Customs & Immigration Shock

While in Friday Harbor I took the opportunity to visit the Customs office. I wanted to spell out our travel plans clearly and make sure that we followed the correct procedures in exiting from and returning to the USA.

When the Customs man came out I opened the discussion with the statement that we had some very simple questions. His reply was that there are no simple questions. How right he turned out to be.

I indicated that Brenda is an Australian citizen, I am a U.S. citizen, the boat is registered in Australia, and we were about to depart for a brief tour of Canadian waters and we had questions of what was required of us.

He asked me for my cruising permit. Huh? I didn't have one. He said that if the boat was registered in Australia I must have a cruising permit and that my citizenship was irrelevant. I told him that I had made my entry in Hilo and to my surprise the official told me that even though the boat was registered in Australia I was free to sail US waters like any other U.S. citizen. WRONG! At present I was cruising totally illegally. I told him that with respect he should contact the Hilo office and set them straight on the correct procedure to prevent reoccurrences of this. He said that there are customs offices out there that don't do things quite correctly. He said that it was good that we had voluntarily reported in and that he would be able to issue us with either a cruising permit or something else that I can't recall. I told him that I had been in Port Townsend for 5 weeks and he passed his hand over his face in exasperation. I did say that I expressed surprise at Hilo that I would not have to report at every port in the US and also that I was disturbed that I walked out of that Customs office with nothing in writing to state that I had cleared my boat at Hilo.

He turned his attention to Brenda who did not have her passport on her, which is another no-no. Oops! He seemed OK when Brenda assured him that she had a formal visa and that she had flown into the USA on a commercial airline.

He asked what our sailing plans were. I told him that in late September we expected to head for California and eventually sail south into Mexican waters. He told me that had I been stopped off the coast by security people and could not produce the proper permits they would no have cared about my story of Hilo: I would have been in deep doo-doo (my words). And it was lucky that this had all come out in the Northwest because if it had happened in San Diego, with its proximity to Mexico and the drug and immigration problems I would have been in Mucho Grande Mierda (my words).

Anyway, at 10 AM tomorrow we will present ourselves with the ship's papers and our personal documentation to sort this thing out.

I wrote to the Commodore of the Fremantle Sailing Club before I embarked on this circumnavigation that Providence would be required for its success. It seems dumb luck that I didn't calculate my fuel usage before departure and was forced to visit Friday Harbor for fuel. And for some reason I felt a compulsion to talk to the Customs people even though on the surface we knew all of the answers to our simple questions.

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