Captain’s Log: More Officialdom/Kicked out in Kanazawa….arghhhhh!!!

May 6-7,

Oh just another unwelcoming big city for cruisers in Japan…..ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!

Just for the record: We are now 7-6-2 for the 15 ports we have been to in Japan…..7 ports all went well, no hassles/moves…..6 ports we had to move 2-4 times….and TWO ports we got kicked out…..that’s a 47% success rate….not boding well for ease of cruising in Japan…ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!

We left Ine at 0530 for the 92nm run to Kanazawa (City of 500,000)….a pretty good run….all seas and winds behind but a pretty big swell at times….3-6′ and calming to 2-4′ by the end of the day!! There are 3 places to berth…a small harbor but it is full so we go by the Coast Guard fleet…great….ugh!!! There is maybe a 3rd spot but it also seemed full of fishing boats and we had been warned you might be asked to leave. The CG harbor is almost full….3 CG boats, 2 pilot boats but a spot on the far wall…..very narrow so we ease in and then have to turn the boat 90* on the dime….TG for thrusters and no wind.

We get settled but Kathy notices it’s all fenced in…gulp….can we get out….she goes tests a door and it opens and then some off-duty CG guys walk by all thumbs up….ok, good to go so passage beers opened by 5pm!!!

As a sidebar, while we were still underway to the port, we had inadvertently left our AIS on, and so we were hailed by the Niigata Coast Guard (which is 150nm from here) and asked to report back to them after we were tied up in Kanazawa. So, after we tied up along the back wall, we dutifully hailed Coast Guard Niigata and gave them our position and asked if we were ok to stay here for 2 or 3 nights. After a delay of probably an hour or better, they hailed us back and told us we were good to stay for up to 3 nights if we wanted. We do the happy dance and crack a passage beer.

Monday: We wake up the next day and it is raining hard….ugh….rained all night too and the forecast is to rain hard all day…..ok, lets have coffee and go to plan D…..we look carefully at weather and develop a plan to leave Tuesday night and do a night passage or wait until Friday…we will decide Tues morning and go tour a castle, garden, a samurai home and some lacquerware….ok…sounds good…so a day off today….cool!!!!

But then our peace is shattered around 9am…..first a Mr Manabu and his boss come by and say we must leave, this is a restricted area, they are the Administrators for this harbor…..we start to have an animated conversation and then 4 “men in blue” show up….CG…they immediately take control and we think they tell the “other guys” the weather is bad and we can stay…..ya, what he said. The CG is very efficient, ask their usual questions, fill out the General Declaration form and are gone in 10 minutes. So back to the Admin guys who have a much better attitude now. They still say we must leave this berth but for the next 5-7 hours they work hard to find us a spot….really, nice guys….but, no go…they did find a private berth in that small harbor we thought was full and had the owner come over….a very nice, old man…but he wanted $110 for one night….with no power or water…really….we told him nicely but wow….that’s the most we’ve ever had to pay so thanks but NO…this really is outrageous for Japan….all places on the wall are supposed to be free…..yep, there is something politically going on in these big Cities doing their best to keep foreigners to small areas and then kicking them out when full!!!

Mr Manabu then talked to his boss and they said we could stay the night….so, now 2 nights, but we must leave tomorrow….but we want to tour the castle et al…so sorry but when the rain stops, which it will tonight, you must go…some how they equate bad weather with rain…..no, we did not try to explain wind & seas but really….they are in charge of the harbor….arghhhhhhh!!!!

Kathy’s words were let’s go to Alaska or even Russia (ok, she might have been a bit frustrated)1….at least we hope to be welcomed there!!!!

So, we are out of here just like Nagasaki without ever getting off the boat….arghhhhhhh!!!!

Hope all is well!!

John
Mystic Moon
Noroshi Ishikawa Japan

PS: Pictures on the website:

PSS: Kathy maybe onto something about these issues…..part of an email she wrote Kirk:

So I was just tidying up all the papers we got today, and came across the document that Manabu-san brought with him. I hadn’t thought much about it because it was all in Japanese, but knew it had some telephone numbers he referred to on it. It also had the website, so I just went to it and translated it, and it is a document about cleaning up derelict pleasure boats on the rivers. It seems to say that mooring in unauthorized places on a river is now forbidden, and that pleasure boats must be in designated moorage areas and then lists the areas for this prefecture. Well, you can look at yourself when you have the time….

http://www.pref.ishikawa.lg.jp/kasen/pleasure-bosyu/index.html

Kirk’s response:

Now this is interesting’¦.and maybe makes a bit of sense.

Yes, I have heard that governments throughout Japan are trying to deal with the thousands of illegally moored, and now often derelict, boats throughout the country. For decades, people (fishermen, pleasure-boat owners, etc.) have moored their boats almost wherever they wanted (often up rivers ‘ safer during storms), without permission, and the authorities didn’t do anything about it. And then, as the boat owners got older or died (further complicating the issue of boat ownership), the boats became abandoned, often sinking or coming loose and floating out to sea to be a danger to other ships. Now the problem has become too severe to ignore and so the authorities are trying to force people to move their boats to designated harbours (marinas, fishing ports, etc.)’¦.and if they don’t, after appropriate procedures and a lot of time, the boats will be removed and disposed of (with the cost billed to the owner, if known ‘ this, in turn, has created legal issues when the owner is dead and his/her heir does not want, or even know about, the boat’¦but yet is expected to pay for its disposal).

I have heard a lot about this recently from my wife (whose company manages eight marinas)’¦as they have had a few people move their boats to her marinas’¦actually just a very few because of the high cost of marinas relative to the value of the boats!

BUT it never occurred to me that that would affect cruisers. Understandably, to deal with this issue, the authorities had to first designate where boats could be, and could not be, moored’¦.to give them the legal authority to deal with boats not in designated moorage areas. But the authorities obviously make no distinction between permanently moored boats and cruisers passing by’¦.and they assume that all cruisers will always go to a marina (in the link you provided, all the designated moorage spots in Ishikawa Prefecture are marinas)’¦so by that logic it is now illegal to moor in fishing ports, such as Noroshi when Spruce is now and where you want to go!! Basically, the default policy seems to be that it’s illegal to moor everywhere’¦except in designated areas.

This is obviously an unworkable policy that affects all cruisers, Japanese and foreign, but I wonder if they will recognise that it is unworkable and amend it? And I wonder if all prefectures are taking the same approach?

It’s so ironic’¦.just when the national closed-port permit system is being relaxed it

seems that a new, and even stricter, prefecture-by-prefecture closed port system may be put into place.

Thanks for letting me know about this. I will contact the head of cruising division of the Japan Sailing Federation and ask him what he knows (the JSF ‘ one of the sponsors for my Japan circumnavigation — mainly focuses on racing but the person in charge of cruising is a great guy and a very experienced long-distance cruiser who certainly understands the challenges of cruising in Japan!!!