MMA training-cruise plan riding rough seas Academy officials forced to negotiate clearance to enter Scottish port

CASTINE – The State of Maine, Maine Maritime Academy’s training vessel, was headed through the Azores in the North Atlantic on Thursday as academy officials worked through diplomatic channels to gain clearance for the vessel to enter the port of Leith in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Port officials in Leith, one of several stops for the ship on its 2002 training cruise, are reluctant to allow the vessel and its 200 students to enter the port. They are demanding that the academy carry a $100 million insurance policy that would cover the vessel while it is in port, according to John Staples, MMA chief of staff.

“We’ve tried to explain to them that this is a United States vessel and that it is backed by the full authority of the U.S. government,” Staples said Thursday. “So far, we haven’t been successful.”

The State of Maine is owned by the U.S. Maritime Administration, an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and is on loan to MMA as a training vessel. The vessel left Castine on May 9 for the annual cruise and is scheduled to visit ports in England, Ireland and Estonia before arriving June 8 in Leith, which serves the city of Edinburgh on Scotland’s east coast.

“Normally, before we embark, all the ports are 100 percent confirmed as far as clearance,” Staples said. “This came up as a last-minute issue, but we were hopeful that we could have resolved it before they left a couple of weeks ago.”

Scottish officials first raised the issue during the weeks before the ship’s departure. They are concerned about issues such as pollution, personal injury liability and collisions between ships, Staples said, and want a policy in place before they allow the ship into the port.

“Apparently, they have had difficulties recently with ships that have had accidents which resulted in expenses to the local government,” Staples said.

This is not the first time the academy has faced difficulties with a planned stop on the annual cruise.

In 1999, during the conflict in Kosovo, academy officials dropped plans to visit the Greek port of Piraeus. Greece shares borders with Albania and Macedonia, then two havens for refugees fleeing Kosovo to the north. Although the port was well away from the fighting, officials said, uncertainty over what might happen before the training vessel arrived made it necessary to drop the port from the cruise itinerary. The vessel stopped instead in Gibraltar.

And in 1998, just weeks before the State of Maine was to depart on its annual cruise, Russian officials, claiming the training ship was a military vessel, announced the ship would be denied docking rights at the port of St. Petersburg. Diplomatic negotiations coordinated through Maine’s congressional delegation, the State Department and White House officials, resolved the issue and the vessel was allowed to dock.

MMA officials now hope diplomacy again will open a port for the training vessel. While they deal through officials at MARAD, they have enlisted the aid of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins. Collins, in turn, has made initial calls to the State Department, according to Judy Cuddy, Collins’ state office representative in Bangor.

So far there has been no resolution, Cuddy said, and none is in site.

The State of Maine will not be forced, like the infamous Flying Dutchman of maritime lore, to wander the seas in search of a port. If arrangements cannot be made with the port of Leith, the ship likely will stop at another port in Great Britain, Staples said.

“We’d just go somewhere else; we don’t know where yet,” he said. “We’re still hopeful we will be able to resolve this.”

The State of Maine is scheduled to return to Portland on July 2 before heading to New York for regularly scheduled maintenance.