A U.S. Coast Guard crew ties their law enforcement boat up to your yacht party, gets on board and ruins your mood. Your day on the water could end then and there, and while the party is over, it just might have saved you from a disaster.
In South Florida, illegal charter voyages are, simply put, a “big problem,” said Alvaro Ferrando, education and outreach coordinator of the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Miami Investigations Division.
It’s a problem those spending big bucks to have fun on glamorous boats for the day can be oblivious to, shocked, confused and outraged when Coast Guard crews board their bikini-clad bachelorette get-togethers or liquor-sipping joy rides and start asking questions. Time and again in South Florida, the Coast Guard finds voyages are illegal charters, terminates the trips and issues tens of thousands of dollars in fines. A few cases have resulted in federal convictions.
Renting a boat is perfectly legal. The problem arises when recreational boat rentals run afoul of the seven specific requirements in order to be in compliance as a true, legitimate bareboat charter. The laws are confusing even to many of those in the boating community, local captains say. Something as seemingly minor as a contract missing a signature is enough for the Coast Guard to say its an illegal charter voyage, even if everything else is in compliance.
“There’s a lot of laws surrounding bareboat charters that they can operate legally, but too many operators and owners don’t understand the federal laws,” said Captain Matt Wurth, owner of Sandhill Charters in Palm Beach County, which offers commercial passenger voyages.
Bareboat charters exploded in South Florida during the pandemic and those operating illegally are rampant in Miami particularly, local captains and the U.S. Coast Guard say. They’ve crept up to Fort Lauderdale but to a much lesser extent.
The Coast Guard Sector Miami, which spans from Lake Worth Beach in Palm Beach County down to Florida City in Miami-Dade County, has for years been cracking down on illegal charters. A targeted enforcement could shut down a dozen or more in one weekend alone in the Miami area.
“We saw a boom of new boats in the industry with COVID,” Wurth said. “And now we’ve got a huge illegal charter problem in Florida. Huge. And we don’t have nearly enough manpower to stop it.”
The recreational boating industry has virtually no oversight and the Coast Guard’s main goal in detecting and terminating illegal charters is keeping passengers safe, said Jesús R. Porrata, Chief of the USCG Sector Miami Investigations Division.
The operator of a bareboat charter does not need to be a licensed captain. The boat doesn’t need to be inspected by the Coast Guard or have more advanced safety gear on board. When they’re operating illegally, they often have too many people on board. All it takes is a simple Google search, seeing an advertisement on Instagram or a browse on what is the equivalent of Airbnb for boat rentals to find one, and customers are booking without being privy to if it’ll be operated legally or not.
As Captain Tony Estrada, a Fort Lauderdale yacht captain, put it: “Most people aren’t going to ask those questions. All they want to do is, they’re here to rent a boat and have fun …”
It is the paying customers that end up being victims, Porrata said.
“They’ve got special moments, they save all this money, they come from all over the world to come here to enjoy our waters and they get caught up in a situation where now that special moment is ruined by Coast Guard boarding.”
The Coast Guard can only devote so much of its resources to detecting and terminating illegal charters, and there are too many for the Coast Guard alone to enforce, local captains say. Combatting illegal charters can be like a game of Whac-A-Mole; “for every one boat that they bust, two more pop up,” Wurth said.
And all the while, customers are paying thousands of dollars to pass the day on a pretty boat that could be lax on safety, poorly maintained and operating illegally. Sometimes tragedy strikes.
“You booked that trip and you didn’t think anything … You just assume, they’re online, they got a website, I’m booking,” Wurth said.
During the pandemic, boat sales skyrocketed, tourists came to Florida to get outside and on the water and owners started renting their vessels “left and right,” said Dave MacDougall, owner and operator of Sunshine Boating in Fort Lauderdale.
“And that created a monster problem for the Coast Guard,” he said. “It just exacerbated a problem into a monstrous problem.”
In Miami, promoters with a hustling mentality took the shuttered nightclub scene out on the water, said Estrada, who hosts a Facebook group called Captains on Call. Promising owners that their boats would be well maintained, club promoters advertise rentals for an “all in” price, meaning including the cost of a captain, fuel and other things. To customers, that sounds legitimate and easy. But a bareboat charter providing the captain is one way the venture becomes illegal.
“That ‘all in’ became the new standard down in Miami,” he said.
Million-dollar boats commonly used in illegal charter voyages were never meant to be worked as hard as they are by those trying to make money off of them, Estrada said, which also leads to maintenance and safety concerns.
“The bareboat industry, as a whole, is unsafe,” he said. “There’s so many different reasons that contribute to it — stemming from incompetent operators, to owners not taking care of their boat.”
In some situations, the Coast Guard gets a call from a boat for help and after they arrive discover it is operating as an illegal charter voyage, as was the case last month when a 58-foot boat ran aground near the New River in Fort Lauderdale, Porrata said. No one was injured.
In South Florida, deaths have been linked to illegal charters.
On April 1, 2018, Mauricio Alvarez was operating an illegal charter voyage on a yacht named Miami Vice. He did not have a Coast Guard license. Alvarez had heavily used cocaine during the time he worked as the operator of the yacht, even being filmed by the yacht’s owner using cocaine, according to the Department of Justice. The yacht was beached on Flagler Monument Island in Miami Beach, and while passengers were swimming, Alvarez started the engines and accelerated them in reverse, catching a passenger in the propellers and killing him.
That same area is where a Coast Guard Sector Miami crew arrived to patrol about 12:30 p.m. on a recent cloudy and hot Sunday. Music played loudly, some swam in the blue-green water and heads turned toward the Coast Guard boat arriving, some recording on their phones.
It’s hard to miss the boat arriving. That can make detecting and terminating illegal charters difficult, Porrata said.
“There are memes with our names on ’em … Whenever the Coast Guard is out, the element of surprise goes away right after the first boarding,” he said. “Its not unheard of that people will start collaborating and leave the area because they don’t want to be detected.”
The mood quickly shifted for a group of family and friends aboard the 60-foot-yacht La Dolce Vita II when the Coast Guard crew slowly pulled up for an inspection. One of the crew members asked, “It’s a charter?” The captain said it was a bareboat charter. And an hour-long investigation began, finding that the captain was in compliance, though he did receive a citation for not having certain documentation.
Porrata said those on La Dolce Vita II had booked the nearly $3,000 trip because one person in the group was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Coast Guard has seen trips in excess of $70,000 for multi-day charters, he said.
When illegal charter voyages are caught and terminated, the Coast Guard escorts them to the next harbor, Ferrando said.
Since 2018, Coast Guard Sector Miami has terminated hundreds of illegal charters, spiking in 2021, and issued nearly 300 Captain of the Port Orders. Violating those orders is a Class D felony punishable by up to six years in prison or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
On June 27, Coast Guard Sector Miami terminated three illegal charter voyages near the Julia Tuttle Causeway. In one weekend alone in May, the Coast Guard, working with federal and state partners, terminated and cited for safety violations 16 illegal charters within the Miami River, Biscayne Bay and off Lummus Park, the agency said in a news release. In February, a dozen illegal charters were terminated and cited in one weekend on Biscayne Bay and Miami River.
Those numbers represent just a fraction of the problem.
MacDougall said there is “no exaggeration, a parade of boats, many of which are illegal,” on the Miami River on a given Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
“I wouldn’t say that every boat on the market is doing a bad job,” MacDougall said. “They generally want to be safe and provide a good service like any business would. They just need to follow the law. Miami is the Wild Wild West of illegal boat charters, no doubt about it.”