>>1344823It is not necessary to have a licensed waterways pilot on board. It is absolutely essential, however, to have a Russian-speaking crew member able to handle the endless radio communications with lock keepers and dispatchers and to manage negotiations with bureaucrats along the way.
Foreign certificates of marine competence carry no weight in Russia. One person on board must have a Russian inland waterways licence (roughly equivalent to CEVNI). This licence is only available to Russian citizens, so your Russian speaking crew will need to be a Russian national. I hope this silly regulation will change in the near future.
It will make things easier if you have a shipping agent or the informal equivalent thereof. The RCC representative in St Petersburg (Vladimir Ivankiv) took this role for us and his assistance was invaluable.
You and your vessel will be complete novelties and your presence will not fit comfortably within the rigid processes governing regulation and passage of the almost entirely commercial shipping along the way. Regularly we were met by officials who just didn’t know what to do with us. With so much red tape and without established protocols and procedures they were loath to do what might seem to be obvious. But at a personal level, they were without exception friendly, and often embarrassed by the predicament which our presence put them in. Ultimately, and often with the assistance of vodka tipples, solutions were always found and we sailed on without incident.
