A Nautical Miscellany

Yards get more time Canada

Yards get more timeCanada has extended the deadline for four shipyards to submit bids for a massive $35bn newbuilding programme.

Irving Shipbuilding, Seaway Marine, Victoria Shipyards and Davie Yards now have until 21 July - an extra two weeks - to file their papers.

Davie Yards

But the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS) secretariat rejected a request for a two-month extension of the previous 7 July cut-off, saying it would "be unacceptable, as it would have significant and unacceptable impacts."

The government said the two-week extension is "the maximum flexibility available to Canada without incurring costs and/or causing unacceptable impact on the NSPS program."

The two biggest candidates, Irving's Halifax Shipyards and Seaspan Marine’s Victoria, had opposed the extension.

Davie, which filed for bankruptcy last year, is relying on a takeover bid from Italy’s Fincantieri to allow it to meet the bidding criteria.

One winner will be awarded the $25bn combat vessel construction deal, while another will secure at least $8bn of non-combat ships, plus more coast guard orders to come, all over 30 years.

Losing shipyards may bid on an estimated $2bn in construction work for smaller, non-combat ships.

Mary Keith, spokeswoman for Irving, said she was disappointed that the government had decided to grant any extension.

"We've worked extremely hard and we've invested thousands of hours and significant financial resources to prepare the bid in compliance with a deadline that was established over a year ago," she added.

"We were ready for the 7 July deadline, we did not need an extension and although we feel the extension was unwarranted, we're going to continue our focus on submitting our bid in accordance with the new deadline."

By Gary Dixon in London - Tradewinds

The wages of sin and my profiting thereby

A friend of mine described obtaining publicity as about as certain as throwing great gobs of over cooked spaghetti against a greased wall and foolishly hoping a few strands will stick.

In our endeavours to get the name of TMS on everyones lips I have advertised in shipping magazines, paid for literature distribution at conferences, mailed out invites to conferences with discounted pricing, designed and mailed out postcards around the world (my favorite was learning the rules by which Canada Post decides pricing on a small piece of cardboard, an education like no other), printed brochures (two types) and spent thousands on a website. Has it produced work? Not so far, but it's only been three years. What unfailingly provides employment is to be referred by someone you know. Does the PR work remind people of who you are? Not so sure but I'm hoping so.

With our recent change of direction I have taken yet another tack and distributed a press release across the country, in both official languages, no less (thanks Marijke). It's yet to be picked up in a newspaper as far as I can tell but then ship management news would appeal only to a small subset of the populace I'm thinking. Our one success has been to be picked up by Tradewinds, who I think out of a sense of charity and the fact that I've worked for noteworthy companies wrote a nice piece on the Tsekoa and our deal with the uni. (The piece can be read here, for how long I don't know.) One would think that ship management is of interest to a much larger group of people amongst Tradewinds subscribers then newspaper readership in Saskatoon or Fredricton.

We just hope someone I know reads the piece and remembers me when asked for the name of a good ship management/broking/consulting company.

Coming round again..

 Received this message this morning from a friend who uses Hotmail for his mail service, been awhile but it would appear that someone is STILL trapped in a hotel in Lagos. I was actually pretty impressed with the writing of the message, generic enough to be sent to anyone but with just a soupcon of desperation.

His account has been  hacked, I suggested Gmail instead.
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Hello, Sorry I didn't inform you about my traveling to West Africa for a Seminar, am presently in Lagos Nigeria. I am stranded here because i misplaced my wallet and other valuable things, personal items such as cash, credit cards and identification documents on my way to the hotel i lodged.  I will like you to assist me urgently with the sum of 2500 pounds to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. I will appreciate whatever you can afford; I’ll pay you back as soon as I return. I had no option than to send you an e-mail since I have exceeded my spending limit in the hotel and I have no money to call you. It will cost me much to make/receive phone calls and I don't have such money right now. I can only contact you through my e-mail for now. It's impossible for me to access my bank account from here, which is why I need your help. The safest and fastest way for you to help me out is by sending the money through the Western Union .  So I will really appreciate whatever you can afford and I promise to pay you back as soon as I return, kindly let me know if you can be of help? So that I can send you the Details which you will use when sending the money to me through Western Union ,  Thanks.

A game changer or a footnote?

 I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today about the tiny Google office in that fair city. It is run by two brothers who sold their business to Google some years ago. The business was called Where 2 Tech which no one had heard of, it became Google Maps, which everyone has heard of. In any event they've moved on since then to a new application/service called Wave which they revealed at a Google developers conference in San Francisco yesterday.

The gist of Wave is that e-mail, IM, photos, videos and blogging will all be integrated in a collaborative way. Conversations called "Waves" (of course) will exist in a browser which makes it system indifferent, including mobile devices such as iPhone and Android. Google defines a Wave:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

The description from their blog is here in Went Walkabout, Brought back Google Wave, there is an embedded video from the conference which gives a detailed demo. The demo is bit long and geeky but the technology is fascinating. I was particularly impressed with the idea that you could watch while someone was typing a message to you, not afterwards but as they actually typed it.

The question in mind is whether this will become the next big thing and everyone will be lined up around the virtual block to get signed on (as they were to a great extent with Gmail) or whether it is a bit too geeky to be adopted by the main stream. 

One very smart thing they are doing is making the source code open to other developers right from the git go to enable them to build on and extend the technology. Another question in my mind and which I didn't hear addressed in the demo is how it will integrate with existing e-mail systems. If you have one system for dealing with friends/coworkers on Wave and another on regular e-mail how long will you  keep it up before you dump the one with fewer correspondents? Nevertheless it's a fascinating idea, stay tuned...

Postscript: I managed to leave out one of the most interesting features, and something that the developers left to the very end of the demo. Wave can translate on the fly, and I mean literally as each word is typed to and from 40 different languages. Not too shabby.

Piracy and the criminalisation of seafarers

I don't usually just repost other peoples blogs but I think this one from Lloyd's today is worth repeating. The officers in the blog are all victims but how they are perceived and how they are treated are vastly different.

Lloyd's List Comment

Where the chain of causation starts and how it bloody ends up

As so often happens an article in Mondays Lloyd's List caused me to ponder. The article was headlined, "Viking Islay master ‘failed in his duty of care' ". I quote directly from the article concerning the actions of some of the crew that lead to their deaths:

"The three men successively entered the vessel’s chain locker before collapsing due to depleted oxygen in the enclosed space. At issue is whether the crew members were made aware that the chain locker was a dangerous place to go, whether they were aware the chain locker had to be adequately vented before entry and why no tests were made of oxygen levels in the locker."

The stupid thing of course is that the crew were entering the locker merely to fasten the hanging chain to prevent it from knocking on the side of the locker and keeping some of the crew awake. 

The basis of the Crown's case was that the Master owed a duty of care to the crew to ensure they were not exposed to risk.The article doesn't mention a verdict so I assume that the case is ongoing.  Of course the Master does have a duty of care to the crew, as I recall it's crew, ship and then cargo. I won't offer an opinion on the Masters action or lack thereof, I'm sure that he's suffering in his own hell.

Undoubtedly there is a confined space entry protocol in the ship managers safety management system that was ignored. Was there a warning about oxidisation in the procedure? Was not the Master or the first two crewmen aware of oxidisation in  a chain locker (or with many cargoes)?

Sadly I was witness to a similar accident when I was at sea, though I was a supernumerary on the ship.In that incident and in this one what distresses me the most is that besides the Masters ignorance (in both incidents) there were at least 3 other people involved who either were ignorant or ignored the procedures and the dangers of entering a compartment that had been closed for some time.

One of the most powerful tools in improving safety on a ship is getting the crew to have a duty of care towards each other, it's way more effective than written procedures or a knowledgeable Master. Did anyone else know they were going to go into the chain locker? If so, did it not strike anyone that this was a danger?

We had an incident in Australia that illustrates the point very neatly. A sailor on a FSO had a pair of work boots that were basically a few scraps of leather held together by laces. It became a running joke amongst the crew about just how bad the boots were. It all came to grief eventually, one day the particular seafarer was transferring from a boat to the loading buoy to do some servicing and of course twisted his ankle. At the time we were desperately trying to improve our not very impressive LTI rate and while the injury was relatively minor it was a setback we could have done without.

We did get some value out of the incident though, it became an excellent object lesson in how safety on board is everyone's responsibility and unless everyone is involved the results can be painful or even tragic.

Stop me if you've heard this one before..

I quote from this mornings Tradewinds,

"Canada’s Nautisol is studying the feasibility of a new fast ferry service from Victoria to Vancouver, with the backing of foreign investors.

The marine technology company’s boss Don Stein told local media that three overseas groups are ready with $150m in funding for the 90-minute run.....

...If all goes according to plan, two 50-metre-long, hybrid hovercraft-catamaran ferries would be built in Vancouver and launched late next year."

For those too young to remember or from away, this would be the third or fourth attempt at such a high speed service between Victoria and Vancouver over the last 20 or 30 years. I do believe that one of the previous incarnations was a SES ship as well.

The problem is, as I see it, that no one wants to be trapped in a small ferry for 90 minutes. People like to be able to get up and walk around, go out on deck, have their lunch or dinner or go back down to their car. The Boeing Jetfoil ran for several years and from all accounts was very fast and fairly comfortable but I remember reading the complaints that there wasn't any deck to get up and walk around on.  You sat in close rows of airline type seating all facing one direction.  For all of their faults and our complaints the BC Ferries are large, pretty comfortable in all but the worst weather and despite what you read, the price is not completely out of whack. Tough to compete with.

Perusing their website (www.nautisol.com)It would appear that the ships will be propelled by gas turbines. I'll be interested to see how this works because of course gas turbines are not the cheapest way to propel a ship, even the Millennium Falcon pictured above. Small ship, relatively high operating cost, low number of passengers, I'd like to see the business plan.

Did this guy talk with that European guy?

Recently, (ok a month ago but I've been busy) Lloyd's published an article titled, "Downturn leading to improved prospects for ship safety" The article quotes the International Union of Marine Insurance as having the view that, "the freight market crash is lifting some of the intense operational pressure exerted in recent years on the world fleet. " or in other words, when your ship is earning $100,000/day no one wants you to slow down to paint the anchor.

This is true, when things are rolling, drydocks get delayed and if repairs can safely be made on the run rather than stopping then that's what you do. What intrigues me of course is how directly at odds this is with our friend from the EMSA that I talked about in a blog some months ago where he opined that the first thing that would happen in a bad market is all the maintenance would stop and the four horseman of the Apocalypse would follow shortly thereafter.

The IUMI also attribute the improvement to the fact that a lot of old trash that should have gone to the breakers a long time ago has now finally shuffled off the mortal coil, bad for the shipowner but good for the crew and the rest of us.  Bad markets do tend to drive some of the less desirable owners out of the business (and some decent ones too unfortunately). This tendency tends to be exacerbated but the fact that when times are tough charterers will also tend to go to the better owners knowing they will be keeping their standards the same.  During both the Erika and the Prestige I saw that the quality companies did proportionally better (Get me a ship and make it a good one this time, someone may be watching!)

The president of IUMI stated that "there were strong signs that the safety culture at sea was taking root. But she warned: “Ship operators are being buffeted from all sides in the growing economic crisis. But to cut corners on maintenance or training can only have one result in the long term: more casualties, higher claims on insurers, and higher premium and deductible levels for shipowners.” I agree with all of this but I don't think it is the entire picture as the whole of operating a ship is not taken up only with the insurance.  Charterers, particularly for oil companies and definitely in the offshore have no tolerance for ship operations that take the lives of their crew for granted. The LTI or loss time injury rate used to be a somewhat novel concept in discussions betwixt charterers and owners but now it tends to be either a conversation starter or the beginning of a deathly silence, if you pardon the pun.

The real message that has to be gotten to the unenlightened is that a low LTI rate goes hand in hand with an efficient operation, and that's what really pleases charterers once they've landed the price they want.  I don't think I've ever seen, and I'd be interested if anyone could show me, an operation that had a really low LTI rate but wasn't an efficient operation.

Remanence:Variance

This has absolutely nothing to do with things shipping or marine but is fascinating nonetheless. What I like the most is that it takes an old technique, time lapse photography, and turns into something that is technically elegant and beautiful at the same time. It's a year in the life of Tokyo, shot with a relatively low cost DSLR, a Canon Rebel.

This will take awhile to load as it's a big file, best to press the play and then pause while you grab a coffee and wait for most of the file to load before you watch. If you press the HD button on the right side of the screen and then the HD symbol that appears on the screen it will take you to the Vimeo web site where you can watch in very sharp HD.

I'll quote from the authors site:

"Shot over the span of a year with Canon DSLRs (mostly 350d), processed with Lightroom (raw files color adjustment and resizing)/VirtualDub (deshaker/deflicker filters)/Sony Vegas (editing). Original rendered in 1080p.

Music is "Is That What Everybody Wants" from Cliff Martinez's superb soundtrack for Solaris, available from all major music outlets."

By the way, the definition of remanence is: The imprint of energy that remains long after an object has been moved

remanence : variance from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Have a try at this...