Regulations and the Codification Commission for Recreational Boating close the Nautical Conference

The second day of the 11th Nautical Congress organized by the National Association of Marine Industries (ANEN) in Euskalduna Bilbao has focused on the regulations affecting recreational boating and administrative challenges for the coming years.

Benito Nunez Quintanilla, Secretary General of Maritime Air Transport, began his speech by stressing how important it is to organize an event with this format, such as the Nautical Congress, and to have a partner entity as ANEN. Since one of the main challenges facing the national marine industry, is the diversity that exists in Spain, which complicates the development of generic standards for a common theme. "It is very difficult to address all the problems of the sector in a unique and exclusive way to accommodate all the needs of the industry, but neither can there be 30 solutions to the same problem," said the Secretary General of Transport, giving as an example the maritime pressure suffered by the Balearic Islands during the summer season. A fact that does not happen in the same way in the rest of Spain. 

Another of the challenges facing recreational boating is safety. "If the sector does not regulate itself, the administration has to set the rules," acknowledged Núñez Quintanilla. One of these rules that is awaiting approval is the amendment of the revised text of the State Ports Act and the Maritime Navigation Act. "These two regulations include many of the needs that recreational boating had conveyed to us," he says. One of these needs refers to the notarial procedure for abandoning boats. "A procedure that is not reasonable for small vessels and has been reformulated to take it out of the judicial sphere and introduce it in the notary's office," said Núñez Quintanilla. 

Public-private collaboration is essential in order to provide solutions to the needs of the sector. In this regard, the Director General of the Directorate General of the Merchant Navy, Gustavo Santana, highlighted the work of forums such as the Nautical Congress to promote this collaboration and announced that the Directorate General of the Merchant Navy is working on the production of a Spanish maritime strategy whose main axes will be decarbonisation, offshore wind energy, simplification of regulations and recreational boating. "We want it to be our navigation chart for the coming years," says Santana. 

One year of the Codification Commission for Recreational Boating

After updating the sector on maritime and administrative regulations, the time has come to learn about the progress made by the Codification Commission for Recreational Boating. The presentation included the participation of Juan Luis Pulido, Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Cadiz; Julio Carlos Fuentes Gómez, Deputy Director General of Maritime Regulation and International Cooperation at the Ministry of Transport; Sonia Barbeira, Head of the Functional Area of Recreational Boating of the General Secretariat of Safety, Pollution and Maritime Inspection of the Directorate General of Merchant Marine and, in the role of moderator, Carlos Sanlorenzo, legal advisor to ANEN.

During the presentation of the round table, Sanlorenzo described this project as "one of the most important legislative developments, I would even say historic, for the nautical sector". In his opinion, "it will revolutionize the sector, because we will bring together in a single text all the rules that affect our industry, modernizing and simplifying all the issues that concern our business. 

To this end, he explained, the working group created to draw up the proposal has already met five times and has a period of five months to present the project, which will be enriched by the sector and the social agents. 

On this point, Julio Carlos Fuentes stressed that 11 royal decrees from the last 25 years will be unified in order to have "a single, coherent language. The challenge is for the regulation to be well understood with the laws above and the rest of the regulations, coordinating the rules, also with the lower level that the service instructions represent, so that the future regulation generates clarity and there are permanent rules for a sector that moves, and the rules accompany it".

For his part, Juan Luis Pulido stressed that "the concept of the vessel is fundamental, and there is a lack of clarity in this respect. We want to develop the mandate of the legislator in the Maritime Navigation Act to regulate a reality that was not regulated: the smaller vessels, with a collateral category of jet skis and a list that is not closed and includes kayaks, boards, etc.," he confided.

In reference to jet skis, Sonia Barbeira revealed that "a new qualification for jet ski instructors will be created, knowing that there are already schools that are offering this qualification without regulatory development". Likewise, a new navigation license will also be created specifically for jet skis, with compulsory practice on this type of vehicle.

Likewise, the exceptions for sailing without a certificate will be clarified, licenses will be allowed to be carried in digital format and the possibility will be assessed of allowing people who hold certificates issued abroad to sail in Spain, as long as their certificate is not only for inland waters (ICC). Likewise, work will be done to ensure that sailors can carry all the boat's documentation in digital format.

Regarding the nautical charter, a sub-sector which, according to Sanlorenzo, "is growing at a good rate and will continue to grow in the future, and needs legal and economic security". Juan Luis Pulido stressed that work is being done to introduce a very complete and simplified regulation of this activity at the administrative level and also in the aspect of regulation of the contract, for which they are taking as a reference similar regulations in countries such as Italy and Croatia. "A scheme is taking shape with a single charter contract and two modalities: chartering a vessel with crew, in which the entrepreneur does not lose nautical control of his vessel, and without crew, in which he does lose it".

How artificial intelligence affects the recreational boating industry

Álex Rayón Jerez, CEO of the company Brain & Code, spoke about 'The impact of Artificial Intelligence on recreational boating'. "I have bad news for sapiens: machines are beginning to surpass us, and not only in a set of functions, such as image viewing or comprehensive reading, but for the first time in history, they have inductive capacity, that is, they are capable of reconstructing and reasoning in abstract environments," he said. So, "it is worth asking what tasks the machine can do for us", including "searching for information, extracting key ideas, synthesizing documents, generating digital assets (writing, creating images and videos, etc.) and making decisions".

Throughout his speech, he gave examples of how to use different AI tools to save on electricity bills, organize sightseeing tours, plan sea routes, summarize texts, create images from descriptions, translate videos into any language in real time and even find all the information available online about specific entities and people and make 'deepfakes', i.e. generate manipulated video, image or voice files of people to make them look real. At this point, he emphasized the concept of 'prompter', i.e. the action of giving instructions to the AI. At this point, he emphasized the importance of being very clear and precise when addressing the machine, starting by placing it in context, and always using language that is as unambiguous as possible.