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The following article was published in Caribbean Compass June 2011

A reply from Sir James Mitchell, once prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines is also included, and was from Compass

I have worked for many years in the field of promoting the yachting industry in the broadest sense throughout the Eastern Caribbean. Most years, just when things start to go well, some official somewhere has a fit of epauletsy and manages to mess things up, sometimes as effectively as throwing sand in machinery. Occasionally we narrowly escape, as with the whole APIS business a few years back. We occasionally get a case of malignant epauletsy. This is where the officials do not care about the industry, and actually take pleasure in harassing those over whom they have power. There was a good case of it this season when a charter boat captain was fined US$5,000 for eating in a restaurant (that was right next to the Customs office) before he had cleared Customs. He had not yet cleared Customs because the Customs office was closed. He took nothing off his boat, he was not doing anything counter to the purpose behind the law, but the head of Customs had a "gotcha" moment (he knew the captain had a charter coming up and did not have time to wait for court) and slapped him with a big fine. So, $5,000 in the Customs revenue box and $50,000 worth of negative publicity all over the internet — not a great trade for the country he is serving. Happily, malignant epauletsy is rare. Usually the epaulettic is personable, well meaning and honestly thinks he is doing the right thing. He just lacks perspective.

I wouldn’t like to give the impression that I think most Customs and Immigration officials are afflicted by epauletsy, far from it. As I was sailing through the Eastern Caribbean this year I was delighted at the strides made in many places and how smoothly procedures went where once they were difficult. EseaClear has definitely come into its own and is helping both yachtspeople and officials. In the northern Eastern Caribbean it has expanded so that Dominica, Montserrat, St. Kitts & Nevis and Anguilla are now all on board, just leaving Antigua to catch up. Kudos to St. Kitts & Nevis where, as far as I know, the Customs department itself, over the years and with no prodding from the government, has reinterpreted the regulations to make them much easier and more yachtfriendly as they realized the implications of yacht tourism and the needs of the yachting community. It makes a huge difference. Kudos also to Dominica, where the government, in cooperation with the Customs department, came up with the most yachtfriendly system in the Eastern Caribbean. They offer a two-week in-and-out clearance; one trip to Customs is all you need. This is hugely appreciated by the yachting community.

Many islands still have a long way to go. If we could just get everyone to adopt Dominica’s regulations we would be way ahead of where we are now. But when I talk about epauletsy, I am talking about big leaps backwards. I have already written about Trinidad in Compass. Having formerly allowed yachts relative freedom to visit their anchorages of choice, officialdom now demands yacht skippers visit Customs and get permission each time they want to move the boat. Annual yacht arrivals in Trinidad are now down to fewer than a thousand, from a high of more than 2,600 in 2000. There are factors other than Customs regulations contributing to this, but the officials are definitely not helping and it is hard to see how Trinidad yachting can possibly rebound under the current regulations. I am sure the Customs feel they face security problems, but it is unclear that tighter restrictions are going to make any difference (crooks do not generally spend their time filling in forms) and even if they did, is the extra security worth the damage to a proven sector of the tourism industry?

Perhaps the most egregious case of epauletsy this year comes from tiny Statia. Yachts have been visiting Statia with no problem on either side for many years. Now that Statia has become part of the Netherlands, bureaucracy has been multiplying like rabbits in spring. The new Immigration department has decided that yachts must leave on the same day they clear out. Therefore there is no way you can get underway at dawn or in the middle of the night — you must depart during office hours. Statia thus becomes the first country in the Eastern Caribbean to create such a restriction. By e-mail I tried to point out why this was not a good idea (both e-mails slightly abbreviated and edited for spelling):

It fell on deaf ears:

This to me is a clear case of epauletsy. I have not met the person who wrote this, but everyone assures me he is charming and helpful. However, the facts of the matter are simple. Everything between yachts and officials has been working well for years in Statia, I know of no crime regarding normal yachting visitors over the last years, and it is a stretch of the imagination to suppose that suddenly nefarious yachtspeople are waiting to "prey on" poor little Statia. These new restrictions are aggravating, will do no good and, by any objective criteria, are unnecessary. The security problems mentioned exist only in the mind of the epaulettic.

My thanks to AV for the concept of epaulette disease; I use initials only so she is in no way associated with this article.ECK VIEW FROM TI KANOT BY CHRIS DOYLE

Dear Compass,
Let me congratulate Chris Doyle on his addition to the Caribbean lexicon with his coinage of the term ‘epauletsy’ as a disease. [See Deck View from Ti Kanot in June issue of Caribbean Compass.] It is far more sophisticated than the casual illness I deem to be ‘uniformitis’ and deserves an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Caribbean English. The problem remains — will Customs and Immigration officials ever read this analysis? Perhaps you should send it to the director general of the OECS, to be added to their studies.

All of us in these islands who realize that tourism is our main income earner, need to make the next step in thinking: the tourist is providing the income of prime minister, ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, teachers, nurses and pensioners, not only of taxi drivers and workers in the hotel industry. In short, Customs and Immigration officials need to get into their heads that their dependable salaries are paid by the tourist.
And what about these machine-readable passports? Why in this Caribbean do we have to answer 44 written questions as well as verbal questions from the officials? Our ministers and officials travel all over the world and they should be familiar with the short forms in the US, Canada and Britain. In Europe, of course, there are no forms; the visa is enough.

Surely the job at ports and airports can be done with dignity and without trying to prove our sovereignty and self-importance. When I was prime minister of St. Vincent & the Grenadines, I did my best to ensure that Customs and Immigration officials had some exposure to the competitive nature of the world’s tourism by including them in delegations to promote tourism. This training should be resumed.
Sir James Mitchell
Bequia