Tims Times

No blame

Published June 7, 2009 in accident and From the ship. 8 Comments

Giovanna with large port list due to overboard valve perhaps not working?

No blame culture; a concept.

17 crew on the ship, and one of them pulls the handle off the overboard valve so that it can’t be used. Nothing is said the broken handle is placed beside neatly in three bits and nothing is reported. No malicious damage or sabotage here, just pure stupidity. No excuse, someone somewhere accepted that a basic level of knowledge was required to be employed, and documents issued by “reputable” sources attested to the fact that yes this man has in fact a brain and is capable of using it. Documents, certificates, references the whole nine yards all to prove worthiness of employment.

Some time later during an inspection of the overboard ballast system, I note that one of the valve handles is broken, imagine if you will walking into the kitchen and noticing that the hot tap on the kitchen sink has no handle. Hard to miss. Very hard to miss. I turn to the engineer and ask, ” How long has it been like this?” the reply ” very long time…it wasn’t me” and I say “but less than a fortnight as that was when the last inspection was held, no?”
Blank face. No response.
I ask the Chief engineer later, he looks at me pale faced and shrugs his shoulders “What to do?” he says, “new crew, new problems”, I ask “when were you planning on telling me?” he replied well you know now.

The idea is that you report the incident so something can be done about it, like fixing or repairing or educating. But mostly the crew say nothing at all. Worrying really.

No blame culture is right, nobody admits to the problem so there is nobody to blame.

Global breakfast

Published June 3, 2009 in By the way. 5 Comments

10 PM the other night and the sun was still loafing about up here at 60 degrees North.

Breakfast.

Today I ate ½lb of Clonakilty Pork Sausages, purchased in Foynes Co.Limerick, with that were two fried eggs sunny side up lightly done so the yolk spilled onto the plate, the eggs were from Rotterdam. I applied a squirt of Heinz Tomato Kethup from a squeezy bottle, provided to us by a good chandler who drove from Talinn to Sillamäe, Estonia to supply the ship. To wipe up the grease, yolk and ketchup was a freshly baked bread roll, flour from Aalborg,Denmark, yeast from Sweden and water from our very own distillation plant and mineralised with god knows what to make it drinkable. Coffee was Gevalia, medium roast from Gävle, Sweden beans from I’m sorry to say a non-eco non-fair trade source. Milk was full fat UHT from Hamburg, Germany, The cutlery and cup were Ikea, made in the peoples republic, the plate Norwegian.
Location of dining, the saloon on the 1st poop deck, location of ship North Atlantic coast of Norway.
And after 6 months of random preparation, the entire repast took less than 15 minutes to consume. Delicious.

GPS dependancy

Published May 21, 2009 in Maritime, Navigation, pinch of salt required, From the ship and On the ship. 5 Comments

I read with interest an article about GPS at Panbo.com which started me thinking about how much GPS there is these days, my mobile phone has a GPS with Google maps, you can get a tag for your dog or pet with a GPS locater. Cars have GPS navigators, hill walkers, mountain climbers, arctic explorers, jungle adventurers literally every man and woman and his/her dog has GPS these days. It’s all GPS.

Now I can remember the days when it was new to ships and had just been downgraded in classification from the US military for use in civilian applications for navigation of commercial vessels. The units were bulky and broke down regularly and we used to check the accuracy of the GPS by comparing our celestial observations with the GPS, the celestial observation being the more accurate of the two. Close to land the GPS was turned off and one navigated with the radar and visual bearings….mark one eyeball method being used too. Surprisingly enough we managed to get in and out of port without any problems, and the world kept turning. In the Red Sea, you would get calls from Greek ships on the VHF radio asking “have you GPS?” and “what is your position?” the standard answer being “on the bridge….”

It didn’t take too long before GPS was being used to test the accuracy of celestial observations, although at the turn of the millenium it looked bad for GPS for a while because of the millennium bug but the clock kept ticking and the world kept turning and the GPS kept spitting out positions with lots of decimal places. I don’t think that many officers on ships deep sea know how to use the sextant any more or where it is, or what it is….something from the old days anyway. You have an entire generation of deck officers who know how to plot a position from a GPS, but who don’t really know where they are or where they are going to, or what the next course will be, or what the ETA is….maybe not that bad but sometimes I wonder!

Anyway this article mentions delays in implementing upgrades and even suggests an entire collapse of the system, shock horror, the world would be full of defunct electronic receivers and a lot of people who were suddenly lost, not knowing where they were going to or coming from, or where the dog was or what street they were on, and “map reading” what is that some kind of 20th century thing?

I don’t think we are that close but you can hear the phrases “who would have thought it could happen ?” and “GPS failure creates havoc on road networks, drivers completely lost….”

Time to dust off the sextant methinks……or who knows where we will end up!

ISM in a box

Published May 19, 2009 in Language, Books, Maritime, Dodgy ships, pinch of salt required and From the ship. 1 Comment

A picture of the pilot boat rounding the stern.

The ISM code for all the land lubbers “International Safety Management (ISM) Code” means the International Management Code for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention.

Which is a bit of a mouthful and it includes the term “the master has the overriding authority and the responsibility to make decisions with respect to safety and pollution prevention” which means that the old man can’t blame anybody else if he didn’t make the right decision.
It is also a big responsibility to give a master. I haven’t done any “overriding” myself, but there is always a first time.

On tankers we have a daily dose of ISM and it pretty much rules the way we work, that’s fine by me. Other ships take the ISM with a “pinch of salt” I heard about a general cargo ship of flag not mentioned that had an inspection from the port state, and the skipper was asked where all the IMO and ISM publications were “oh, them, we have them all in a cardboard box behind the bridge, every time we get a new one we just put it in the box…..,and they are all in English and well nobody reads English here….”

I don’t know if the story is true, but the official IMO languages are English,French and Spanish. With three additional languages Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The Germans had just lost the war when the languages were being dealt out.

But sure as long as the legislation sounds good to the politicians and lawyers, then they are happy and so were the boys on the cargo ship…..with the books in a box!

Laid up

Published April 22, 2009 in Maritime, Shipping and On the ship. 2 Comments

Neatly parked Russian coasters waiting for better days near Svetly on the canal to Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave in the Baltic. The pilot informed me that they had been laid up since January of this year, another pilot in Rotterdam told me that they have such underpowered engines that they would be the first to get mothballed, shippers choosing more flexible tonnage. That was his take on events. But I think that regardless of machine power the chances for these ships of seeing any action are slim for the foreseeable future.
Lay ups.
A programme on Swedish Public Radio was discussing the use of fjords and harbours on the west coast of Sweden as possible sites for long term lay ups. Northern latitudes being apparently more attractive due to better security. Another report in the LA Times speaks about Subic Bay in the Philippines where ships are laid up.

Hot and cold lay ups. A hot lay up is where the ship is waiting for a shorter period without cargo with full crew and ready for action, e.g. Subic Bay, because of the risk of typhoons. A cold lay up means a long period of time out of service. Accommodation sealed up, dehumidifiers in all spaces, and shore electricity or extra generator for power, with maybe one or two watchmen onboard. Dead ship in other words, e.g. Labuan in Brunei.

Of course none of this lay up business is new, 20 years ago as cadet I sailed on ships that had been reactivated from lay up after going directly from newly built to idle for several years. Back then it was mostly VLCC’s and other tankers, now it’s mostly large container vessels. The reasons are the same though over capacity and freight rates plummet. It will take time for a recovery, by then plenty ships will have gone to scrap or lay up to push up the freight rates. Then the carousel can start again.