Recreational Boater Workshop

Workshop for Recreational Boaters: I mentioned this event in my January "RBIG" article, and although not all of the event details are available as yet, it is definitely worth adding this to your calendars! It is a daylong Workshop entitled “Galveston Bay Mariners Connect” and it is to be conducted on February 29th (leap day!) at the spectacular San Jacinto Maritime Campus in LaPorte (re: https://www.sanjac.edu/maritime). The sponsoring sub-committee within the Lone Star Harbor Safety Committee (“Maritime Education, Training & Outreach”) is still working on details, but I do have a draft version of the agenda and it can be found by clicking here, and as soon as it is finalized I will of course be posting it. The concept behind this workshop is to get recreational boaters in the same room with representatives from the USCG Vessel Traffic Service (VTS), with ship pilots, with tugboat and towboat captains, and with the Chair of the Lone Star Harbor Safety Committee and have some dialog with them.

Lunch will be provided, and as the agenda suggests, also some time at the end of the day to experience the Maritime Simulator facilities that they have onsite (click here). This Workshop is a new idea out of this sub-committee, and it kind of parallels the “Brownwater / Bluewater Symposium” events (between ship pilots and towboat captains) that have been held on a couple of occasions. And there has also fairly recently been a similar very useful “symposium” between the towboat captains and shrimp boat captains. This is all in the interest of fostering better communications between the various waterway users, and so here is our chance to meet some of these commercial mariner folks and hear what they have to say about how we can all be better “sharers of the bay”!

Late breaking! The “eventbrite” sign-up page opened on 1/30 (click here) and attendance is limited to 75 persons! So do not procrastinate about getting yourself signed up!!!