New Zealand Company of Master Mariners

I HAD lunch with Jim Davis the other day. A week before, the Chairman of the International Maritime Industries Forum had celebrated his 80th birthday, and one doesn’t pass up an invitation to spend a couple of cheery hours with somebody whose experience crosses several generations.

I mean, just how many 80 year olds do you know who are still active full-time in the shipping industry. He’s there each day in the IMIF office in the Baltic Exchange, surrounded by young folk burbling on about FFA’s and other curious financial devices, which would have seemed like something dreamed up by necromancers and astrologers when Jim arrived in P&O as a management trainee all those years ago. Then that great company had some 400 ships scattered across what was still confidently referred to the ‘Empire’.

The huge value of Jim Davis, although there will be no more nice lunches and he will not thank me for saying so, is his sheer longevity, in a cyclical industry where the same things tend to come around every generation or so.

When some youngish Baltic broker is waxing lyrical about the stratospheric level of rates, in the same tone of voice that Gordon Brown used to use when he suggested that “boom and bust” could be designated redundant terms, I just hope that he might exchange a word or two with the IMIF chairman in the lift, or the Baltic coffee room.

He might learn a thing or two. Jim actually remembers life in the 50s, and 60s, and 70s, on until today, and the sort of climate there was to be found in the shipping industry of that era. He can recall the post-war rebuilding boom, for goodness sake, when P&O directors were dispatched to the North to buy ships which really were technically redundant, from shipyards which were terminally inefficient.

Every blooming ship different, because the extraordinary lessons of series built ships like the Liberty, or Victory had just failed to register with either the buyer or the seller of new tonnage.

Jim was part of a P&O which was still running cargo-passenger ships to the Dominions, socking great liners with enormous holds, which would spend weeks, if not months, on the New Zealand, or Australian coasts, waiting for the wool sales, or for the freezing works to have accumulated sufficient butter for their lower holds.

The New Zealand Shipping Co ‘Rangi’ boats were magnificent, and I always envied them the excitement of boatloads of nubile Kiwi women passengers, but they lost money hand over fist, with their chief stewards owning large businesses in New Zealand, which they would assiduously work at while the ships were lying alongside, passengerless and costing NZS a bomb.

Jim would probably point out that the absolute justification for containerisation came from the length of voyage and sheer unproductivity of these beautiful ships. And we all know now that this is a completely accurate analysis.

But you need some sort of bridge between the generations, if any of the wisdom of the past is ever to be transmitted for the benefit of the future. What on earth did we learn from the 1970s, which began with such high hopes, with governments helping to finance vast fleets of huge ships, and shipyards being constructed out of green fields to extrude VLCCs on three shifts of fit, young Japanese workers?

Jim will tell you that in such an era, you learned something about the influence of events (the quadrupling of oil prices and the opening and shutting of the odd canal) and the immutability and unpredictability of the freight cycles. I wonder if this sort of appreciation is registering with the present generation, as it lives for the day with extraordinary relish?

Perhaps because this unpredictability of the markets has been his predominant message for so long, the IMIF chairman has acquired a reputation as a sort of modern day Cassandra.

It is not entirely justified as he, has always, as long as I have known him, preached caution and care, rather than doom. He cannot, for instance, understand containership owners intent on buying still more huge ships at pretty hefty prices. Why on earth not sit on our hands, keep the money in the bank and anticipate some distress sales of some very choice morsels once rates have plummeted? It’s what clever Greeks did once, with aplomb.

I thought of the industry Jim joined, compared to what it has become today. It’s when you really appreciate what is understood by “generational change”.

I had an uncle who was a master in British India Steam Navigation Co, about the time Jim was sent out to the East as a ‘student prince’, which is what they used to call these clever young chaps who had P&O directors’ batons in their haversacks.

I have all his photo albums, stretching back to when my uncle had sailed off in 1915 into the first world war, with dazzle painted troopships and a torpedo in the side on his very first trip.

This was an even earlier generation, and my uncle had sailed with people with square rig tickets, and looked upon a four year tour of duty in the eastern BI fleet as perfectly routine, indeed as did he.

I particularly treasure pictures taken on the long years when he was a chief officer on the pre-war ‘slow gulf mail’, where the decks of the ship are shown awash with camels, loaded out of dhows off Dubai Creek, seen as a collection of low buildings on the horizon, rather than the extraordinary city on the sea which it has become.

I often think of the generation gaps, as illustrated by long serving people like Jim, in technical terms. People my uncle sailed with were the bridge between several thousand years of commercial sail, and mechanically propelled ships.

I suppose that my own generation was the last to have this link with at least the materials with which our sailing ship predecessors operated. We were trained to sew canvas, to splice and do interesting things with rope and line and cordage. “Worm and parcel with the lay — turn and serve the other way,” was some almost meaningless key to successful ropework that has stayed in the memory.

We did things with wire and wood, building great structures of 3”x 3” and 6” x 1” dunnage. We were in and out of boats, and in theory, even if we never had to do it in anger, could react to all sorts of emergencies with ‘three stout spars’ or send up a telescopic topmast or rig a jury rudder. We navigated by dead reckoning, and sounding, radio direction finding and the craft of the celestial navigator.

Does the modern mariner get the same thrill out of seeing Pitcairn rising out of the Pacific, one point on the port bow, ten days after Cape Palliser in the Cook Strait dipped below the horizon? I’d like to think he does, but satellites do seem so quick and easy, compared to a sextant and those whole bookfulls of sight reductions, which, for some ridiculous reason, I still retain in a box in my attic.

But our shipping was of a human scale and I have the utmost admiration for those people of my generation who have stayed with it, and adapted to the extraordinary technical changes that have taken place in the past fifty years.

As somebody who is constantly being shamed by small grandchildren, I just marvel at friends who have competently managed to constantly update themselves to cope with modern technology. They are the real bridgers of the generations, in an industry which has seen such a multiplication of technical innovation, which has seen ships develop in their working lives from small tweendeckers to 12,000teu containerships.

From channel packets to 150,000 cu m LNG carriers, from the Slow Gulf Mail to cruiseships with 6000 souls aboard. From the general cargoships to vessels offering extraordinary specialisation. From a Baltic timecharter to a complex deal of industrial shipping, which will see a volume the size of the Isle of Wight hauled from Brazil to Rotterdam.

People who bridge generations, like Jim, are living history, although he would be even more angry to hear himself so described. We need to listen to them more.

Ships can also transcend generations, and I was delighted to learn about the successful withdrawal from the US Reserve Fleet of “positively the last available Liberty ship” which has been gifted to Greece and is now being prepared for her trans-Atlantic journey home.

It has taken a bit of time, but because they will have one of their own, the huge importance of this standard, war-built ship will be handed down to a new generation of Greeks.

They will be able to walk her decks and marvel at the simplicity of effective design, and the contribution of that ship to freedom. Rather sadly, our lot, who really ought to appreciate the same historical truths, will be restricted to looking at models and reading books. It is a pity, this great generational gap which has been left. It is up to people like Jim to fill it. He left me with one of his own little drawings of the veteran cruiseship Ocean Monarch, which he sketched on his recent Greek Holiday. I sailed in her when I was an apprentice, and years later, a second mate when she was one of Port Line’s mighty meat boats. There is a generational gap leaped, in steel, for our pleasure, on paper.
 
 

On 22 June 2008 His Excellency The Honourable Anand Satyanand, Governor-General of New Zealand unveiled a Commemorative Plaque to the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Auckland.   Above the plaque are the bell from the last ship built for the Company UNION ROTOITI and the amoral  bearings of the Company which were on display in the Auckland office.

Many of our members were present at the service.

For more than 125 year the Company provided links with Australia, Asia, North America, Pacific Islands and even ventured into services to Europe at one stage. 

Formed in Dunedin in 1875 the Company was New Zealand’s biggest private employer with more than 7000 staff. It owned  70 ships, an airline and interests in other ancilllary transport and tourist organisations.  

Lloyds List – Monday 23 June 2008

IT’S THE way of the world. You are a captain of industry, richly rewarded with a vast package of shares and a mind-boggling salary, accompanied by colossal annual bonuses and other financial accoutrements which your board of directors has been persuaded is necessary to prevent the ‘world-class’ manager you are going off and accepting something equally juicy.

Well, in this risk taking world of corporate excitement, you are forced to go against your better judgement and take a risk.

It turns out that you have made a colossal cock-up, which costs the company millions in terms of reputation and share value.

So you are forced to depart, but fortunately with a massive financial cushion of cash and unimpaired pension rights, while your current enormous bonus is available to gild the lily and ice the cake. It’s a hard old life.

You are the captain of a ro-ro ferry, coming into a tight port with difficult wind conditions. In your risk taking world of operational excitement risks are what you are paid to take, but on this occasion you miscalculate the strength of the wind and you make what is called in the profession a “hard landing”, holing the ship and damaging the ramp.

The company is generous enough not to fire you, but busts you back to second mate after a suspension while the accident is investigated, your salary plummeting from $86,000 per annum to $63,000.

I suppose you might consider yourself lucky not to be prosecuted for criminal damage, or worse, if one of your passengers had tumbled down the stairs It’s a hard old life.

Increasingly, the world is being divided into those who we believe to be risk takers, but are tremendously insulated against the consequences of any risk, and those who, because of their profession, take real risks every day of the week, and are punished severely if they ever make a mistake.

And one of the problems is that among the former category, and indeed among those who really do not take any risks whatever, there are those calling for higher penalties and more rigorous prosecution under criminal law of those in the latter category, whose jobs entail the risk of a mistake or a miscalculation.

Curiously, the sort of financial insulation enjoyed by captains of industry does not appear to be available for captains of ships. It’s a hard old life.

On Tuesday 17 June 2008, the Master and the General Secretary represented the Company at Government House, Wellington at a reception for representatives of the 150 organisations in New Zealand privileged to have Vice-Regal Patronage.

His Excellency, the Hon Anand Satyanand, thanked everyone for the mostly voluntary work that each organisation did for the New Zealand community.

The reception also marked the launch of the Governor-Generals new standard which was raised for the first time in the presence of all attendees. This standard replaced one which had been in use since 1937.

The Governor General’s flag was originally instituted by the Admiralty in 1869 and was intended for maritime use exclusively but subsequently flown on all occasions when he is present and also over Government House when he is in residence. A number of different designs ensured but in January 1931 a new vice-regal flag was designed partly in order to meet South African objections to the use of the Union Jack and partly to symbolise the Governor-General’s new status as the King’s personal representative. It was a uniform design for all Dominions but with the appropriate name. It was adopted in New Zealand in 1937.

The new flag reflects elements pertinent to New Zealand. The first quarter represents the southern cross, then three ships symbolising the importance of New Zealand’s sea trade; in the second quarter is a fleece representing the farming industry. The wheat sheaf in the third quarter represents the agricultural industry, whilst the crossed hammer in the fourth quarter represents the mining industry.  
  2008 –

  1937 – 2008

  1908 – 1937

  1874 – 1908

 1869 – 1874

The above letter to the Editor, Wellington Dominion Post, Friday 23 May 2008  from one of our members.

It is in response to the Government’s announcement of spending $36m for the development of coastal shipping.   

IN times past, the master could delegate the safe navigation of the ship to the officer of the watch knowing that he could trust them to carry out this important task, especially in the early afternoon.

These photos show that this is now not always the case. A cargo ship passes an oil platform in Indonesian waters at a distance stated to be 5 metres. There appears to be no one on the bridge!

A Career Ladder Worth Climbing –   Monday 19 May 2008

I OFTEN think about the little quirks of fate that determine one’s direction in life. They constitute a succession of ‘near misses’ that track one’s career down through the years, where the possibilities of the past gradually evolve into the realities of the present. It could be a matter of great regret that one didn’t take the career decision that would have made one’s certain fortune.

Conversely, the years might have demonstrated what a really excellent decision it had been to have invested in certain shares, proposed to a certain lady, or taken that job offer. It may seem a pointless exercise, but it is a pleasant enough matter, sitting in the garden on a sunny day, to muse what life might have been like.

I sometimes recall that period of my life when I had just come ashore, and was finding it very hard to adjust to life in what we like to call the shore-side infrastructure. I hated being in an office, never seeing the sea or the sky, and spent inordinate amounts of time applying for other jobs. Maybe I wrote an absolutely brilliant letter of application, in those days before psychologists and psychometric testing got into recruitment, because I kept getting offered virtually every one for which I applied.

But, happy as this situation might have been, there was invariably a snag attached to each of these ostensibly desirable posts. I can recall being offered the command of a small research ship, which seemed to offer enormous job satisfaction. The problem was its location, operating out of north Wales, where one’s children would be educated in Welsh when they went to school. I was offered a job as a cargo surveyor, by one of the finest firms operating out of City, but alas, accompanied by such paucity of financial award only a person of independent means could have afforded to take the position.

In one desperate week, I applied for, and was accepted as, a sort of ghillie looking after the islands of Loch Lomond for the environmental agency, largely on the grounds that I was familiar with a boat. One snag here was the almost neglible salary, but the real killer was the requirement to live in a stone croft and cook porridge on a peat fire, to which my wife made reasonable objection.

There were others which have largely faded into the memory. I was interviewed by a cheery chap for a deputy harbour master’s job in the Caribbean, and offered a mate’s job on a ferry being delivered to New Zealand. One really attractive job I recall was that of a pilot/marine officer in the great Pacific port of Suva. We were all set to go, but were warned at the last minute that it was not the place to take pregnant wives, and as I had one of these in the family at the time, we regretfully postponed the expedition. Then, blow me down, I applied to become a technical journalist on a weekly magazine, and my fate was sealed.

I had been rather disappointed about the Fiji job (although I kept it quiet from my wife at the time) because pilotage had been a job I always fancied. Shiphandling is an art, and a good shiphandler is always a real pleasure to watch.

Mind you, I have no idea how good a pilot I would have made. A few years ago I spent a couple of days at the excellent model lake run by Warsash at Marchwood and I recall the instructor telling us about the importance of spatial awareness. There were a very few shiphandlers, he told us, who were absolute naturals and, equally, a small number who should not be permitted within a mile of a ship’s bridge. Training and experience would produce very adequate shiphandlers out of the broad swathe of people who lay between these two extremes. Then, I was in a model 60,000 dwt ship and realised that there was no possibility of getting the way off the ship before it slammed into the quay I was supposed to be gently coming alongside. Perhaps I was in the latter category after all.

I have always been an admirer of pilots. I know these things come with experience, but really cannot quite comprehend how they can leap nimbly up the ladder and make sense of the often confusing scene they encounter when they arrive on the bridge. There are also ports where there are vast differences in the size and handling qualities of the ships entering and leaving their ports. Goodness knows what sort of adjustments they have to make to their brains as they move in the space of an hour from a VLCC to a 4,000 dwt general cargo ship, and back to a capesize in ballast. That, at least to me, takes a great deal of this spatial awareness.

Then there is the extraordinary sang froid of a capable pilot when all turns to ashes around him. When the engine fails to go astern, the helmsman appears to be completely deaf and the master, who has discovered the chief officer has neglected to take the lashings off the anchors, is having hysterics.

Because there is no denying that ships manoeuvring are more prone to breakdown at these times, that is, when it matters most. That is when the value of a top pilot is really demonstrated.

Good pilots are also communicators of some skill. And, let’s face it, language can be a considerable obstacle, despite all the earnest injunctions about the importance of the maritime vocabulary. Sign language, so a pilot friend tells me, can be a tremendous asset when the helm orders appear to have fallen on deaf ears and the request to take the tug on the starboard quarter results in a cup of tea and plate of sandwiches.

In all honesty, I don’t think I could have hacked it. Probably stress-related illness would have polished me off, even if I managed to avoid plunging a ship bridge deep into a concrete quay.

Because one of the most irritating things I would have experienced as a pilot would have been the constant niggling from shipowners about whether my job was absolutely necessary.

It is easy to blame accountants for this down on the pilotage profession. These are number crunchers who see any human input as a cost, rather than an investment, and say things like: “Why can’t the master handle his own ship? We pay him enough, surely.” Once such stupid statements would have been quickly refuted by a powerful marine superintendent, but too many of these people have themselves become redundant, or are so afraid of losing their jobs that they will not contradict those who handle the cash and prescribe the budgets.

Meat and drink to these people are imaginative schemes for remote pilotage, where a chap in a VTS tower can organise the detailed manoeuvring of half a dozen ships simultaneously. Are not all the tools — the radar, the radio and the automatic identification system already in place? The fact that the chap on the other end of the radio speaks no known language, and there is huge dispute, just short of fisticuffs, going on on the bridge of the ship, are contributory factors that will not emerge until the court of inquiry into the incident.

It must be a little depressing to pilots to have so many people attempting to diminish the importance of the vital job they do. But to a pilotage professional, it must also be rather vexing that there is a timelessness about these issues, which seem to be passed from one generation to the next without actually doing anything about the problem.

“Master’s orders on pilot’s advice.” This entry in a million bridge books belies the reality of so much indecision about the actual status of the pilot vis-à-vis a bridge ‘team’. A modern interpretation of the pilot’s role sees him or her firmly integrated into the bridge team, such as it is. The fact that the team members constitute the master and possibly a helmsman, if you are lucky, surely makes this integration even more essential. An interesting article by a Rotterdam pilot, which I read in the newsletter of the Confederation of European Shipmasters’ Associations, makes the analogy with aviation, where safe navigation and aircraft handling is undertaken by people who may be complete strangers, but who share language, terminology and procedures.

I think that there is a lot in this, and that it would be possible to provide ‘bridge team training’ that would see pilots integrated, and common procedures devised to eliminate as far as possible the one-person error.

But we have to be sensible in this, and not go overboard, and we must recognise that there is a plethora of different bridge situations, where there are very few different aircraft flight decks and training is type specific.

We also have to recognised the realities of crewing (which are getting more critical all the time) and the possibility that half the bridge team (the master) may be dropping from exhaustion.

But of all the things which face the contemporary pilot, that which I would have found hardest to face is the constant exposure to career-shattering blame if I made a mistake, or if somebody else thought I had made one.

Because, as every pilot knows full well, we are firmly within an era of total intolerance to accidents. Indeed the word ‘accident’ will probably soon be outlawed by the powers who govern these things. It is a funny thing. If you are a government minister, or a bank manager, or a mortgage lender, or a senior executive of a FTSE 100 company, you are permitted to make mistakes. Indeed, your accidents, stemming from the wrong decisions you have made, might have the most devastating consequences, costing billions of dollars or even lives. But they probably will not affect your career advancement, or the gigantic bonuses awarded by your friendly remuneration committee.

But if you are a pilot, handling very large ships in narrow waters, wild tides and heavy weather, you are not permitted to make the smallest mistake. A moment’s miscalculation of distance, the tide cutting in a few minutes early, the visibility clamping down or the engine failing to fire up going astern and crunch, it will be the pilot who will get the blame. There will be angry statements about pilot liability, by people who ought to know better. There will be silly things said about the number of accidents which occur with pilots embarked.

Worse still, there is an increasing tendency under many regimes for pilots to be prosecuted after accidents. Incidents which are investigated not by some professional analyst but by Mr Plod, who is only concerned with the oil in the water, or the political outrage which is demanding punishment of those responsible.

None of which is even remotely helpful in making people better at their jobs, or even encouraging them to take up pilotage. But it is a societal problem, a sort of collective madness that seems to affect all civilisations from time to time. I just think it is pretty remarkable that so many people are still prepared to take up pilotage as a career, when there are so many evident disadvantages. It ought to make us admire them even more.
PERPETUATING THE DRUNKEN SAILOR MYTH – Monday 19 May 2008

WHY is it that after a marine accident in a growing number of countries, the first people aboard are policemen bearing breath-testing kits?

Moreover, in any official announcement of the incident, while the technical circumstances or the subsequent salvage tend to be sketched over, the fact that the master and the pilot have been tested for alcohol misuse, invariably feature as something designed to reassure the public.

Just last week there was an exact case in point, with a containership aground in the Melbourne approaches. True to form, the brave constabulary were straight up the ladder with their little alcohol meters, testing — you’ve guessed it — the master and the pilot.

It transpired that the ship had lost power and swung out of the channel. But I bet they didn’t test the engineroom staff, who probably had rather more influence in the mechanical department than those on the bridge, who were only pulling the levers.

Why the authorities always make such a big deal about this testing, even when it is negative, which they won’t tell us, I suppose comes from a need to justify their existence to the number crunchers controlling their budgets. It could be that the myth of the drunken sailor is so well-established that it just won’t go away. I think it is time that shipmasters start to fight back against these reputational slurs.