Also, to encourage more people to enjoy marine leisure, the procedure for acquiring a yacht and leisure boat license will be simplified. (image: Flickr/ Yacht Rent)
SEOUL, Oct. 21 (Korea Bizwire) – The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries announced an amendment of regulations with the goal of strengthening the marine leisure industry on October 20 at the 8th Regulation Reformation On-site Monitoring Meeting held with the presence of the Prime Minister. The measure was set up to stimulate the marine leisure industry, thus helping to overcome the crises that shipbuilding and traditional marine industries are facing these days.
Currently, Korean marinas can handle only 15 percent of the 15,172 registered vessels. However, private investors are reluctant to build marinas because of the expensive fees. The government will change the enforcement ordinances of river law and fishing village and port law to lower the fees for river access this December to stimulate the development of marinas in fishing villages and inland cities.
Also, to encourage more people to enjoy marine leisure, the procedure for acquiring a yacht and leisure boat license will be simplified. There are only 10 training centers that do not require yacht and boat driving licenses, and the cost of training is 800,000 KRW for 40 hours. The government will change related regulations and increase the number of training centers to 32, a tactic to induce price competition to lower the cost of training.
The minimum rental boat size will go down from five tons to two tons. This means the number of boats that will be available for rental should increase from 1,000 to 3,000.
Other changes in the regulations are lowering the operating requirement of engineers for sailing yachts, and the threshold for incremental charging of local tax will go up from 100 million KRW to 300 million KRW.
By Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
