If I was a Somali pirate chief, or perhaps the Business Development Director of one of those gruesome gangs causing mayhem in world shipping circles, as we are informed they are now well organised along such formal lines, I would have annotated my 2011 wall chart with some enthusiasm last week. The Volvo Ocean round the world race started in Alicante on Saturday with its six yachts, all professionally crewed, en route to Cape Town.
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It’s a fact that some ship types are endemically more vulnerable to disaster than others.
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“It will never work because there is no infrastructure!” I wonder how many times these words, or their 19th century equivalents, were spoken by sailing ship owners contemplating the move into mechanical propulsion.
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In the frenetic rush to get a big containership through a terminal, is there enough time to consider exactly what nasties might be in the boxes that are classified as dangerous deck cargo?
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Maritime history buffs may remember the story of the Marie Celeste, a sailing ship found abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean, which seemingly had managed to sail for months without reaching land, and whose crew were mysteriously absent. To this day, her mystery remains the subject of speculation.
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The true state of the world economy was shown on August 1, with the release by JPMorgan of a series of indicators making up the global manufacturing purchasing managers’ indices (PMI).
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My recent blog on weak walled ships seemed to have struck a chord with people who spend their time handling them.
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Now here’s a good idea, possibly overdue in its conception, that might make the carriage of containers aboard ship rather safer.
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Hooray for Germanischer Lloyd, for some very pointed remarks about maintenance at the Norshipping show in Oslo.
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It is always instructive to hear the P&I club interpretation of what is going on in safety terms – it’s the clubs who are the recipients of all those improbable, predictable, eminently repeatable and sometimes tragic claims that come winging in from their members.
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