HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The Western Pacific Maritime Academy in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, headquartered in Saipan, is partnering with the GCA Trades Academy to set up a program on Guam.
The program will be about getting people ready to work on ships as merchant mariners, according to Capt. Michael Bacher, executive director of the WPMA.
“The process is getting a Merchant Marine credential and then taking a few basic courses so that they have the endorsements sufficient enough for them to work on that oceangoing vessel,” Bacher said Thursday.
The program is still in progress and is anticipated to fully launch around March next year, Bacher added.
At this time, WPMA has established a relationship with the trades academy, and they have courses developed, but they still need to resolve a couple of issues to stand up practical courses on fire fighting and personal survival techniques.
“We have to identify a pool, which we’ve done with St. John’s School. We’ll submit that to (the U.S.) Coast Guard, and we have a relationship with private industry here where we can give our firefighting training. We have to submit those practical sites as well,” Bacher said.
The executive director said he also met with the acting Gov. Josh Tenorio to let him know broadly that WPMA is “in his backyard” offering programs on Guam.
“The soft ask was requesting that he look upon us favorably and that we can call on his office to help with relationships to get things done if we run into any roadblocks,” Bacher said. “And his office was very supportive of us.”
Bacher held a free seminar at the GCA Trades Academy offices last week Thursday regarding how to apply for Merchant Mariner Credentials.
“Courses, when they are given and certificated, then can be submitted as endorsements to the Coast Guard into the Merchant Marine credential. So step one, really, is to get the Merchant Marine credential. Most of these people (who attended the seminar) will probably be able to submit the Merchant Marine credential and the courses all at the same time so that those endorsements are in there when they submit. But courses by themselves are useless without them being endorsements into the Merchant Marine credential,” Bacher said, adding that they’ll probably host more seminars from time to time.
“What happened up in Saipan is the news spreads. All of a sudden, there’s a bunch of people who learned about this and now there’s excitement in the air that other people want to jump onto the bandwagon,” Bacher said.
