When Does the Marine World Wake Up?

Last week in a fit of middle aged – ahem – pique I wrote an article about the truly miserable state of the marine industry, in particular, the abysmal standards that have now become the norm on a ship.

And, before I go any further I’d like to know which gibbon has set up Microsoft’s background editing because I’m fairly sure he or she does not have English as first language. In my first line I allowed the autocorrect free reign. And that would be fine if I wanted that authentic direct translation from Chinese to English in a machinery manual. I may not be a literary giant, but I know bollocks when I read it.

Anyway, forcing my miserable arse back on track its clear that my feelings about the current standards that pervade across ships of all kinds seems to have hit a nerve. So much so that whilst I figured my rant was pretty much the ravings of an old bloke sat in Saudi Arabia with sod all to do at the weekend, there must be a grain or two of truth in it.

And over the week, whilst talking with colleagues, some of whom read my article we debated this issue. And very quickly it almost became a self-help group of sad and depressed mariners venting their spleen with a tear in their eye, misty at the thought of better times past.

I’d like to add that my current Board of Trade friends range from various countries with strong nautical backgrounds who have the primary job of inspecting vessels – literally hundreds of them – and evaluating seafarers for a variety of reasons. Thousands of them each year, so, there is no doubt that the issues we see floating to the surface like a particularly smelly turd in an increasingly shallow pool are valid. Without a doubt, no matter what some shiny arsed, job justifying governmental representative or company front person says, seafaring competence is no longer a term that should be used because it implies some level that can be quantified. And for the most part you would need a good knowledge of quantum physics to find that today.

Now, having said all that I’ll precis a bit of my background which inglorious as it is, has given me a fairly broad-based knowledge of the marine industry. I started off with Shell Tankers UK. And I had every intention of never leaving them because they were a company that pulled the neat trick of making you feel that you were on the cream of the worlds shipping when, in fact, you were on floating scrapyards held together by an understaffed engineering department who worked their backsides off but, through dint of sweat and ability kept the impossible running from A to B. It was a wonderful place to learn how to be a marine engineer because you had no support from the beach, communications were so expensive that even Shell baulked and the people you worked with by and large really knew their stuff and passed on that knowledge. You could also do things like weld up high-pressure boilers without involving the United Nations to oversee it. Cadets were supposed to be able to flash up a main engine and 3rd engineers had a better knowledge of AC and refrigeration than most service companies now.

All that came to a crashing halt when they flagged out. And a salutary lesson to me as a young man as to what the sea is really about and how seafarers are perceived. One week before the ships were moved out of the sweet high standards of the UK flag, the managing director of Shell Tankers UK stated categorically that not one iota of truth lay in the rumours and that no ships were being transferred from the UK. It is an amazing feat that astonishes me even today how they managed to change their minds that night and in four working days get all 30-odd ships onto the IOM register. They must have really burned the midnight oil on that one.

Or they were lying bastards. Which has pretty much set the tone for the maritime industry since.

Now, being a lying bastard with a straight face is a useful tool and one that can really help you in a tight spot. Like telling the captain that you will get the engine fixed in a couple of hours whilst staring at the smoking ruins of what was once a pristine engineroom, all the while wondering what the hell you did to break it. And more importantly how you can fix it.

But, whilst a certain amount of obscuration of reality is needed to run a business, when it becomes the normal state of operating, something is drastically wrong somewhere.

So, sliding back on track I left deepsea for a shore job commissioning chemical plants. Basically, making poisons that you feed your family every time you eat a vegetable or tuck into a nice bit of steak. I had a conversation one long evening with a chemist on site who was very clear that he only ate organic food. Go figure. By the way, he also had worked in a factory making baked beans and was adamant that he would only eat Heinz, having seen what went into the bog basic tins. Anyway, after a few months of this and getting to a point where I loathed my very existence I went back to sea on a coaster. Which, by pure coincidence was at the same oil berth that I left my last tanker, only it was about 1500mt not 300,000mt – an unpleasant transition that reared its head the first time I was in a storm in the Irish sea. Didn’t know you could throw up your arsehole until then.

From there I somehow ended up doing a conversion of an ancient drill ship to a cable ship in Birkenhead and then sailed on it as 2E for a few years. Couple of things I discovered doing that. Firstly, the drill ship had been a French one so below the galley there were three 2000ltr tanks for wine. Really. Can you imagine that level of civilisation today on a drill ship? Sadly, the miserable sods I worked for ripped them out. Secondly, the boozer outside the docks called ‘The Castle’ is where we could buy back all the gear that had been nicked by the dockers throughout each day. Scousers, eh? Rascals. Or something like that…..

Then the biggie. Because of my DP experience gained cable laying, I ended up in the offshore world on a trenching vessel where the first job was a six weeker in Korea for a well-known American offshore construction company. Pity that they hadn’t actually done a proper bottom survey because six months later we finished….

After that a bunch of other offshore ships which at the time had proper staff on board. When I got to Chief Engineer I used to go to bed at night and sleep.

Until…

The industry decided that all they needed was one guy at the top of each department that knew what to do and they could really save some money by not employing people who had seen a ship before in the lower ranks. I kid you not, that towards the end of my time offshore I always left a light on in my cabin because being called out of your scratcher every sodding night was a lot easier if you were basically only half asleep and secondly able to see the phone.

After a while I ended up doing conversions and newbuilds and working in and out of an office which gave me the chance to actually sleep at night and then ponce around during the day knowing that it was some other poor sap who was going to have to deal with the impossible when it sailed. I’ll write about this sort of thing later.

Then, thanks to the oil price crash I find myself wandering around ships doing on hires and desperately trying to locate that small kernel of knowledge buried in the minds of the people I evaluate - for the most part smiling through gritted teeth. Sometimes I feel like the Indiana Jones of the marine world searching for lost treasure - minus the good looks and money I'd hasten to add.

 Which, eventually brings me to the point of this worryingly long article. Namely, what happens when this current layer of people that inhabit the age group from about 45 to 55 retires? Or dies, which sometimes I feel might be a wonderful thing about half way through another health and safety presentation which you know that the people presenting it don’t believe and the people listening to it know that they don’t believe it either. I wish for once that a brave soul will just stand up in front of everyone and say it how it is. They need a job and therefore must generate more safety bollocks to justify their existence, whilst corporate need to maintain the illusion that they are good to small children and dogs. If a bit of truth could be dispensed early on we could all get the pain over with in about two minutes and then go for a beer. Or a nice glass of freshly bottled RO plant water where I am now.

So, after another diversion we come back to the main thrust of what I’m getting at.

A long time ago when I joined a ship, the Captain and Chief Engineer had usually joined the ranks of the Flat Arse Society and were well on their way to getting a corporate membership of Alcoholics Anonymous. This was a good thing because it stopped them from causing too much trouble in places they had no knowledge of, such as the bridge or engineroom. Ships ran off the backs of the Mate and the Second Engineer. These were usually younger folk around the 30(ish) mark who had their full-blown tickets – when they were hard to get – and who looked like triathletes because of the running around they did. These guys were the future.

And companies knew that. The office staff and HR – well not HR because that ghastly term had not been invented to make our lives miserable at that time – had a pretty good idea of who was on their ships and they had a marker on the stars of the future. Some were destined to become Captains and Chief Engineers and others – those with table manners and the ability to wear a suit without looking as if they had demobbed from a WW2 regiment – were earmarked for ‘The Office.’ These blokes – and I use that term not people because, woman had not been invented at sea yet – were looked at by the head office as assets. They were usually given a ‘Call Me,’ trip, i.e. a one-off trip with four stripes so they could say they had done the job – and then invited into the hallowed halls of ‘Head Office’ in order to transfer seagoing knowledge and experience to the beach. This meant that within the office you often had very senior people who had done your job and understood your problems. They also had experience of the shore-based side of the operations which, if one is to be fair is also an acquired skill that has a huge impact upon the job and the company. A good manager or technical support system is pure gold when you are looking at getting out of some properly miserable port with half the ship in bits.

The people in the office therefore had a broad-based understanding of ships and how they operate. The people on the ships could liaise with a peer and whilst not always would they agree, at the very least there was a detente in place that generally worked.

Today that’s gone. Companies rely on the Captain and Chief Engineer to provide on board the layer of expertise that they need to keep a ship working whilst to a large extent ignoring the more junior people, working on the principle that as long as the guy at the top is good then all else will follow.

And that leads to a few problems, some current and some to come. Firstly, it’s a damned lonely place at the top of a ship now. Because of the lowering standards nearly all the decisions, even small ones, are made by either the Captain or the Chief Engineer. And as humans they are fallible and need on board support which no longer exists in many cases. Sometimes no matter how experienced you are you need to have conversations with people who can challenge you and spot things that you don’t see or don’t know. Today we are getting away with it because there remains a layer of old school guys around who mask the issues that have built up. This cannot go on forever because inevitably, weary and broken these ancient mariners will leave, only to be replaced with people that companies have not invested in and who have not developed the skills needed to effectively and safely run a ship. These are people who have done STCW 95 certification but who have little real sea time and a fraction of the knowledge needed.

And this will also affect the office environment as well. Despite the internet, a company that has assets that sail on the oceans in whatever capacity also need mariners. And where do they get the high-quality guys – and now women – from? Given that STCW has manifestly failed to improve standards and has across the board skydived to oblivion the rigorous accountability previously applied to seafarers, you will have people running ships and offshore assets who have no connection with them at a level required to be effective.

Not that anyone will ask someone like myself what is required, to put my ore in I’d say that companies need to take a long term and broader view. Its not about money. I know of people who work for companies because they like them and there is mutual respect and honesty even though wages are lower. Companies need to look lower down the monkey puzzle tree towards junior staff and invest in them. STCW is a bit of paper that enables someone to sail in a role on a ship. It does not actually mean they are any good at it and this is an area that could be focused on. Companies should look at ways of turning back the clock to an older school way running a ship.

Start with the basics and work from there. Pride is about working for someone or a company that holds its head high and instead of simply writing more bollocks, does it. Make writing log books properly a mandatory part of the job, insist that engineers invest energy into keeping a clean and efficient engineroom. Make deck staff do old school skills such as take a noon sight for example. Bring back a uniform, maybe.

Invest in making people proud to work for a particular company because it’s a good one not because it happens to need to simply fill a number in a spreadsheet.