The news hits like the proverbial bombshell: the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Social Affairs has surprisingly announced in a Press release has announced that for the 2014 season, the handling of signalling rockets on board charter yachts by charter customers will be drastically simplified: From now on, it will be sufficient for customers to be instructed on site by a competent employee of the charter company in the use of class P2 distress signalling equipment, i.e. above all the rockets. The charter customer then receives a written confirmation of the instruction given, which he takes with him. This does away with the previous regulation that a crew member on board must have the so-called "pyro licence", the certificate of competence under explosives law.
However, the real sensation is the information from the Schleswig-Holstein authorities that the EU intends to generally remove signalling rockets on yachts from the legal regulation level P2 in February 2015 and that they will then only fall under category P1. This would completely exempt charter customers and owners from having to provide proof of expertise.
The unexpected simplification is the result of an initiative by the charter company 1. Klasse Yachten (Charter Centre Heiligenhafen). Under the previous regulation, employees had offered customers the opportunity to complete a one-and-a-half-hour course on site at the start of the charter, in which they could provide the necessary proof of expertise following a practical and theoretical examination. This procedure was recently forbidden to the people from Heiligenhafen for formal legal reasons. They would not fulfil all the conditions for the examination correctly.
"That would have meant that we might have lost hundreds of customers who simply didn't want to take a licence for a charter when they could do without it in the surrounding EU region," says 1st Class Marketing Manager Dirk Kadach. In their distress, the people of Heiligenhafen turned to the Entwicklungsgesellschaft Ostholstein (EGOH) to tackle the competitive disadvantage. As a result, they were able to set a positive example for their charter customers of what working with the authorities can look like: EGOH contacted the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Social Affairs, explained the situation - and found a practical solution.
The ministry came to the conclusion that the existing pyrotechnic licence requirement represented a "legal hardship" and decided to remedy the situation. This is legally possible, as the authority found: "The requirements can be waived if suitable measures are taken to ensure that the signalling devices classified in category P2 are used as intended and only in an emergency. If there is no emergency, use is not permitted."
A new safety concept was then developed together with the Ministry of Social Affairs, the State Labour Protection Authority at the Unfallkasse Nord accident insurance fund and EGOH. Decree was published. In simplified terms, it has the following key points:
- The signalling equipment must be stored in a permanently installed container.
- They must be sealed or lead-sealed.
- Upon return of the yacht, the seal must be checked.
- The customer who has been instructed in the use of the appliance must present the written proof of instruction at the time of inspection.
After this procedure was agreed in Schleswig-Holstein, an agreement was reached at federal level, which also adopted the regulation for the other federal states. This provides the charter market with a simple transitional arrangement for the 2014 season before the new EU regulation comes into force in 2015.
