Watching TV is not Rest Time

Op-Ed by Harilaos Petrakakos, senior consultant at P&P Marine Consultants

MLC 2006 addresses many issues related to the crew. 

It treats the seafarer very well, protects them when they are abandoned, but at the same time leaves major issues that can't assist them in their everyday life on board. 

Each ship type is unique in regards to how a seafarer will feel while on board, therefore designers and shipyards make a general plan according to the regulations that exist at the time.

The regulators have finally tackled the rest hours of seafarer and created a form that must be filled by each and every one identifying their working and rest hours. This form is yet one more of the zillion forms that seafarers have recently been made to fill in and keep updated to satisfy the regulators.

Has the regulator considered that sitting in the TV room to unwind a bit is not a real rest - sleeping - time? 

The regulators have included or determined that when the seafarer has completed his/her watch and has taken the time to sit in the reading room and watch TV that this is a rest time. The seafarer considers that this should not be included as a rest time, since it may be a time between tasks which does not leave time to close ones eyes and have the rest that was in the mind of the regulators.

Discussing with crews on board within the last few months, as an independent technical and management consultant, I have seen that this form can be and has been falsified to satisfy the regulators, while at the same time the seafarer is wondering out loud: "Why are the regulators worrying about our rest hours when in fact they have burdened us with so many forms and regulations?" I would say in order to calm them down: "It is for your safety. A rested seafarer is alert and does not allow for accidents to happen."

As I found out my explanation is not sitting well with the seafarers some of them having seen the amount of paper work increase from a half file folder to two full folders overflowing with certificates and documents of every sort. Their filing cabinets do not have enough space to store the volumes dealing with crew safety. 

It did not surprise me when two officers showing me the amount of files from ISM, ISPS etc etc asked me if all these are dealing with safety.

I have wondered why we can't make the burden that the regulators impose on the seafarers lighter? Allow them to carry out their tasks of seamanship without turning them to overpaid form filers.

The new regulations relating to ballast water treatment and the many forms that will be required in each and every port will impose yet one more burden on our seafarers. The filing of each and every fuel change in the ECA and SECA zones imposes yet one more burden.

I wonder whether the regulators have ever sat next to a seafarer to understand the volumes that these guys have to go through in order that a port state control inspector will find everything according to what the regulators have imposed. 

While I am a very strong supporter of safety, I am also a strong supporter of the seafarer's well being and this is shown in the way I have taught my supervision teams in the shipyards to make sure that the ship is safe, built with the tightest supervision, adhering to the rules and also ensuring that the living standards are of the highest caliber, requesting Internet cafe and in addition wifi on the vessel to make the seafarer feel at home. 

The seafarers are at the short end of the stick. We are talking about reduced manpower when we all know that the many little things that our seafarers have to carry out during the day occupy them in full without having to fill out forms two and three times.

The entry forms into the ports on a worldwide basis should be made by the regulators - that so easily regulate our seafarers rest hours - to be standardized and filled in automatically by the officers on land at the office.

The equipment makers should be regulated to make their equipment have a complete register of all events such as start, stop and all in between, therefore making the filling out of an individual log book redundant. Data loggers have been around for centuries, so to speak, but we still request that the crew fill in the hand deck and engine logs even when the document from the data loggers should be enough.

With the introduction of the internet these parameters can be certainly seen by the office if only they invest in the proper equipment. 

One would ask then: why should we have the officers on board? What else are they doing other than sitting and chatting on the newly established Internet connectivity?

The answer should be simple. We reduced the manpower when we automated the ships. This created a strain in the needed man hours of work that each and every seafarer has to log. On many ships the chief engineer needs to play the officer on watch and the master to have his own watch.

The ships are not automatons, filled with a thousand little robots that carry out all the menial tasks that our seafarers continue to carry out logging many hours of work with less rest then the regulators permit. 

Port state control regulations should become more standardized like the class rules so that each port handles the ships with the same knowledge and binder of regulations without resorting to his own experiences and his own interpretations of what the ships and crew should be like. This will save man ours of the officers and crew. 

My thinking behind this is that when the ship arrives in port at 08:00 hrs the crew and officers are expected to be at their best, rested whether they have slept at 4am because the regulators have allowed the inspectors to march in and demand to carry out any and all inspections without due regard for the situation.

A Master sailing the channel in New Orleans on arrival must be at his best even without a single minute of sleep greeting each and every inspector with a smile, showing all the forms and certificates again and again. And he knows what would happen if he were to say to any of the inspectors that he is tired, that he did not sleep to watch over the Mississippi Pilot.

In closing, I would suggest that a directive goes out to all delegate countries to find ways to coordinate the filling system of their ports, and of ISM, to ensure orderly inspection in port by the multitude of inspectors and to say that seafarers have the right to state to the inspectors "Sorry, we are tired, we have not slept enough as we were on alert because of channel, river or rough weather passage".

Harilaos Petrakakos has a dual Master’s degree in naval architecture and marine engineering as well as shipping and shipbuilding management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After working with the top shipping corporations in New York, he founded P&P Marine Consultants Inc. to become a useful advisor and project leader to many shipowners and maritime financial institutions. While he has become an outspoken new buildings consultant, his experience is not restricted to shipbuilding, because he also has extensive knowledge and experience in ship management and financing.

He is an invited guest and has been and will be again in the spring chairman in conferences dealing with shipping related financial issues. He is also a research associate in shipbuilding and ship repairs in the Nautical Studies School of the University of Cantabria, Spain. He promotes efficient ships and advocates that a well designed ship is the one that takes into consideration all the items that can increase the current efficiency of the vessel. His company formulates teams to supervise the new building of ships with knowledge above the norm, to ensure the high quality the seafarers are expecting.