March 13th, 201964Peter Gartsjö from PG Marine continues to look into how conditions at sea can be made more comfortable. In 1976 on my first ship, Laponia, there were separate dining rooms for the master/chief engineer (saloon), officers, petty officers, mess personnel and finally crew. Some years earlier there had even been separate messes for deck...
March 8th, 201924Splash reported last month on The Mission To Seafarers’ comments that today’s sterile accommodation blocks make hospitals look attractive by comparison. The article prompted Peter Gartsjö from PG Marine to get in touch with some simple improvements for life at sea. Below is the first of a two-part feature looking at how...
March 6th, 20190One month and one day on from the ship’s grounding, the insurer and the owner of the finally issued a release today, claiming “deep remorse” for the incident, which has become the worst man-made ecological disaster to hit the Solomon Islands. The 1994-built Hong Kong-flagged Solomon Trader, insured by Korea P&I, ran aground...
March 6th, 20190A worker has died and two were injured following a crane collapse at an offshore oil platform managed by Italian oil and gas major Eni. The crane was in operation when it toppled from the Barbara F platform, about 60 km off the port of Ancona, hitting the supply vessel injuring two people aboard the vessel before falling in the...
March 5th, 20191Repatriation of abandoned crews was one of the key topics discussed at last week’s International Labour Organization (ILO) Special Tripartite Committee on the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), with owners, unions and regulators in attendance. The three days of discussion raised a raft of issues including those facing cadets and...
March 5th, 20191Wisdom Marine, a Taiwanese owner, was forced to stump up cash to pay crew on its bulker, , after the ship was impounded in New Zealand. The ship was detained by Maritime New Zealand when it arrived at the port of Christchurch earlier this month after it was revealed that the crew onboard had not been paid for nearly four months. The...
February 25th, 20195Humans have a tenuous relationship with automation. On balance, we love it. It has made our lives easier. Freed up time for leisure. Freed up time for thinking … about more automation. Progressively, we have made automation cleverer. First, we armed it with simple decision trees, then with supervised reasoning, until we arrived at...
February 19th, 20191In April Hubert Jaroni (pictured) will be running the London Marathon to raise funds for Sailors’ Society. Below this landlubber explains why he chose to run for this charity. My brother-in-law is your not so humble editor of this site and my window into an opaque industry that the more I get to learn about the more it blows my...
February 18th, 20193The Mission To Seafarers has hit out at today’s accommodation blocks, suggesting the sterile environment onboard ships nowadays make hospitals look attractive by comparison. The charity is running a series of articles at the moment based on findings from its regular Seafarers Happiness Index. In a recent post entitled Seafarers...
February 13th, 20190Crew aboard a ship at a BHP terminal in Queensland claim they are being starved and underpaid, in what the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) claims today is another instance of the miner’s “veil of secrecy” over its operations in Australian waters. A seafarer aboard an 80,000 dwt bulk carrier, the , contacted the...
