Spot the Hazard
Safety is largely a matter of awareness and anything that can be done to promote this is worth doing. Pointing out the frightful consequences of inattention and a casual attitude to safety can be...
View ArticleTesting technology
We have had navigational simulators available for the best part of half a century. They began with relatively simple devices for training and testing competence with radars, but have graduated over the...
View ArticleFire down below
Heat, oxygen and something to burn are the classic ingredients of the “fire triangle” which comes near the beginning of every firefighting course. Take just one of the three away, and presto,...
View ArticleThe right moment
There has been, unsurprisingly since the Costa Concordia loss, much talk about the need to improve damaged stability on ships. More subdivision, cross-flooding arrangements and means of providing more...
View ArticleThe migrant problem
No great decisions over “unsafe mixed migration by sea” were taken at the latest meeting of the IMO Maritime Safety Committee, despite plenty of agreement about the urgency of the situation. But how is...
View ArticleRopes’ end
Everyone knows about the inadvisability of standing in a bight of mooring rope and the fact that mooring and unmooring, with its huge stresses and tensions on ropes and wires, along with a lot of...
View ArticleA lucky escape
It is hard to think of an accident with a greater potential for serious loss of life than a collision involving a passenger ship and a tanker. The Dona Paz- Vector collision which killed 4386 people in...
View ArticlePirates’ progress
There is grim reading from the South China Seas and South East Asian waters, where piracy, which seems to have been contained although perhaps not entirely defeated in the Eastern Indian Ocean, has...
View ArticleShips that drive themselves
There are some encounters between ships that stay in the memory. One was a meeting with a crossing vessel off the Sombrero Passage into the Caribbean, when we saw a crossing vessel on the port bow, on...
View ArticleNot so flexible
When the tunnel under the English Channel looked like being excavated the threatened ferry companies liked to portray themselves as the travellers “flexible” friends as opposed to the “fixed link” that...
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