New Zealand Company of Master Mariners

A reunion of Union Company Cadets to celebrate the commencement of the last scheme 60 years ago will be held Friday 02 November to Sunday 04 November 2012 at Napier.

For full information contact

Lindsay Butterfield

10 Guys Hill Road

Napier 4110

NEW ZEALAND

lbutterfield@xtra.co.nz

This article was sent to me on 1st April 2012. Is it an April Fool Joke or are the New Zealand taxpayers being taken for a ride. As for water coming over the bow in rough weather and causing the guns to get rusty probably they should put a plastic bag over it before the ship goes to sea.

SHIP GLITCHES

Canterbury’s rigid-hulled inflatable boat alcoves were too close to the waterline. The landing craft were badly designed, which led to cracking in the bow ramp doors.

The ship’s propellers came out of the water in heavy seas, causing engine damage.

The ship handles poorly in rough weather. Improvements to ballast and the fuel-transfer system needed.

The anti-roll system does not work in heavy conditions.

An inability to track helicopters by radar at the required range and height.

Waves crashing over the front of the ship could wreck its gun.

Since the days of Mark Twain, the San Francisco Bar Pilots have had it good. Thanks to outsized political clout and highly specialized training, this elite cadre, currently numbering 56 ship captains, has enjoyed monopoly control over the San Francisco Bay since 1850. State law requires a bar pilot to guide every large vessel — be it a luxury liner, a
billionaire’s yacht, aircraft carrier or cargo ship — in, out and around the San Francisco Bay. Most of the ships are docked at the Port of Oakland.
For decades the pilots plied the Northern California waters with almost no public scrutiny. That’s because they did so largely without major incidents and at no cost to taxpayers. Their salaries and benefits are set by an obscure state commission and paid entirely by ship owners. The state Legislature is tasked with approving the salaries, and routinely
gaveled home raises over the years for the pilots with little push back. It helped that the pilots, through their association, contributed more than $100,000 to mostly Democratic candidates and causes every two-year state election cycle.
The annual income of the 55 men and one woman who proudly call themselves San Francisco bar pilots has risen from about $150,000 in 1990 to $451,336 last year for a job one pilot argued in a court fight with the Internal Revenue Service amounts to part-time work — seven days “on” and seven days “off” duty. They fly business class to France every five years for mandatory training and enjoy a pension that is fully funded by ship owners and requires no contributions from them.
Then on the foggy morning in November 2007, one of the bar pilots slammed the cargo ship Cosco Busan into the San Francisco Bay Bridge, touching off a massive oil spill that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean and brought the pilots and the commission that oversees them a load of scrutiny.
Now, the mariners are running into political turbulence in Sacramento after decades of smooth sailing in the capital. Shipping companies, farmers, state Chamber of Commerce representatives and others are exploiting the new-found political vulnerability to successfully oppose pilot requests for raises while demanding more legislative oversight.
The Board of Pilot Commissioners for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun — which licenses and oversees the pilots — operated with virtually no oversight from lawmakers, according to a state audit prompted by the 2007 disaster and released in 2009.
The Legislature in 2009 placed the commission under the authority of the Business, Transportation, and Housing Agency and its entire membership and executive director were replaced. Two bar pilots, two representatives from the shipping industry and three public members now comprise the board. The latest political setback happened Monday
when the Assembly transportation committee tabled a pilot-backed bill that would have required owners of ships larger than about 1,150 feet to pay the equivalent of 150 percent of the typical fee to add a second pilot to help guide the large vessel to dock.

“We don’t believe it is fair to increase the salaries of people making $451,000 a year at the expense of farmers and Californians trying to feed their families,” Crystal Jack, a lobbyist representing the California Grocers Association and several large state agricultural interests, said at the outset of the hearing. Several legislators were clearly concerned with raising the pilot’s level of compensation and sent the bill back for more negotiations.

Both sides agree that two pilots should man the biggest vessels. But the ship owners say the pilots are paid by the size of the ship and already receive higher fees for handling the larger vessels. The pilots said the fees aren’t enough to compensate for the work done by the second pilot.

One pending bill could put tighter controls on the commission or even eliminate the panel, 172 years after the Legislature’s third-ever act created it to bring order to the chaotic bay during the California Gold Rush. ”They have been around so long that no one knows what they do until something happens,” said Assemblywoman  Alyson Huber, a Democrat from Lodi, who introduced a “sunset” bill that could put the board out of business unless the Legislature acts to keep it alive. Huber said she believes the board plays a vital role in keeping Northern California waterways safe by having pilots take control of large ships from captains unfamiliar with the treacherous currents, weather and geography of the San Francisco Bay. But she said her bill is necessary to ensure the commission receives proper oversight.

Huber and shippers’ representative Mike Jacob deny the pilots’ charges that they are attempting to do away with the commission or San Francisco bar pilots, named so because of the dredged bar they must cross to get large vessels to port. Capt. Bruce Horton, the top pilot and “port agent,” said he believes much of the negative attention is being driven by the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association in an effort to reduce the fees paid by ship owners, which amounted to $50 million last year. Horton said he believes the Huber bill, backed by the shippers’ lobbyist, is designed to replace them with less expensive pilots licensed by the federal government. ”For the shippers, it’s about the bottom line,” Horton said Wednesday aboard one of the pilots’ utility boats, which ferries the captains from the bay-front station house on San Francisco’s Pier 9, the heart of the city’s waterfront, to
ships at anchor in the bay and to another pilot boat anchored 11-miles outside the Golden Gate Bridge. There the bar pilots board incoming ships by jumping onto a rope ladder and scurrying up the vessel’s side, one of the most dangerous aspects of the job. Horton said the average age of the pilots is 52 and each has worked about 11 years in sailing before becoming a bar pilot. They also undergo intensive training that finishes with a test that requires the applicants to fill in aquatic landmarks, buoys and other significant parts of the bay from memory. He said the generous compensation is needed to attract the top captains to a congested waterway beset with high winds, changing currents and fog. ”We are well compensated because we are at the acme of our profession,” Horton said. “This is not an entry level job.” Source : Businessweek

Issue 4 On Deck March, 2012

Craig Eason writes in Lloyds List – Thursday 23 February 2012

It takes 100 years to create a revolution in shipping.

One hundred years ago the first oil-powered ship, SELANDIA, was handed over to its Danish owners, marking the demise of steam power and the start of the era of diesel and heavy fuel oil.

It was also 100 years before SELANDIA that COMET, the first commercial steamship, left a Scottish shipyard in 1812, introducing a new form of propulsion to beat sail and herald the end of the huge clippers.

Today the same sort of comments are being made about gas-powered shipping, after the first gas-powered ferries in Norway heralded the start of a regional drive to make the use of liquefied natural gas more widespread.

While the change from steam power to diesel was a triumph in efficiency and cost, and the development of LNG fuel is being touted in the same light, it is important to look at how far shipping has come since SELANDIA was launched in 1912 by Burmeister and Wain, a shipbuilder with a yard in Copenhagen. The shipbuilder was also the engine maker.

Vessels have grown in size while improving fuel efficiency and operating costs. Fuel costs in recent years have been rocketing, but according to some this is a very recent phenomenon as fuel in 1912 was virtually impossible to come by and likely to be expensive.

SELANDIA was powered by two small engines. They were gas oil engines, the fuel stored in relatively large fuel tanks in the vessel’s double bottom. The vessel was designed to sail from Denmark to Bangkok and back again without needing to bunker. Facilities were available in Singapore, but were not relied upon.

Critics of gas-powered shipping point to a similar problem with LNG availability. Diesel was available only in selected ports, making it a suitable fuel for vessels on liner trades. It was 20 years before tramp shipping turned from steam to diesel.

MAN Diesel manager Otto Winkel says SELANDIA was unique also in that its two engines were fuelled by a refined oil, and not a residual product as is the case with the majority of two-stroke engines. The fuel for SELANDIA’s first voyage actually came from eastern Europe.

The small vessel would probably have been known as a Bangkokmax as its dimensions were such that it could sail up the Chao Phraya river.

It also was designed to have no visible funnel, a way of acknowledging the change of environmental performance without really having any strong thought for environmental stewardship.

MAN Diesel and Turbo, which B&W became after it was bought by the German MAN engineering group in the 1980s, has been celebrating 100 years of diesel shipping this month, but also commenting on the future of its engines. It has pointed to the modern engine and the development of dual fuel engines.

However, just as tramp vessels took to oil power 20 years after its first use on SELANDIA, the widespread use of LNG will also take some time as the bunkering capabilities have to be more widespread before operators on the spot market feel comfortable about using such ships.

Lloyds List Monday 23 January 2012
Facing Up To Life As A Surviving Captain by Michael Grey

WHO would be a shipmaster, as everyone from the media to his employer bites chunks out of the reputation of poor Francesco Schettino, late of Costa Concordia ?

A century ago, perhaps the prospect of such a life as a survivor occurred to Capt Edward John Smith as he walked back into the dark and abandoned wheelhouse of Titanic before his ship slid into the deep.

“If I ever lost a ship, I would make damn sure I went down in her,” said a master I sailed with one evening as he finished writing up his night orderbook and took the cup of cocoa I had made for him.

He had reached this gloomy conclusion, he told me, after reading the harrowing account of the formal inquiry into a collision in which a master, who lost his daughter in the incident, then had his certificate suspended (Crystal Jewel/British Aviator collision)

My captain’s assessment was probably right, when you consider how people who take on the vast responsibilities of command are treated when things go pear-shaped.

The master is the man or woman who carries the can and whose conduct falls under the spotlight after a disaster. Whether the incident was due to ill fortune or misjudgement, parties jostle to declare open season on the master’s behaviour and reputation.

Lawyers’ perfect hindsight will dissect the master’s every action. Survivors’ evidence will provide grim personal stories that can be taken out of context to prove professional negligence of one sort or another. Inevitably, the odds will be stacked against any rational assessment of one man’s conduct in extremis.

Witch-hunts of the past have left surviving shipmasters as wrecked as their ships from the treatment they received. Who recalls the vilification of Capt Rugiati of Torrey Canyon , exhausted, suffering from tuberculosis, being harassed to meet the tide at Milford Haven, yet “entirely to blame” for the stranding that ushered in the age of the superspill.

Remember Capt Bardari of Amoco Cadiz , who carried the blame for the grounding of his disabled very large crude carrier , which nobody could tow clear of rocks off Brittany.

Recall Capt Kirby, senior master of Herald of Free Enterprise , not even on board his ship when it came to grief in Zeebrugge, but persecuted and prosecuted nonetheless.

It is a long list of people, whose lives and careers have been wrecked like their ships, survivors who then faced judgement for their actions, in modern times mostly in criminal courts.

These days, of course, nobody waits for the court of inquiry or trial before drawing their own conclusions about the obvious incompetence, negligence or even cowardice of the master. All those cellphone cameras, wielded by citizen journalists, provide us with “evidence”, even though that they are in the hands of individuals who almost certainly have no idea of what is going on and no inkling of the complex events taking place in an evacuation.

Can any survivor, as he or she gives their breathless recollections to camera, be in possession of anything other than a fragment of the whole picture?

It is so very easy to allege that there was panic or a lack of proper instruction, amid inevitable confusion, to a media that will publish these words instantly, with no counterbalancing view from somebody with a better idea of the reality.

Let us acknowledge that it takes a well-informed cruise passenger to be able to distinguish between the various senior officers of the various departments on board these huge ships.

The “captain” that some breathless survivor has allegedly seen chatting to a blonde in the bar before the accident, may well have been the chief purser, chief environmental engineer or just a barman with a lot of gold on his uniform. Almost certainly there will be very little context in the way that these fragments are then delivered.

In this most human story, the hunt is on for heroes who can be lauded or incompetents who can be roundly condemned. National stereotypes are meat and drink for the tabloids. The fact that almost no reporter has any clue about ships or shipping tends to encourage them to focus on things they do understand. Heroism. Cowardice. Blame.

An allegation, even a hint of cowardice, or of failure to abide by traditional mores of “women and children first” fills a lot of airtime and printed space.

Of course, the fact that the professionals mostly will not talk, possibly because they have a professional future to consider, leaves the questing scribes with those who want to get something off their chests. Along with the experts who, it is fair to say, are markedly less expert now that maritime expertise is a minority pursuit in former maritime countries.

Will there be any objective assessment of what went on before or after a marine accident? It very much depends on who is doing the assessing.

Despite the laudable efforts of the European Maritime Safety Agency, too many countries in Europe still cling to their old habit of investigating through judicial or criminal law. We need to know what happened, so we can prevent it happening again.

Finding somebody to blame and throwing shipmasters in jail will not get us anywhere.

Issue 3 On Deck Sept. 2011. FO

Seafarer Criminalisation Rears Its Ugly Head
Wednesday 19 October 2011 Lloyds List
The Rena oil spill off New Zealand has highlighted where blame will be apportioned by John AC Cartner

THE sickening odour of the criminalisation of yet another master is wafting in New Zealand’s vernal breezes. The scenario, depressingly clear, is well writ in the past. The master of Rena will be hanged. It is as summer following spring or, as in these cases, as injustice is piled on injustice in a sort of inverted compurgation.

First, there is a navigational difficulty, usually followed by collision (Marmara Princess and Beau Rivage ) or a grounding (Erika ). Then comes the pollution of black oil of some species (Exxon Valdez ).

During the pollution, the festivities of detention, drumhead trial and public hanging of the obviously guilty by the lynch mobs and the environmental vigilantes occurs. They have already decided as to the fault-worthy. Shouts of a sort of inchoate revanchism fill the air and ether. But there is no Zola with a handy “J’accuse!” in this Dreyfusian analogue.

Arrest follows by the local constabulary (Full City ) who round up the usual suspect — the master — and detain on either an improperly applied law or, if the state is lucky, a nice obsolete one (Zim Mexico III ) specially dusted off for the occasion.

A kangaroo hearing before a magistrate who knows not the difference between a navigational consequence and spilling his tea then occurs (Hebei Spirit ) with an outrageous bail set by the same. The master is then detained (Prestige ) for fear he will flee until the bail is met.

Rationally and evidentially founded or not, the prosecutor plays the tune well to a supposedly neutral magistrate — who puts the clearly subhuman and irretrievably sinful pile of flesh of a master behind bars. This is accompanied with some kind of tacky hyperbole for the press to consume then trumpet (Exxon Valdez ).

Earlier in our history there were three kinds of trials. There were trials meting the King’s justice which had some kind of predictable order.

There were Trials by Combat where one rider with a well-sharp’d lance and pointy tried to impale the other before meeting the same fate. God punished the guilty by bringing him to His expansive bosom as the consolation verdict. The innocent who lived was set free by lesser beings who concluded the more fortunate mortal had been saved by an opposite and equal application of divine grace.

Then there was Trial by Ordeal. Even the name gives one pause. Dunking stools; tossing the accused into a lake, hands tied behind, before a jeering crowd observing the miracle of learning to swim immediately; walking through fire to demonstrate that overnight God could grow one an asbestos integument, and other similar social phenomena made trial by ordeal a singularly creative judicial enterprise offering great public entertainment. If the accused died, innocent or guilty he was going on to a better place than this vale of tears. If he lived it was clear-cut: he was innocent because God was with him as surely as with Shadrach, et al. (see, Daniel, 1-3) in the furnace. Until recently, the King’s justice eventually out-competed the others and prevailed.

Now Trial by Ordeal is returning in indirect form — it is called Trial by Press. It too offers great public entertainment. The baccalaureate story-of-the-day journalists come along in these cases to fan the flames using prosecution press releases and dead aves counts until the next titillating le scandale of sex, money and corruption in self-described high places arrives — with more and better news-selling titillations.

The wretch in jail is forgot. Masters are rarely titillating. Justice has played out its game for now. There is no hope. The master, merely homo sapiens, has been convicted and awaits the public hanging.

The next phase is Fate by Finance. The master has been found guilty in the press for his clear and obvious moral defects. The press and people have had their public expressions of television-flamed outrage over the dead birds as heard for a day. Now real courts come along. Justice is a function of who hires the better set of lawyers.

The state has the full faith, credit and weight of the government to support it with unlimited budget for a nice juicy case everyman can understand. Here, pollution is best. Try a good pollution case and one can get a real job outside the prosecutor’s office when it is over.

The master? He has the policy-limited coverage, if any, of the P&I. The owner might grudgingly chip in a little. Now the master is in the full clutches of finance. It shakes him as a hound does a fox. The owner does not care because his money is not endangered — the laws are quite conveniently tilted so no liability attaches to him if he uses only half his brain. The crewing agency or union does not care.

They are not responsible. The master is now a press-created embarrassment. The banker, the shipper, the buyer of the cargo, the seller of the cargo do not care — they are covered. The prosecutor sees an opportunity to further career aspirations. Who cares now? The now utterly powerless.

Those who have been stripped of career, money and good repute then discarded to a footnote in a history or law book or blessed anonymity. Persons such as Capts Schroeder, Hazelwood, Madouras and the like care. These are the only people on the planet who know what is really happening.

They understand from experience: masters make good press, are expendable, and certainly not worth remonstrating for to the company who has sided with the state. They have been described in at least one eponymous doctoral dissertation thus: “masters: Pawns of the Financial System.”

The trials are show trials. The conclusions are foregone. No matter how much the defence tries to believe in the man being tried, it understands full well this is Trial by Ordeal in another guise. Prosecutors nowadays use the full arsenal: threats, lies, snitches, prevarication, bad laboratory work, coached witnesses. Sexism even has a place if well done.

In Zim Mexico III , Capt Schroeder was prosecuted by a female apparent man-hater before an apparently man-hating female judge. Each had gone to the Historical Redress School of Sexual Justice it seems.

Conviction is all. Justice, if served, is a nice by-product but not necessary. The Trial by Ordeal was abandoned in the middle ages and replaced by Trial by Compurgation.

Trial by Compurgation required the accused to swear on a stack of Bibles his innocence then to have others, good men and true (usually 12) swear the same. This somehow seems better than the unholy alliance of press, money and prosecutorial and judicial indiscretion which hangs masters.

Perhaps we should bring it back for balance in the dismal state of justice for any master. Parents: do not let your children grow up to be masters.

John AC Cartner is a lawyer and solicitor practising in Washington and London. He is certificated as a master mariner with no restrictions. He is the principal author of The International Law of the master (2011) Informa/Lloyds Press, www.intermaster law.com