The recent federal conviction of a sea-school operator and a separate Coast Guard internal investigation suggest that it is way too easy to game the system that awards six-pack and 100-ton captain licenses.
“When you say sea school, you’re talking about these large, large training entities that do this on a daily basis worldwide with thousands of people that are getting their license on a weekly basis, monthly basis. And, really, that needs a lot of oversight,” said Special Agent Edward Songer.
Songer heads up the Great Lakes office of the Coast Guard Investigative Service, CGIS for short. While most of us have heard to NCIS, the naval law enforcement equivalent, CGIS labors in relative obscurity, investigating crimes that “happen on, over or under a navigable waterway.”
Songer and Special Agent Joshua Packer of the South Florida CGIS office sat down recently for an interview with Loose Cannon about lessons learned from an investigation involving Great Lakes Charter Training, a school that had been based at Algonac, Michigan.
CGIS effectively shut the school down with the arrest of proprietor Mel Stackpoole, who “knowingly altered and falsified records and documents with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence the proper administration of a matter within thejurisdiction of the United States Coast Guard…to wit: merchant mariner credential test results and course completion certificates.”
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Stackpoole faced up to 20 years in prison, but, after his guilty plea, the court last month sentenced him to four years probation. The agents were asked whether the judge’s mercy had been a disappointment, given the seriousness of the charge and the work put into the investigation.
“It’s hard to answer…There weren’t many of these cases,” Songer said. “We really don’t have anything to quantify—a legacy of these cases that go back—to say, yeah, normally a person is sentenced to X number of years.”
Songer said the case “came out of the air,” but not exactly; it came from a tipster: “There was a student that just didn’t feel right about receiving their credential,” he said.
Undercover
That prompted CGIS to enroll an undercover agent in one of Stackpoole’s courses for people seeking a 100-ton license. This is what that agent learned from two weeks of attending classes in August 2020:
The defendant provided students enrolled in the course with less than 50 hours of classroom instruction, rather than the required 80 hours. Further, during the course the defendant instructed students to provide false information regarding their prior sea service, medical history and recreational drug use on their MMC (merchant mariner credential) applications. The defendant also improperly provided the students with answers to certain examination questions; changed students’ incorrect test answers into correct answers; and inflated the students’ test scores in order to reflect passing, rather than failing grades.
Sea schools, also called marine training centers, are a popular avenue to obtain credentials such as a six-pack license or a license to operate commercial vessels of up to 100 tons.
Officially known as OUPV for Operator of Uninspected Passenger vessels, the six-pack license typically allows someone with a center-console to take six people out for a day of fishing. Fifty- or 100-ton licenses typically enable the holder to skipper boats for whale watching, tourist schooners or catamaran excursions.
Another way to earn the necessary certification to get “your ticket,” as the licenses are commonly called, is to take a test at an official Coast Guard Regional Examination Center. But as agents Packer and Songer were quick to point out, the pass rate is much higher for those attending for-profit sea schools.
These schools get $600 to $900 from candidates for a six-pack course, and $300 to $400 for an upgrade to 100 tons. Multiply that by thousands of licenses per month nationwide. Sea schools are big business.
Unlike the International Certificate of Competence issued through the U.K.’s Royal Yachting Association, American captains at the low-end of the tonnage scale do not undergo an actual examination of their operating skills while underway in a boat.
Ours is all paperwork of one sort or another: medical records, drug tests, CPR certification, documented sea-time and passing a written test. Sea-time reporting is intended to take the place of having to operate an actual boat in front of an examiner.
Anyone wanting to start a company to help captain candidates gather the necessary documentation and administer the written test must submit a curriculum and the test itself for approval by the Coast Guard’s National Maritime Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the same office that handles vessel documentation.
The Center enables for-profit entities to certify that students have taken an approved course and passed a test on the material. It also certifies sea-school instructors themselves. For example, there are 45 certified instructors in Florida alone.
The not-so-secret formula for the success at sea school is that it “teaches the test,” which the schools write and the schools administer. When an instructor says (wink, wink) something like, “The gooseneck is the part of a crane most likely to fail,” you can bet it’s the answer to one of the test questions.
Sea Time
As mentioned in the court record, one of Stackpoole’s sins was advising students to fabricate their sea time.
A six-pack license requires 360 days of documented experience on a vessel, with at least 90 days in the last three years, and part of that must be in the specific waters of operation (Inland, Near Coastal, Great Lakes). A “day” constitutes at least four hours in a 24-hour period. Applicants need to document time on their own boats using Coast Guard form 719S or a company letter for documentation of time on a company boat.
In other words, sea-time on low-tonnage licenses is largely on the honor system. It is a federal offense to falsify sea time or to sign off on someone else’s fake sea time, but the law is rarely enforced.
Which annoys many credentialed mariners who complain that sea-time perjury—endemic in the yacht industry—is unfair to those who earned their ticket honestly. As one former sea school instructor posted on the Cruisers Forum:
The biggest weakness in the system is the self reporting of sea time on your own boat. You only have to prove you owned the boat and the Coast Guard pretty much has to accept whatever you submit as long as it looks reasonable. Just don’t try to tell them you did 720 days in two calendar years or even four.
Tate Westbrook is a retired Navy captain and serves on the Board of Directors of the Chesapeake Area Professional Captains Association. Westbrook told Loose Cannon that under the current system it is nearly impossible to weed out the fakers.
One of our many objectives is to professionalize those who sail on those 50- to 100-ton licenses. However, they all walk in the door of our organization with a license in hand that they earned somewhere else. We have a robust continuing education program that elevates their skills… I am the director of continuing education, so we take that pretty seriously. But absent a similar of professional association, a yahoo who takes one of those multi-day classes online or in person and is a boat owner can easily fake their own credentials.
The National Maritime Center, which is responsible for oversight of the licensing system, recently came under fire from the Coast Guard’s own Inspector General’s Office for scattershot enforcement.
The September 2025 report did not single out sea schools specifically, but it did say the investigation had been initiated after pressure from Congress, whose Government Accounting Office had concluded the credentialing system was too slow.
Packer and Songer argued that there is a direct link between shortcomings in the Center’s oversight function and the Stackpoole case. They noted, for example, that his Great Lakes Charter Training company had passed Coast Guard audits. “They’re getting a clean bill of health, or at least passing these audits, yet we’re still able to get an indictment. That’s a telltale sign that there’s something amiss in the process,” Songer said.
Taken to its logical extreme, the Stackpoole example paints a dire picture.
We start with candidates for captain who never have to really prove they can actually operate a boat because that’s not how we do it. They are coached to lie about medical issues and drug use. They are encouraged to falsify their sea time.
Then, despite being taught the test for dozens of hours in the classroom, some candidates still manage to fail, so the instructor gives them a passing grade anyway, because he had guaranteed success to 100 percent of his paying customers.
Songer said that gaming the system to obtain a captain’s license is not merely a papework offense. “It puts you, me, our families, Josh and his family, all of us in danger when we’re out on the water, especially anywhere near the maritime industry,” he said.
LOOSE CANNON covers hard news, technical issues and nautical history. Every so often he tries to be funny. Subscribe for free to support the work. If you’ve been reading for a while—and you like it—consider upgrading to paid.
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