HE-Alert - the magazine for safety on ships

Now also available online at:-

http://www.he-alert.org/index.asp

Here's my short response to an article on a subject dear to me . . . read on:-


Richard Sadler's column (Alert/issue No. 23/May 2010) makes some very valid points on the relationship between finance/financiers and shipping/seafarers.

Here's my point of view, and please don't put it aside as "3rd World" because of my physical/geographical location on date - as an ex-seafarer who has been a shipbroker, into politics, as a freight forwarder, been part of bringing unitised cargo inland into India, on television as an anchor, within all forms of media and headed the Asia operations of a Silicon Valley tech company in the business of transaction management for 3 industries - financial, gaming and preventive defence - as well as fathered two investment bankers - and so I do think a bit of world view comes from New Delhi, too. Please also excuse the syntax and grammar - for the last one year I have been at it trying to also revive my CoC issued 1980 and that has been an experience, too.

1) The biggest flaw is that the seafarer is seen by everybody ashore as an over-worked donkey - which she or he is. The rest of the world has moved on, not just in reduced working hours, but the seafarer is still flogged on 4-on/8-off, or worse. Between IMO, ILO, STCW, ILO 147, ILO 163, ILO 180 and now ILO Super - everybody knows that the seafarer they visit on the ship is still subjected to something called "not undermining the authority of the Master" - in this day and age. The first thing that needs to be done, therefore, is to bring down working hours onboard, especially for deck watchkeepers, by the simple method of adopting a Master + non-watchkeeping First Mate, and 3 independent watch-keepers. At the very least.

2) The training for seafarers is still stuck in arcane subjects like magnetic poles, theory of gyro and other ancient art forms - when what is needed for interaction with shore staff is more a PR cum legal person. An average seafarer by the time he is 30 or so has spent more than 4 years learning about stuff that is going to be of no use to him, while the same time could be spent better in understanding the simpler art of collision avoidance, pollution prevention and acquiring basic economic skillsets. That's the next thing that needs to change. You want respect from your banker - you have to understand what he is saying.

3) Industry meaning shipowner - and I have spent some quality time lately with shipowners as well as taken part in piracy/hijack release discussions - considers the seafarer on board as a standing expense - whether alive or dead. As long as the CoC and other certification is in order keeping the ship seaworthy, it does not matter - the seafarer is a commodity to the shipowner. Barring passenger and cruise ships, it is better to treat the seafarer as somebody who eats too much food, and then cribs about everything.

4) Industry meaning cargo interests, port state staff, insurance the rest of them - in my part of the world, treats the seafarer as somebody from the bottom rung, like the hapless truckdriver. Somebody to hold as hostage for a period of time at no cost to anybody other than the shipowner, so why feed the seafarer in the period ad interim. For "food" read salaries, and other expenses. I have heard shipowners crib about paying salaries to seafarers who have spent months onboard ships arrested, hijacked or similar - or been jailed for alleged crimes committed while on duty.

5) On crew shore leaves, and the comparison to airline crew, very valid points. Where do we start - should seafarers demand shore leave as a right? Good heavens, even earned leave is deemed to be a "privilege" extended at the mercy of the owner, so what cost shore leave? So
would owners now start insisting that charter parties include clauses on shore leave for seafarers, or ensure additional "bonuses" in lieu, is that a thought the time for which is very overdue?
What I can not agree with, Sir, is the approach that we leave it to the bankers to administer these changes. Having been a vendor to the banking industry for the last decade, I would suggest that change in inertia level is one thing they hate. What we have to do is look within. Take, for example, the whole wonderful concept of GMDSS. Great. But how on earth did it evolve into something which did away with a Radio officer onboard, when in actual fact we need a Super Elecronics and Communication person on every Merchant Navy ship?

The cure, Sir, is from within. It is the seafarer who needs to say, OK, I am a Master, and I consider this ship unseaworthy if it does not have at least 1 more watch-keeping officer - and he then needs to work with the Port State, since the Flag State and its bankers sure will not assist.

Sincerely,
Veeresh Malik
New Delhi
India

(Courtesy of Alert! - The International Maritime Human Element Bulletin)

Manu's scripts: Calculated mistake.

Manu's scripts: Calculated mistake.

"For most of my working life I have been told, by the cabal sitting ashore, that crew costs are rising unsustainably and that we Indian sailors are- to use a favourite banality- ‘pricing ourselves out of the market’. So you can imagine my surprise when I read of a Lloyd’s List article that said that, since 2003, when the the International Bargaining Forum began, ”the costs of the 23-man model ship used as the basis for negotiations have increased from USD 42,794 a month to USD 54,850, a rise of 28%”. Coincidentally, another report I ran into, this time by Moore Stephens, says that total ship operating costs fell between 2% and 8% in 2009 after 7 years of rise, although they are expected to be marginally higher this year. The nine year average rise is between 6 and 7 percent.""

Read on, click the link . . .

How to join a cruise ship? ver 1.0

Basic advice to a young man who wants to join the cruise industry. Age 27, done this and that in the travel industry ashore, now looking at the romance of being on a ship.

Please do read, update, correct, suggest improvements?

+++

a) To join cruiuse ships now, you will need:-

1)  To do 4 x basic courses also called STCW/78, these can be done at a variety of institutes and colleges in India. Cost about 12k.

2) An InDOS number, which the institute will apply for you, costs about 800-1000/-

3) Then, with these two things in hand, you simultaneously start looking for jobs, for which you have to check out the newspapers, catering colleges, byelanes of port cities, internet.

4) Once you have an offer, that company may sponsor you for a CDC of that flag which their cruise ship flies. There are hardly any Indian pax ships, and their rules are, different. So it will be open register and similar.

5) Also take a look here:- http://www.tsrahaman.org/  . . . you can do the 4 courses listed in "1" over here and hopefully pick up some grapevine on agents/jobs etc. Pleasant place, residential campus.

5) One more 3 day course called Passenger Ship Course, this is done in Cal/Madras/Mumbai. But is better done AFTER you have acquired a CDC or atleast got somewhere.

These are the 4 courses you will need to do, at DGS approved colleges, for STCW purposes:-

Personal Survival Technique
Personal Safety and Social Responsibility
Fire Prevention & Fire Fighting
Elementary First Aid

+++

And then, good luck.

+++

Indian seafarer jobhunting feedback for owners/operators/managers

Anybody got any more ideas or comments? Identities shall be protected . . .

+++

Here's a collection of feedback from seafarers in context with their life at sea, as well as when they visit the shipping company offices ashore:-

# Ship owners and managers should send more inhouse information, especially as pertains to casaulty reports and also company's internal issues, so that those at sea can remain informed.

# Ship manager and owner offices must have better facilities for seafarers. Sitting in open plan offices discussing terms and conditions is not good. Seafarers must be called into small conference rooms for all pre-joining facilities where those who have business with them can come to them instead of seafarers standing in front of clerks like slaves.

# The first point of contact is usually a security guard, who is familiar with regular shore staff, but usually disrespectful to the seafarer who comes occasionally. This needs to be resolved. Seafarers should be accompanies into offices by specially designated people who will coordinate other issues too.

# General waiting areas for seafarers must be cleaner, as well as provide full facilities for refreshments, beverages and cleaning up. Toilets, especially, must be of high standard. If shipping companies want their offiers to behave like officers, then they need to treat their officers like officers, too.

# Ship owners and managers are sending seafarers to look after investments costing millions of dollars. But at the shipping offices, this simple fact is lost on especially the juniormost staff, who need to be educated and taught as well as trained to be aware that they are there to serve.

# Wages are often the subject of verbal agreements, which are then broken, so that needs to be sorted out. In addition, companies must inform prospective hires that this is the number, gross salary, without trying to fool people with offers of hazy bonuses, and "tax saving" schemes.

# Seafarers too should rely on guidance from their own tax consultants on the best way to save tax. With so many changes coming by way of NRI status and service tax, seafarers working on contract need to be very clear well in advance on possible tax implications.

# Most of all, in the forthcoming days of seafarer shortages, companies must bring in programmes to look after the families of seafarers at sea. It usually will not need anything more than outsourcing such work to specialist agencies, including hospitals.

+++

Full report on the Hanjin Gotherburd/Chang Tong collision

Seldom have I seen such amazing photographs as these. A container ship at 25 knots slices through the midships of a bulk carrier, both were in an end-on situation, clear visibility, classic case of faster vessel altering to port in a TSS, while the slower bulker alters to starboard.

http://www.bsu-bund.de/cln_005/nn_101744/SharedDocs/pdf/EN/Investigation__Report/2008/Investigation__Report__450__07,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/Investigation_Report_450_07.pdf

Worth the visit, if only for the photos.

Deepwater Horizon, and a quote from Clay Maitland . . .

Most of you would have already read about as well as seen television and internet coverage on the DEEPWATER HORIZON accident in the US Gulf/Gulf of Mexico. And then gone back to your daily lives, heck yes, this is too far away, won't impact us.

Really? Well, put it briefly, this is what one important shipping analysts says on his regular features on the subject:-

http://www.claymaitland.com/2010/06/03/changes-in-climate/

Clay Maitland says:-

What will the economic consequences of the oil spill be? We don’t know, but I’m reminded of that recent movie about oil wildcatters: “There Will Be Blood”.

I do not believe that offshore drilling is completely dead in U. S. waters, including the Arctic, but it may be. It looks badly wounded. If so, expect a lot more imports of foreign-flag tankers, with the implied risk of tanker-related oil spills to come.

That means still more regulatory restrictions by the U. S. Federal and state governments. Hence the reason for industry concern about the sanctity of the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, as it applies to tanker vessels, limits of liability, and expansion of the list of directly responsible parties. Many things have changed since 1991, when that law went into effect; the rise of powerful oil trading firms, sometimes called the Vitol effect, being just one. The issue of “who chooses the tankers”, and therefore of quality of the vessels and crews, is with us yet, and becomes even more relevant if tanker traffic to North America is about to expand. We’ll have to see how that goes, too.

Another economic consequence: marine insurance faces a very different, and uncertain, future. The U. S. Congress is now fully aware, as it was in 1990, of what a bad thing limitation of liability is. Can Brussels be far behind? The enormous damage and loss claims emanating from the U. S. Gulf states will far exceed anything the London market has seen since the second world war. Yes, there will be blood.

+++

The DEEPWATER HORIZON/2010 crisis in the US Gulf area impacts many of us in many ways.

For the US Government, an engineering mishap is being smartly converted into a natural disaster using some excellent PR, since nature is gentler on the future of Presidents there, unlike the monsoon here which decides it for the Government in India.  Katrina/Bush and now DEEPWATER HORIZON/Obama, not our fault, it was the Big Bad Sea.

For the environmentalists, there is a mixed bag - some have a "serves them right" attitude, some compare with Bhopal/1984 or Kuwait-Iraq '90s, and some go emotional on photographs of birds soaked in oil. For the media, there is the usual shrill structured amazement - how could "they" have made holes miles below the ocean's surface to  drill for and bring out oil, and not taken the precaution of figuring out how to stop it - like children who will claim they did not know that ice-cream can and will be spilt. What the media is paid for is to drill deeper into annual reports put out by large companies, where all these issues are listed in the fine print, with notes on the risks thereon.

As friends at sea talk about whole fleets of laid-up tankers being revived to load, ship-out from the Persian Gulf area, and store crude oil in the developed countries, and friends in the banking industry speak about how the complete dynamics of international commodities and shipping are shivering at the prospect of even more regulations adding to the costs, it seems that people on land have not the faintest clue on what to do next with such deep drilling accidents.

To bring things into simple persepctive - the depths involved are more than the height of Mount Everest over mean sea level. Now imagine that from this base, we try to pull out natural resources, to keep ourselves going on top of the mountain. So we all live on a plateau high up, way above the Himalayas, and somehow, way way down below on the ground at mean sea level, where it is also dark, cold, and where exist pressures able to crush diamonds into dust, some people, call them engineers, have now decided to dig huge holes and remove the foundations of the mountain to bring it up and make fuel out of it. Using a pipe, which they do not know how to stop, in case the bottom of the mountain caves in.

Can you and I remove the foundations of our homes to build higher floors? That's exactly where the deep oil drilling industry has now reached, in its push for energy, Fuelled by the rest of us. Because that's how it is - we climb higher and higher, and dig deeper below, after all, there's only water on top, right? Right. Think about what that water did when a little crack appeared on the surface of the ocean, during the tsunami, a few years ago.

And then, ofcourse, there are those who are busy making a profit out of this disaster, too. 34 billion dollars, and counting, likely to go up some more - simple physics tells you that all that money going down the pipe is going to surface somewhere else. And like after 9/11, the rest of the world will be expected to cough up the re-insurance bill. Likewise, the actual ownership of BP, shrouded within corporate googlies of the sort which are increasingly prevalent worldwide, will probably change - whatever that means. Or it will get merged with some other existing oil and energy major, and re-appear in yet another thinly veiled avatar.

What is certain, however, is that eventually the rest of the world, including us, will pick up the bill for the vast insurance claims, as well as the much higher fuel costs. And as seafarers, we will continue to sail those huge tankers with even bigger slop tanks and small ships which have less deadweight than the afore-mentioned slop tanks, and all points in between. And as for foreign flag tankers, and the risks their crews will take - hey, its your choice. But your salary better go up, because you will, like doctors and others, soon need to buy malpractice insurance or similar cover every time your ship calls a US Port.

The DEEPWATER HORIZON is just one more marker. That it happened off the shores of a developed country is probably why it is getting all the attention. But the real problem is not with the natural consequences of oil coming up and floating on the surface of the sea and along the beaches - it is there, deep down below, where the question remins the same - how deep do you drill?

The answer for which is this - as the price of oil keeps rising, the deeper they will need to drill.

And as on date, there are no conventions or agreements between countries worldwide on how deep they should drill into the earth's core. And that's where the fallacy lies, that is the real problem to solve. Not just OPA or other conventions that cover what happens on the surface of the sea.