On Wednesday, opening day of the Minnesota Boat, Sport, Camping and Vacation Show at RiverCentre in St. Paul, the U.S. Coast Guard was represented by two neatly uniformed men. One is stationed in St. Louis, the other in the Twin Cities. Their mission at the show is to provide more information to fishing guides and anglers who use them about the federal agency's newly enforced licensing requirements for guides.
The requirements are causing a stir among Minnesota fishing guides, though the Coast Guard has long required that even small-time guides -- those, say, capable of carrying no more than six passengers -- must pass a comprehensive test to acquire what generally is referred to as a Coast Guard "six-pack" license.
But only in the past year has the license become an issue in Minnesota. A crackdown by the Coast Guard began last summer, when guides working the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers were told to get off those rivers until they acquired licenses.
Hard feelings followed. One problem was the Coast Guard pulled the plug on some guides during midsummer, reducing their incomes. Another is that a private study course offered in preparation for the Coast Guard exam wasn't available in the Twin Cities until November, meaning the guides were out of business until then.
The licensing issue also received a lot of attention at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Stakeholder's Roundtable last week in Brooklyn Center. Complaints about the licensing rule were rife. But so was confusion.
The two officers at the St. Paul sport show on Wednesday -- both polite, both knowledgeable -- help shed some light on licensing requirements.
• For charter boat captains on the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water, or operators who work on many different waters in their work, the "six-pack" requirement isn't going away.
• However, as the Coast Guard has begun enforcing its six-pack requirements for what might be called "small-time" guides nationwide -- those, say, who travel only a limited number of inland waters -- the resulting furor seems to have sparked some interest in Congress and the Coast Guard to revisit the issue. My inference from talking to the Coast Guard officers -- Lt. Brian Zekus, supervisor of the marine safety detachment in St. Paul, and Lt. Commander Jeffrey Morgan, chief of the Coast Guard Inspection Department in St. Louis -- was that nothing significant will change in the short term regarding licensing.
