The accurate simulation of oceanic turbulence is crucial to understanding global ocean circulation, impacting accurate prediction of global warming effects and national security problems. Nonetheless, high fidelity simulations are difficult due to the ocean’s complex physics and broad range of spatial and temporal scales. These range from the smallest dissipative scales with typical lengths of millimeters, to the largest energetic mesoscale eddies with characteristic wavelengths exceeding tens of kilometers. Whereas the accurate parameterization of all flow scales with the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) is nearly impossible, resolving all scales of turbulence through a direct numerical simulation (DNS) is beyond the capabilities of the most powerful supercomputers in the foreseeable future. Hence, efficient parameterizations are needed. In this work, we extend the bridging partially-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (PANS) model to ocean flows. This parameterization operates between RANS and DNS, and aims only to resolve the scales not amenable to modeling in order to increase the efficiency of ocean computations. We also propose a PANS scale-aware closure to model the unresolved scales. The initial validation tests of the new PANS model include two representative ocean channel flows. The results confirm the potential of the new parameterization to predict oceanographically relevant turbulence efficiently.