For some years, cynical observers of the shipping industry have hinted that the liner sector, despite its ability to build bigger and bigger container ships, was not quite as clever as those responsible for its public relations made out. In commercial terms, the gross current overcapacity might be a good example of this flawed hubris.
Continue reading
After several thousand years of training seafarers, one would think that mankind had some sort of a system in mind. Surprisingly, there is no formal training-at-sea system.
Continue reading
In his message to the world’s seafarers, dedicating the year 2010 as the “Year of the Seafarer,” Efthimios Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the IMO, points out that it is the crew of each ship that makes world trade possible, and that 1.5m seafarers serve the daily needs of more than 6.5 billion human beings.
Continue reading
IMO ‘will lead emissions plan’ says the
headline and it’s good without necessarily being right.
A newspaper sub-editor is more often than not a writer’s conscience and in this case, Alfons (not Alfred) Guinier of the European Community Shipowners Association is merely expressing his optimistic hope that IMO retains control of the post-Copenhagen GHG process.
We had all better hope he is correct. This is not because of the hysteria that surrounded the conference but because of the accord that resulted. While too many people were focussing on what the accord wasn’t – or why it shouldn’t have been at all – not enough were looking at what it is and what it might mean.
Even for such a skimpy document, looked…
Continue reading
Technology, as the man who came to fix my computer said, “is designed for technologists, not users”. Probably, more or less the same thing was said by the farrier who fixed horses’ hooves in the Middle Ages, or the chap who turned up in the 19th century to service the windmill.
As with most tremendous inventions which have arrived to make the operation of ships easier, electronic charts appear with a certain number of health warnings.
On the face of it, they are great, offering the navigator a real-time position on the chart, with no fiddling around with pelorus and pencil. And the chart is there, in front of you, so you don’t have to lurk behind a blackout curtain in a dim light at night, while it is simplicity itself to…
Continue reading
« go back