New Zealand Company of Master Mariners

A report compiled by New Zealand investigators into the sinking of the Tongan ferry Princess Ashika has found the vessel was in such a bad state it should not have been operating. The ferry sank during an overnight voyage from the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa to an outlying island in August last year, killing 74 people.

A New Zealand Transport Accident Investigation Commission report, released yesterday, said the vessel had “major deficiencies” and should not have been allowed to operate. “The Princess Ashika was unseaworthy when it departed on the accident voyage and should not have been issued with a certificate allowing it to operate under any circumstances until major deficiencies had been rectified,” the report said. The report found the death toll was so high because of the delay in raising the alarm and the lack of an emergency abandon ship drill. The NZ commission said it was asked by the king of Tonga to conduct a technical investigation into the disaster. Earlier this year, a Royal Commission of Inquiry in Tonga found the country’s government failed its people by buying a ship that was obviously unseaworthy. The inquiry’s report, released in April, found the ship was aged, overloaded and unfit for the open sea, and pointed at senior government and state shipping officials as responsible for the disaster. In March, police charged Shipping Corporation of Polynesia managing director John Jonesse, Princess Ashika captain Makahokovalu Tuputupu and first mate Viliami Tu’ipulotu with man laughter and with sending an unseaworthy vessel to sea. 

Full report available at http://www.taic.org.nz/

The Wellington Branch will hold meetings at Quay Plaza Hotel, Oriental Parade,  1200 for 1300 on the following dates in 2010.

Wednesday 11 August: Annual General Meeting of New Zealand Company

Wednesday 08 September: Speaker to be advised

Wednesday 13 October:

Wednesday 17 November:  Cocktail Evening at 1700 at same venue.

Government first needs to show competence in pilotage regulation

Lloyds List by Steve Pelecanos – Tuesday 20 April 2010

SHIPS have been running aground on the Great Barrier Reef ever since Captain James Cook undertook his historic voyage along Australia’s east coast. It is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon to which Australia’s community has obstinately refused to become desensitised.

Each time the newspapers carry a headline, the radio waves fill the air or the evening television news show pictures of ships hard and fast on the reef, with ribbons of oil fanning out from the stricken hull, it generates a gut-wrenching odium in the national psyche.

When Shen Neng 1 ran aground on the reef earlier this month, politicians, sensing the public’s disgust, queued up to fly over and ‘inspect’ the casualty and then lined up to face the television cameras calling for an extension to the compulsory pilotage area.

It is rare to see politicians of all political persuasions calling for more pilots — an event, one would think, that pilots would heartily support.

However, the Australasian Marine Pilots Institute took the opposite view. It would rather see the government show competence in pilotage regulation before it rushes into propagating the mess over which it currently presides.

When pilotage first started in the Great Barrier Reef in 1874, it was carried out by individual master mariners with local knowledge, who offered their services to transiting ships. By 1884, the competition between pilots had degenerated into a dog-eat-dog environment and the Queensland government decided to regulate the coastal pilotage area. It introduced proper standards of service delivery, selection criteria, examinations for licences and also set the pilotage fee.

In 1993, the regulation of pilotage was ceded by the Queensland government to the federal government. It took a giant step backwards to an environment similar to that which existed in 1874. It seems the federal government had come under the spell of the economic rationalists, who were basking in the glory of their moment in the sun and decided to once again deregulate pilotage and open it up to competition. The result? Pilotage had again become a dog-eat-dog environment.

The federal government almost immediately recognised its blunder and embarked on a programme of trying subtly to fix the mess that had been created. It did this by introducing layers of incremental change each time something went wrong — similar to applying a band-aid to another leak in a rusty bucket. As a gauge of its anxiety, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has conducted eight formal reviews into reef pilotage in the last 17 years. This is an extraordinary number.

No matter how many layers of regulation AMSA introduces or how many reviews it conducts — until it has the courage to throw away the bucket and replace it with a new one — the problem, which in essence is a structural one, will not be fixed.

The model that has emerged on the Great Barrier Reef is unique. A new animal has been created, one AMSA has called a “pilotage provider”, but more commonly known as a middleman.

There are three such middlemen in business on the Great Barrier Reef and they compete with each other for market share. Each has contracted a number of pilots to provide pilotage services to their ships. A pilot contracted to one middleman cannot contract to another.

Middlemen do not take responsibility for the performance of the pilot and if there is an accident, they remain at arm’s length. The pilots compete with each other to be assigned work by the middlemen, who are in a position to decide whether or not, and to what extent, the pilots can feed their families. They ruthlessly exercise this power over the pilots. They will vary what they pay the pilots for each task, claiming a need to slash their price to get the work. The discounting always comes out of the pilots’ share, the middleman is always assured of his cut.

AMSA has issued 76 pilot licences for the Great Barrier Reef. The 76 individuals do not belong to any organisational structure. Therefore, there are 76 ways of executing the pilotage task, 76 safety management systems, 76 passage plans, 76 under keel clearance calculation methodologies, 76 organisational cultures — the list goes on.

These are 76 individuals who have mortgages to pay and families to feed and have no security of tenure and no security of earnings. These are 76 individuals who compete with one another for ships and are therefore pressured into acting in a way that no professional pilot will act. For them, more ships is more money. They are compelled to take short cuts to be on the pilot boarding ground before their colleagues so as to be first on turn for the next ship.

They turn a blind eye to ship defects and inappropriate practice because they do not wish to lose customers. They will alter their fatigue records so as to appear to be properly rested to minimise their wait between ships. In fact, most of the accidents on the reef since 1993 have been fatigue-related.

Today’s bureaucrats in Canberra are saddled with an awful legacy created by their predecessors, one that they are working with the Australasian Marine Pilots Institute to fix. They have the support of their minister. These are the first rays of common sense to emerge from the nation’s capital since 1993.

The pilots’ institute’s position is quite clear. It does not want to see an extension of the compulsory pilotage area on the Great Barrier Reef until the current debacle is fixed. It does not want to see a structurally unsound pilot service spreading to other parts of the reef. That is no way to achieve the best safety outcomes.

Australia needs to show that it can run a properly regulated pilot service to give confidence to all stakeholders that if the compulsory pilotage area is ever extended, it has a good chance of providing the benefit expected. Currently, that would be very doubtful.

STEVE Pelecanos has worked in the maritime industry for 40 years. He has held a number of senior positions including ship’s master, pilot and harbour master. He was also a past president of the Australian Marine Pilots Association and chairman of Brisbane Marine Pilots. He is head of standards and training at the Australasian Marine Pilots Institute. Capt Pelecanos has introduced many changes to the pilotage profession and written and presented numerous papers on pilotage at many international industry fora. 

The following excerpt from the Wellington Wardens report to the Wellington AGM.

In respect to present day seafaring, the author of this report is privileged, some may think mentally unbalanced, to still be an active seafarer.  During the year under review voyages were undertaken on a break bulk vessel to the Chatham Island’s, a coastal container vessel, a multi-purpose general cargo/container ship and a bulk vessel.  On the latter vessel a cargo of bulk wheat was taken from Timaru to New Plymouth. Further trips of bulk wheat are scheduled to other NZ ports.

The purpose of mentioning the above is to seriously question the myriad of rules, regulations etc. that have been adopted for the New Zealand maritime industry.

 A change that took place some years ago was the disbanding of Government Shipping Offices along with Official Log Books and seamen’s official Certificate of Discharges from vessels and the disbanding of the Marine Department Surveyors, placing this task with private enterprise companies and its disjointed survey system.  At the time this seemed a sensible money saving idea by closing down the few shipping offices that were only at major ports and making the staff redundant but it was also disbanding an efficient system in respect to safe ship operations.

The present system of safe ship management seemed a great idea but with the introduction of the United Nations ISM Code, it does seem to be an overkill with no regard for economics as it encourages the employment of an army of parasites funded by the shipping industry.  The ISM regulations may-be required and need to be policed on those vessels sailing under flags of convenience that have crews whose masters and officers would be better suited to be employed as street hawkers.

The ISM Code usurps the authority of the ship’s master and is insulting to all crew who have spent a few years at sea.  The Code insists that the shipping company establish procedures and checklists for key shipboard operations.  Many of these key procedures and check lists are practices and disciplines that any reasonable sailor has been accustomed to since his days as a deck boy or a first year cadet.

What are these checklists and procedures? The ship I’m on at present has a crew of 6 plus the master. It is a requirement to have three garbage bins, one for paper, one for plastics and one for edible galley scraps.  On arrival in New Plymouth the refuse collector arrived and took away the garbage noting that each bin contained the appropriate type of refuse and produced a receipt for the same.  Had the edible scraps been empty indicating it had been jettisoned at sea, the vessel’s voyage plan may have been inspected to ensure that the ship had been at least 12 nautical miles off the coast during the latter part of the voyage.  That is the minimum distance off the coast for dumping galley scraps.  It is unclear who does the inspection of the voyage plan but he/she may run a risk of wearing the garbage if they make such a request of most of the good ships masters that I have sailed with in the past.  In respect to plastics most, if not all sailors, are aware of its problem to sea life and its inability to decompose.  Even those with a low IQ are aware of this and will not dispose of it into the ocean for fear of bringing down the wroth of the crew on them.

With reference to checklists, the chartroom has an elaborately printed plastic covered checklist giving commonsense procedural instructions such as have the harbour plan out of the chart draw, contact harbour control with latest ETA, advise engineer of standby time and all those other logical procedures learnt by a first trip third mate. Most of the instructions are given in the Master’s night orders book and it is difficult to understand why this basic seamanship is duplicated by the ISM Code.  Obviously providing unnecessary costs and building up a parasitical empire with additional parasites who do not contribute to making a dollar.  Regretfully they pass regulations that burden ships masters with unnecessary and unproductive paper work plus using a masters valuable time being audited by some person who may have never been to sea.  New Zealand would do well not to take the United Nations seriously especially as when a multi-billion dollar tax funded talk feast can issue an edict declaring NZ inhumane because it issues it’s police with stun guns and is not aware that NZ Police are not armed. This says it all about the United Nations.

Passage Plans. As always in a well run vessel the second mate lays the course off on paper charts to the Master’s instructions of distances off points of land etc. This is still the practice but the latitude and longitude of the course alterations are numbered and typed onto a sheet of paper and headed up as the Passage Plan. This is displayed in the chart room and must be produced if the garbage disposal does not satisfy some worthless bureaucrat or some ISM or SSM safety auditor who thinks that ships run on train lines. 

Safe Ship Management, similar to ISM, has also become a monster that has grown at the hands of boffins and others dreaming up restrictive regulations to justify their existence at the cost of the New Zealand shipping industry.  It would be a fair bet that Maritime New Zealand now employs more people than its predecessor which included surveyors, shipping officers and nautical tutors etc.  Such is the cost of progress if that’s what it can be called.

It is with regret that we report the death of Captain John Wilson Dickinson on 29 March 2010.

John Dickinson, who was a life member of the  Company, went to sea at the age of 16 when he sailed from Liverpool on the Henderson Line ship SAGAING in December 1940 as a cadet. After one trip to India and Burma he returned to Glasgow and joined H Hogarth and Sons where he was able to sign indentures in June 1941.

He survived the war and obtained his 2nd mates certificate in 1944.

He joined the Union Steam Ship Company in 1947 and came out to New Zealand  on the KOMATA.

He was mate on the MANUKA from 1948 until 1951. MANUKA was the mother ship for the cod fishing fleet at the Chatham Islands.

In 1951 he was appointed Master of the PORT WAIKATO, which was running to the Chatham Islands for Holm & Company.

In 1957 he was appointed General Secretary of the New Zealand Merchant Service Guild and in addition General Secretary of New Zealand Airline Pilots Association in 1962, a position he held until 1985.

He retired from the Merchant Service Guild in 1987 and was appointed to the Arbitration Commission for 4 years until 1991.

He joined the Company of Master Mariners in 1951 and was well known and respected by all ship masters and officers.

Master’s delay voids error of navigation defence

A New Zealand court case has highlighted the unseen consequences of a master’s actions in trying to hide his own navigational error. Details of the legal argument in how they relate directly to decision-makingmay provide a salutary warning

GENERAL cargo vessel Tasman Pioneer (1979-built, 16,748 gt) was en route from Yokohama to Pusan carrying New Zealand cargo to various Asian ports.

The vessel had been running behind schedule and the master tried to make up time by transiting through a restricted passage at night. He was delayed on his voyage from Yokohama to Pusan because of bad weather and he decided that he could save about 14 hours by steaming east of the island of Okino Shima instead of taking the usual route to the west. This new route was a narrow channel between Okino Shima and the small island of Biro Shima.

The master, who was in charge of the bridge, made his decision despite the fact that it would be a night passage with visibility of only two miles and there was a northwesterly gale with wind speeds of 37 knots. Rain squalls occasionally obscured the radar images. During one of these squalls the second mate was asked to adjust the radar to take account of the rain and after doing so he immediately noted that Biro Shima was only 800 yards off the port side.

From a speed of 15 knots the vessel momentarily slowed to six or seven knots and developed a list of three degrees, which increased to 10 degrees after 10 minutes. Holds one and two were taking in water; clearly the vessel had touched bottom.

The law can be quite forgiving in respect of claims made by cargo interests against owners by allowing the owners a complete defence in certain circumstances. One of those circumstances is known as the ‘error of navigation/management defence’.

This defence is sometimes seen as out of date in that it originates from a time when the risks of navigation were perceived to be considerably greater than they are today.

Assuming that no other factor other than the master’s poor decision-making contributed to the grounding of the ship, the owners would avoid paying damages to all the cargo interests for cargo which was damaged by the flooding. However, the master’s subsequent decisions had disastrous consequences in respect of liability.

The vessel continued steaming at full speed into the Inland Sea where the master anchored near the intersection of the original course west of Okino Shima.

The vessel anchored there 2.5 hours after the grounding and only then did the master inform his owner’s agents.

He instructed the crew to falsify the records and to lie to investigators, with a view to persuading them that the vessel had stayed on its original intended course and had hit an unknown floating object.

In addition, the master did not contact the Japanese coastguard to inform them of the condition of the vessel. This was reported by a passing vessel to the coastguard, whose patrol boat managed to locate and inspect the vessel some six hours after the incident; at that time it had a 5 m-6 m trim by the head. The poor weather conditions had not abated. A no-cure no-pay salvage agreement was not concluded until some seven hours after the grounding.

Instead of proceeding at full speed towards the Inland Sea, the master could have reduced speed and made for the nearest sheltered anchorage, which was only eight miles away. There were salvage tugs in that area on 24-hour standby and it appears that salvors could have been in attendance some five to six hours earlier than they were.

During that additional five to six hours, a considerable amount of deck cargo was damaged or lost.

Understandably, the owners of the deck cargo were reluctant to accept an ‘error of navigation/management defence’. Nevertheless, they did so in respect of that cargo damaged immediately following the grounding, ie within the flooded holds. They did not do so in respect of the damaged and lost deck cargo.

Cargo owners argued that the master’s decision to proceed to the Inland Sea and not to call for salvage assistance immediately should not be allowed as an ‘error of navigation’ defence because it was made in bad faith. The cargoes mainly originated from New Zealand and the New Zealand court agreed with the cargo owners.

The shipowners appealed, arguing that the defence was available for any navigational act, be it negligent, reckless or otherwise.

After much complex analysis, the Court of Appeal simply decided that the actions of the master in delaying the notification to salvors and local authorities had been motivated not by his paramount duty to the safety of the ship, crew and cargo, but by his intention to avoid blame.

Such behaviour was carried out for purely selfish purposes and was completely against the carrier’s obligations to cargo interests under the relevant legal regime and was not conduct in the navigation or the management of the ship.

To support its conclusion, the court pointed to a previous French case where the master of a damaged ship, instead of beaching it, spent valuable hours trying to avoid salvage costs. That decision was held not to be conduct in the management of the ship. As a result, the owners were obliged to pay the cargo interests’ claims.

This article was originally published inBritannia Risk Watch, March 2010 .

Harbourmasters in some of the country’s busiest stretches of water are calling for more power to investigate incidents where boats narrowly avoid colliding. They say it is only a matter of time before someone else is killed in a collision, and want to be able to try to stop any future accidents. ‘Sometimes it’s a daily basis, sometimes it’s multiple times a day,” says Marlborough Sounds harbourmaster Alex van Wijngaarden, who fears that too few of these close calls are actually being investigated. Port of Whangarei harbourmaster Ian Niblock agrees, saying that the near misses are of concern because they are an indication that there could potentially be fatal accidents. Officially called close quarter incidents, all near misses on the water are reported to Maritime New Zealand. However, they say they cannot look into every incident, and that investigations are decided on a case-by-case basis. Harbourmasters themselves can only ask for a person’s name and address after a close quarter incident, but they cannot investigate beyond that. They are calling for the power to conduct investigations in their own stretches of water.  However, Associate Minister of Transport Nathan Guy is unaware of any issues raised by harbourmasters. “We think the current legislation is working pretty well.” says Guy. 

Some would say that at some ports the Harbourmaster would be the last person to investigate a near miss.  Some Harbourmasters have no experience nor qualifications and at one major NZ port the position of Harbourmaster is (or was) filled on a roster basis from senior executive staff.

The above notice is prominently displayed on the Greater Wellington Regional Council web site and has previously been published in Wellington newspapers. The wording in the above is not the same as in WRC by-law 6.3.1 nor the relevant collision prevention rules  and gives a completely false interpretation of the present international collision rules. The by-law and the rules use the term “must not impede” and not “must give way”. There appears to be a culture which has developed in New Zealand where large ships think that they are the stand on vessels and all small vessels must keep out of their way at all times with no rights what so ever.

This culture probably comes from Maritime New Zealand and its advisors and is demonstrated in the findings of investigations into collisions.

Two collisions come to mind. Both occurred at night with little wind and both vessels in each case could see each other well before the collision. The larger ship in each case only saw sidelights of the other vessel so should have assumed that each smaller vessel was a sailing vessel with limited manoeuvrerability because of the lack of wind. In both cases the larger ships carried on at full speed until just before the collision.

In one case the  non compliance with the “narrow channel”  (Rule 9) was stated as the main contributing cause and in the other case the non compliance with a harbour by-law based on the unique New Zealand 500 ton rule.  The operative words in both rules  are “not to impede” which are accepted internationally as not the same as “keep out of the way”.  In fact both  rules state a vessel that is not to be impeded remains fully obliged to comply with the Steering and Sailing Rules when the two vessels are approaching one another so as to involve a risk of collision and in these two cases the overriding rule would be that a power driven vessel must keep out of the way of a sailing vessel.

This is certainly not the message that the above poster gives –  MIGHT IS RIGHT –  It is a sad day that we have reached this state of affairs in New Zealand

From the booklet “Across the Water”,  biography of Captain A.E. Wilmott, ferry master and later Marine Superintendent/Harbour Master at Heysham for LMS Railway steamers.

“Although modern in every other respect, none of the Fleetwood steamers was fitted with wireless telegraphy until 1921 and instead they carried on the bridge two carrier pigeons for use in an emergency, the basket containing them placed on board immediately before the ship left Fleetwood.”

Time to update GMDSS — but with what?

Lloyds List 9 March 2010 by Peter Blackhurst

WHILE there may be differing opinions on when the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System actually began — its conception in 1979, the GMDSS Conference in 1988 or the full implementation in February 1999 — it is widely accepted that little has changed to the system in the intervening years and that now is the time to look at bringing the GMDSS up to date.

To that end, the request for a review of the GMDSS was placed before the International Maritime Organization’s Maritime Safety Committee at its 86th session. It agreed that Comsar, the sub-committee on radiocommunications and search and rescue, should carry out a scoping exercise over its next two sessions to assess which areas need to be reviewed, amended, and included or excluded.

Several forums have already started fringe discussions to open up the general awareness of the issues. These started at the joint IMO/International Telecommunication Union experts group last summer, where some excellent brainstorming took place. Earlier this month, a joint meeting of various organisations on HQS Wellington in London, organised by the Royal Institute of Navigation, hosted a discussion on electronic GMDSS that covered some pertinent questions: Has GMDSS worked? Can it do better? Which new technologies can be used? What will be its role for future electronic Navigation?

Another area of focus, including the question of its continued relevance, is Chapter IV of Solas, which deals with making a distress alert and call. One idea currently circulating is changing the title of Chapter IV to distress communications; all distress-related communications would be transferred into the chapter, while other communication needs are addressed by other chapters. There is a strong view that distress communications should be clearly separated from other types of communications.

Also for consideration is the demise of Telex and the bleak future of High Frequency; although carriage requirements include the relatively obsolete system, there are concerns over a lack of HF stations. Denmark closed its HF services in October 2009, for instance.

The four areas of carriage requirements (sea areas A1 to A4) might be reduced; this might come about if the MF/HF solution is amended, especially as there is a great deal of discussion regarding vessels in areas outside the coverage of Inmarsat’s geostationary satellites. The work being carried out by the IMO’s Ship Design and Equipment sub-committee may well reach the conclusion, in conjunction with Comsar, that vessels sailing in polar regions should be mandated to make special arrangements with administrations and coastal states for the transmission and reception of distress and safety messaging. These communications systems may well include HF or utilisation of other new technologies as appropriate.

It has been further suggested that the Automatic Identification System can become part of the GMDSS. There are many benefits in the way that AIS information is promulgated between ships, and this has really helped navigational safety, the monitoring of vessels by shore stations and in global information services.

Additionally, satellite detection of AIS signals is providing an additional resource that could be used for landing safety information. It could be that this system can provide a medium for relaying distress and safety information, or certainly in assisting with Search and Rescue activities.

It has also been suggested that Long Range Information and Tracking and Ship Security Alerting System may also have a place within the GMDSS.

Within discussion groups there is a strong feeling that the GMDSS should be maintained as a simple, reliable and responsive system, and not clogged up with unnecessary traffic generated by the misuse of ‘Digital Selective Calling’ facilities, multiple acknowledgments and relays (primarily by HF but also with other systems).

With that, we come full circle. An idea gaining ground is one that was first considered at the conception of the GMDSS: that it should consist of a VHF/satellite solution for distress and safety alerting, and that the need for MF or HF is superfluous to modern needs except in some commercial applications.

Electronic navigation will require much spectrum in its implementation and the release of current MF and HF frequencies may well be acceptable to the user needs. Digitisation of VHF and the use of other systems such as WiMax may also provide the connectivity for this large exchange of data.

We find ourselves at the beginning of the path in the evolutionary process. We have to be mindful of existing equipment that is installed and ensure that compatibility into the future is assured; that any changes in the system will provide cost savings to the operator and will not force the undue installation of new equipment before its time.

Finally, when this process is complete, we need a continuing review to ensure that the GMDSS remains modern and efficient.

Peter Blackhurst is head of maritime safety services at Inmarsat.