Rising risks of cabin fever at sea

Andrew Craig-Bennett warns on the lack of communal get-togethers on ships today.

On a Facebook page, one that is maintained by quondam colleagues in a former employer’s shipping company, I saw a picture of a modern ship’s bar. I should say at once that this is not – at least not now – a tanker company, subject to the Exxon clause; it’s a dry cargo outfit and not one that goes in for ‘dry’ ships. You can have wine with a meal and a daily ration of beer, subject to returning the empties – make that ‘the empty’ – of course. And there’s a bar.  

Only this ship’s bar looked a bit odd. I’m reasonably familiar with this shipowner’s ship’s bars. I have had a hand in designing some and I have had a beer in many others, because I am a believer in the idea that for as long as a crew are whingeing, volubly, nothing much is wrong. If the crew are delighted to tell any visiting shore manager just how hopeless he and the company are, all is well. It’s when people go grimly silent that you are in trouble. Worse still if the silence is accompanied by a varnished-on smile.

There were no plaques or other trophies from ports visited, and there were no optics, no beer pumps and in fact no sign at all that alcohol is consumed there. Because it isn’t. It’s a ‘dry’ ship’s bar. Which is why there was no evidence of any conviviality whatsoever in the picture. As a ship’s bar, its design follows closely that of the ship’s bars that I remember, but it’s a gesture by the owners – a very decent lot – towards a hope that their crew may gather together and drink their ration of beer or orange juice or various branded carbonated flavoured waters. In this the owners have, I am told, been rather less than successful. There’s a bar, it’s spotless, and will probably be in pristine condition when the ship goes on to her next owner. But it’s a sort of fossil; an archaeological remnant of a now vanished way of life.

Speaking of passing on the bar to the next owner, I remember selling two of this company’s small containerships, in succession as they were replaced with newbuildings, to a well-known Singaporean company. When they bought the first ship, they refused to pay for the bond, because “Our ships are dry” – this was conveyed in the sort of prim self-righteous tone that all our Singaporean friends, much as we love them, are so good at. When the time came to hand over her sister, a few weeks later, we took the bond off, before the handover. The buyers were outraged at not getting the several thousand dollars’ worth of free booze that they had been expecting.

Something is changing in seagoing. The hard work and slow voyages of the past were at least partly alleviated by ‘a good crowd’ onboard, as well as the opportunity of a ‘good run ashore’ in some ports, depending of course on the ship and the trade – I have yet to hear of a good run ashore at Ras Tanura, and still less at Kharg Island, and there are those who say that American and even European tanker terminals are not much better.

For years it has been the unacknowledged practice of masters and watchkeepers to try to pass within cell phone range of anywhere that has cellphone masts, and surprisingly few strandings have resulted – praise perhaps due to GPS in some cases.

Today, the seafarer is at last starting to get real internet connectivity. For this we must thank Elon Musk. I don’t suppose for a moment that he set out to improve the life of the seafarer but, at least for ships equipped with a Starlink terminal, he has done so – assuming that their employers interpret the Maritime Labour Convention in a reasonably generous spirit, because it is full of weasel words on this subject – “so far as reasonably practicable”… “charges, if any, being reasonable in amount” and so on.

We are not quite there yet with connectivity, but even where ships do have reasonable internet access this is an activity that takes place in your cabin. It’s not communal. The only communal activity on some ships is eating – and not too much of that, sometimes. You might be with a good crowd, but absent a run ashore or a barbeque on deck, both vanishingly rare now, how would you know?