Competency Afloat – A Maine-based training center teaches multiple marine skills

“I’ve been teaching non-traditional students for 13 years,” said Shawn J. Ahern III, Ocean Master and president of the Down East Maritime Training Center, based in Freedom, Maine.

The school offers 15 courses, specializing in Merchant Marine officer licenses, Able Bodied Seaman’s licenses and endorsement courses for mariners. All courses are geared toward certification for competency. Ahern also offers courses in safe boating, personal survival, safety for the recreational boater and various courses for college credit.

A graduate of California Pacific University, he took advanced training at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and got his doctorate in Business Administration at California Pacific. The Martha’s Vineyard native started his training school on the island, where lobsterman Wayne V. Iacono took Ahern’s 100-ton course ten years ago.

“He was just great,” Iacono said of Ahern and his course. “It worked out really well.” He added that he got an additional dividend: Ahern taught him how to use a computer.

But the ever-increasing cost of operating his school on Martha’s Vineyard forced Ahern to move his training center to Vineyard Haven, MA and Freedom, Maine. He also offers his services at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and USCG Groups Rockland and Southwest Harbor in Maine; Boston; South Carolina and the Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) in Castine; in Eastport and in Stonington. He’ll give a course anywhere, provided enough students sign up. He generally aims for about five.

Stonington Harbormaster and Commercial Fish Pier Manager Steven Johnson brought six students together in Stonington last year in order to allow his son Eric to take the course for his captain’s license. Eric, now 21, got his license and is now captain of the MERI (Marine Environmental Research Institute) research vessel in Blue Hill. Johnson said, “As harbormaster, I’m really impressed with [Ahern’s course]: the stuff they’re doing, the training they get before they actually go out on the water. It’s an extensive program and it’s a hard course to pass. It’s not one of those easy courses by any chance.”

Ahern opened his school in Freedom in 1999, and for the next five years, before taking advantage of what the Maritime Academy had to offer, he said, “We were duplicating what they were doing. The academy has all the toys.” In 2004 he became a professor at the academy’s undergraduate school and in its Department of Continuing Education, where he offers Standards of Training, Certification, and Watch-keeping (STCW) courses for U.S. Coast Guard license upgrades and recertification.

Every quarter the Maritime Academy offers Basic Safety Training, which is one of the U.S. Coast Guard STCW courses. Basic Safety Training is a four-module course consisting of Firefighting, Medical First Aid and CPR, Ocean Survival and Safety, and Personal Responsibility. Ahern teaches Ocean Survival at the academy pool. There, students practice donning survival suits in the water and righting the life raft.

Victoria Stearns, Coordinator of Continuing Education at the academy, said, “We geared up for that in 1995 for our previous graduates. A whole lot of them had to go through that.”

With Ahern on the faculty, MMA can also offer a certification program in addition to its regular degree offerings. “Part of our mission is to reach out to all Maine residents,” Stearns said. “This program helps the academy expand that mission to the non-degree student. One of the things that is unique about the Continuing Education approach at MMA is that now MMA is open to people who may have thought it was only available to college students. It teaches people that they need not be intimidated.”

Stonington lobsterman Donald Jones was among those who took two of Ahern’s courses: a one-week radar course for towing in Stonington and a much more involved course for a captain’s license, which took three days of travel to Freedom per week over a two-month period.

Jones liked the courses he took and said, “I think more people ought to do it to give them some idea of what they’re supposed to be doing, especially young fellas.” He said he was not only talking about some recreational weekend sailors, but some from the commercial fleet, too.

“I think Shawn was a very nice teacher,” Jones added. “He would sit and listen because I’d been on the water some 30-40 years, something like that, and he qualifies for a captain’s license for any unlimited vessel for any ocean. I didn’t agree with some of the stuff he was saying, but we could sit there and have some pretty good discussions. Sometimes I’d have to give in, but other times, you know, he’d give a little bit. He stuck with small classes: there were, like, four or five of us that started about the same time, and it worked out really nice. It was pretty much individual attention. If you were getting it, it was fine, and if you weren’t getting it, he’d sit there and show you what you were doing wrong. He was very nice.”

Of the courses offered at Down East Maritime Training Center, at Maine Maritime Academy, and at the other training sites, Ahern said, “We have an extremely high passing rate, but you’re going to know you are in a classroom.”

To learn more about courses the Down East Maritime Training Center offers and its 2006 schedule, go to downeastmaritime.com. To reach Ahern, call 207 382-3037, or e-mail him at maritime1@pivot.net. To reach MMA’s Continuing Education site go to: http://conted.mainemaritime.edu/. To reach Stearns, call 207-326-2211 or vstearns@mma.edu.