaii 96826-1919 (808) 222-9794 RawcoHI@cs.com