How Low Can Seafaring Standards Go?

Firstly this is the first article that I've ever written so feel free to critique this as much as you feel you have time to do so. After 32 years working at sea as a marine engineer, ashore doing new-builds, conversions and latterly mostly in an office colouring in spreadsheets hoping that the sweet mercy of death would take me, I have reached that perfect age when I stopped giving a - insert your choice of profane word here. Oops. Maybe, that qualifies for a bit of censorship. Please see first part of last sentence.

Anyway, as I reach for that part of life between the hellish misery of realising just how crap things are and the tantalising period of time at home with enough wedge to do a few more interesting things before I'm dribbling in my soup and nutting the cornflakes, I figured its about time to say a few words about the sea. More specifically, the sad reality of an industry that seems to be unique in that instead of steadily improving standards of quality, standards and professionalism we have the reverse. Frankly, I can't think of another mass industry where the race to the bottom has been so successful. In fact so successful that I suspect in the near future some enterprising company or agency will work out how to waterproof a JCB and start digging at a seabed near you soon.

I'll wind the clock back a bit, because at 50, that seems an entirely sensible thing to do as, lets face it, looking forward isn't quite so appealing....

I started as a cadet in Plymouth for Shell Tankers UK. It was in retrospect clearly the end of an era that actually achieved real improvements in professional people at sea. It was in the UK a time when the weight and gravitas of hundreds of years of seafaring was just about finished but the last vestige of company and personal pride still remained. It was also a time when HSE was in place with enough common sense to be meaningful but allowed enough space to actually do the job, learn from mistakes and once in a while kill yourself which, was an excellent example to those around you. Far more effective than a crappy video or even worse 'Death By PowerPoint.'

A couple of small digressions here. Number 1. Stop doing PowerPoint stuff. Really. After the first slide everyone in the room is on their mobiles looking at the news, surfing questionable websites or asleep. Big PowerPoint presentations are miserable for the audience and you look and sound like a nob. Don't do it. Go look at TED for some examples of how to keep an audience interested. Second digression is health and safety. Many people will have come across the Darwin Awards but if you have not let me recap. Basically, you win an award by killing yourself or rendering yourself unable to pass your genes on by doing something really epic. Like grind your testicles against an industrial belt sander with fairly obvious results...That's a true story, by the way. So, back to health and safety. One of the obvious problems with health and safety is that it keeps people alive. More specifically it keeps people alive that will sadly pass on their idiocy to future generations, thus degrading the industry. Time and time again I've been involved in situations or met people over the last 15 years where I honestly had to question myself as to why they were anywhere near something dangerous. I've had conversations with similarly aged and crusty colleagues who would, if given a beer or two spend a lot of time sobbing in it.

And whilst being somewhat flippant there is a serious point. By trying to eliminate all risk we have perversely achieved an entire workforce who lack many skills that only a generation ago people simply had. And the biggest missing elements are competence and ability.

In order to gain competence you need to do something enough times to the point where it becomes second nature or you have the motor functions ingrained so far that you automatically do the right things. Driving a car is of course like that and lets be honest here, if learning to drive a car was organised by the oil and gas industry there would be about ten people on the road and those ten would have a bloke walking in front of them holding a red flag. What really happens is that you 'learn' to drive, pass a test which, on any other day you would fail and then you head out into the wild roads, utterly terrified and in reality not safe to be out there. But we humans love a bit of risk and despite the horrors that await when leaving the drive we persevere and within a short period of time the overwhelming amount of people will become safe and competent drivers and find themselves heading from A to B without any issues and able to negotiate 99.999% of the problems chucked at them. Now and again they will come across a small shrine of flowers taped to a new section of roadside barrier dedicated to a 15 year old called Shane who, despite his double figure convictions for minor offences was, according to the various in memorium cards a wonderful human being who was nice to dogs and loved his granny. We all at that point slow down a tad and remind ourselves to behave a bit more.

What happens now is that there is so huge an aversion to risk that people no longer feel willing or able to do anything. And before one states otherwise there is a difference between risk and doing something utterly stupid and criminal like damaging the environment. What I mean by removing risk is that we take away the desire of people to stretch themselves and improve by trying new things out and learning from them. Being at sea or working in the offshore construction industry is a dangerous place. And the only way to learn about that and to deal with it is to do it. You can't gain that ability to deal with an ever changing and hostile environment if you have been swathed in cotton wool with personal risk reduced to zero. Sooner or later a situation will crop up that you will be utterly unable to deal with.

And, eventually having rambled on I arrive at the sad point I see within the marine industry where the vast majority of seafarers I meet on either side of the shipboard fence are to put it simply, not very good. And that's partially because of the risk averse culture we now find ourselves in where people have become so scared to make a mistake that they no longer learn how to do the job. At 21 I could pretty much take an engine apart and put most of it back together again. I would have needed a bit of help to take the required bits off again and locate the few leftovers I had, however, by and large it would have been done and resembled the bit of kit I started with only with new valves and bearings. 99 times out of 100 it might even run after the third attempt.

I remember well the first steam ship I was on working with the Second Engineer who was in a genuinely senior position occupied by a man in his 30's who had the long distance stare of a Vietnam vet. He had dealt with near disasters multiple times whilst enjoying the gentle rocking of a Force 10 and zero support from a Chief Engineer who was basically a 24 hour drunk. He showed me once how to put chemicals into a high pressure boiler leaving me with the sage words that if I got it wrong chances were, I'd blow my head off. I can assure you that the level of focus and attention to the job I put into it was, to say the least extreme. He never once after that stood over my shoulder and I didn't kill myself many times either. Today, 28 years later if I close my eyes I can mentally operate all the valves and feel the pressure in the steam pipes.

Now, when I visit a vessel I can speak to a 'Chief Engineer' who would not know how to check, let alone set a tappet on an engine. A man who would be unable to manually synchronise a generator. I'm sure that if I were to take an equally miserable and crusty Captain with me he would find similar standards on the bridge with most navigators unable to even recognise a sextant let alone know what one does. These are people who have been so micro-managed from ashore and made so risk averse that they are terrified to attempt even the simplest of tasks for fear of making a mistake or getting an email bollocking from an office wallah who last stepped on a ship in 1961 and yet still believed he 'had it.'

And you can combine this with possibly the worst thing that has befallen the professional seafarer, which is the STCW 95 training scheme. Make no mistake, nearly every seafarer that qualified before STCW 95 from a good college working for a proper old school shipping company has nothing good to say about STCW 95. It is a meaningless qualification that has aimed for a low average and been highly successful at achieving it. On many occasions I have dealt with people who hold Class 1 unlimited certificates from either deck or engine who frankly would struggle to find their arse with both hands. They would definitely be unable to fix a moderate technical issue or confidently command a vessel in adverse conditions.

And that's because STCW is aimed at numbers not standards no matter what is said to the contrary. The industry wants a large pool of cheap labour that at the very least on paper looks professional enough to keep the insurance low and any inspectors happy. Whether or not that person on board is genuinely capable or not is of little interest to a holding company based in Giberovia hidden behind multiple shell corporations. And because of the desire for labour on board to be as cheap as possible, traditional seafaring nations which, if one was to be honest punted out people with considerably higher levels of knowledge and competence can no longer compete. Very few seafarers today from a high cost country could afford to work for $500 USD a month or be willing to do a trip lasting a year. And of course today you have the added issue of possibly being on board a vessel where you are the only person from your culture or country, making a social life extremely hard indeed. People need social interaction and of course cultural reference points are needed to create the bonds that make friendships. Today a ship can be a lonely place especially when shore leave is almost impossible in most places now.

In my opinion STCW has been an enabler for lower standards and the decimation of the more professional seafarer. It has allowed companies to scrape people from around the globe based on the cheapest possible supply not the best. And it has also allowed fraud to further degrade those seafarers who have made the effort to go to good colleges, spend high amounts of money and lose months of work doing it.

Thing have become so bad that some larger companies now have teams of people who evaluate ship staff for competence before a contract is awarded. Not just checking the paperwork but actually sending people to a vessel and conducting competence evaluations because that STCW 95 bit of paper is no longer held to be sufficient evidence of ability. And in my job, sadly I have come across many men who, despite holding a Class 1 unlimited are rejected because they are so poor. This is not only a reflection on the person, its mostly a reflection on the system that allows pretty much anyone to get the highest level of certification from somewhere for little real effort. And I include some White Book nations in this. A colleague of mine recently came across a master with an unlimited CoC - not CeC - issued from a White Book nation and verified through their own system as genuine who had only ever achieved a certificate for below 500grt working in a harbour. When the man was questioned he simply said that he told the White Book issuing authority of his many years experience and unquestioningly they issued - for a fee - a full blown CoC unlimited.

As I reach the end of this particular grump, I find myself somewhat at a loss to understand just how poor things are. I suspect that today as in most aspects of life, seafaring has taken on a level of unreality. At one time the honest truth was made clear. To go to sea was damned hard work where you might end up doing huge hours in a dangerous and unpleasant place but the flip side is that you took some pride in achieving the impossible with few resources and could have a properly good drink afterwards with colleagues who had been in the same metaphorical trenches with you. The sodden and filthy boiler suit was a mark of pride not to be shed as soon as your hands got mucky. On the deck side - despite the oil and water - officers took pride in being able to use a sextant, to take a noon sight, to be able to pilot a ship in dangerous waters without resorting to a check sheet or an email from the office.

If we are honest, the truth is that across the board there is an unsaid and un-talked about crisis of competence. There are enough ancient mariners around to hold the string bag of operating a vessel together but like other dinosaurs extinction looms over the next ten years. What will be left are people who hold more certificates than a pack of cards but don't have a scooby how to run and maintain a ship without huge amounts of shore support. Which, by the way, isn't all that shiny either in many cases.

But, like many issues, where there is a problem there is almost always a solution. But first one has to squarely look at the problem in an open and truthful way and accept what actually is. Once honesty has been injected into the arm of the industry then solutions can be put into place that deal with those problems. For seafaring, STCW 95 needs to be looked at again and the question has to be asked as to why Class 2 and Class 1 certification is being issued to people who 20 years ago would never get that level of qualification. If there is no solution to that, then countries who actually want better standards should rethink their stance and perhaps start issuing an STCW 95+ certificate. When insurers, charterers, and companies taking vessels on hire understand that there are better levels of people out there demand will increase for those people and perhaps force a change in a system that's reversed standards and lowered seafaring levels across the globe.