Just a quick note on South Africa and crew changes there. When I was in Cape Town in Janurary of last year, we came across an issue during a crew change. At the time, I worked aboard a traveling school ship, and as such we had large groups, say 24 students at a time leaving the vessel and arriving every three months or so. During the previous year, we had had a group of students depart the vessel, and they were signed off the crew list as per the usual order of operations. We then had 24 new students arrive, and we signed them on the crew list which is where the problems began.
During our attempt to Clear immigration and customs, we requested the right to leave the country and we were denied at first. The reason being, the government of South Africa wanted proof that all of our previous crew (students/passengers) had actually departed the country before they would approve us to sign on the new arrivals. This was a highly unusual occurence, and we were fighting the immigration authorities on the grounds that we had no proof that they had left, execept flight numbers, and home addresses. Well according the immigration authority, they were required to find out where all of our previous crew members were, BEFORE they would process the new crew. He apologized profusely for the delay, recognizing that it would be very difficult to determine where those people all were at any given time, after all some may have remained and did exploring South Africa, quite legally on visas.
However, according to the immigration officer, ships were coming into Cape Town with African crews, among others, and unloading huge numbers of crew, who would then stay in the country illegally. So the authorities were tracking down as many crews as they could in a crack down. In the end it came down to 2 students, whom we had to prove were in the United States by looking at facebook pages of all ways!
The big irony here is that the South African immigration computers at the airport, are NOT available or connected to the ship immigration authorities, so finding out whether or not our crew had left was rather difficult. However, we had written down all crew’s flight details for just such an occurence and one by one the immigration authorities proved that our previous crew had departed on their scheduled flights.
Lessons learned, are to ALWAYS write down the flight details of passengers and crew when they disembark. This may be your only proof that your guests actually left the country. And hire an agent while in South Africa, as it can save a lot of time in the end.
After three days delay, we were allowed to leave South Africa by the authorities, until of course we discovered that in order to enter Brazil, we had to apply for Visa’s before we left South Africa! But that’s another blog….
