The wonders of technology at sea, and ashore.
Last month I traveled up to Washington and paid a call on the good folks at International Registries, Inc. (IRI) in Reston. IRI and its affiliates, of course, provide administrative and technical support to the Republic of the Marshall Islands maritime and corporate registries. A quick tour of their well-equipped offices took me past what looked like at least a 50 inch (it was bigger than mine, that’s for sure) flat screen monitor, on which a pictorial map of the world was overlaid with the LRIT signatures of virtually every one of their RMI fleet of almost 2,500 vessels. It is an impressive thing to look at and while IRI probably can’t claim to be the only flag administrator doing this sort of thing, they were the first. The ‘visual’ also served to jog my memory about something that happened to me back in my shipping days.
It was 1984 and I was serving as second mate on a 40-year old U.S.-flag, coastwise chemical tanker that had seen better days and I assure you that today wouldn’t have passed too many port state control inspections. But, I’m getting off track. I arrived in the chart room at about 2350 hours, ready to relieve the third mate before standing my regular mid watch. He greeted me and showed me his latest fix, after which we wandered out into the darkened wheelhouse where he briefed me on the prevailing traffic in the area, of which there was plenty.
Nominally satisfied that I had the operational picture, I advised him that I now had the watch. Nevertheless, he had one more piece of information to pass along: “Don’t talk to anyone on the radio.” I beg your pardon? Don’t use the radio? I finally replied evenly, “Well, that might be kinda hard since we’re 6 hours out of Ambrose, in heavy traffic and I have to give notice of arrival at some point.” He insisted, “Old man says not to talk to anyone.” Exasperated, I snapped, “Do want to share with me the reasons why or do I have to wake him up and put him in still another bad mood?” This was to be avoided at all costs, especially at a quarter past midnight. Trust me on this one.
It turned out that we were racing another ship to the chemical terminal’s berth, up in beautiful Carteret, NJ. The ship that got there last was not only going to have to wait at anchor but also another 24 hours after that due to some sort of movement or maintenance in the port that would follow. I suppose the conventional wisdom from the office folks was that by moving up the coast in stealth mode, we would sneak up on them and beat them to the pilot. Slave as we were to the demurrage God in the wonderful world of the chemical parcel carriage trades, the engineers were squeezing every last turn out of the screws and while it really didn’t matter much to me (I was privately amused by the entire ‘radio silence’ drama), I’m sure that somebody back in the home office was probably sweating this one out.
We finished dead last (in a field of two) in the great race; this despite the Captain’s repeated white lies about our impending arrival to the pilots that we would be at Ambrose literally 45 minutes before we actually got there. The other tanker was about 30 years younger than ours, a motor ship that didn’t hemorrhage steam through every open orifice and they passed Ambrose at least one hour before we did. A rather unpleasant 72 hours spent at anchor ensued, with the old man puttering around on the bridge, drumming his fingers on the porthole, chain smoking cigarettes and periodically grilling me with things like, “Are you sure you stayed to the course line?” Or, my personal favorite, “You changed course to avoid traffic, didn’t you? That’s where we lost some time. I KNEW it!” I really liked him, you know?
In the six-plus years that I went to sea, I saw this very same thing happen on one or two other occasions. Back then, of course, we didn’t have LRIT, AIS, cellular telephones or anything else. Positions, ETA’s and actual arrival times were routinely fudged in the name of saving a few thousand (or much more, in some cases) dollars in demurrage. And, really, there was no readily available commercial means with which to tell who was lying and who wasn’t. Those days are clearly gone forever.
Established as an international system in 2006, long-range identification and tracking (LRIT) of ships was established as an amendment to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), applying to passenger ships, cargo ships and mobile offshore drilling units. Ships report their positions four times daily on International voyages and some administrators such as IRI monitor their ships even closer than that in certain waters and situations.
Closer to home, Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals, with a much shorter range, serve as collision avoidance systems but also as navigational aids. In a recent Bridge Resource Management (BRM) class, I got my first operational exposure to an AIS overlay on an ECDIS screen during some simulator training. It was a marvelous experience that also served to show me just how far things have come since I last stepped down a gangway in 1986. The instructor told me flatly, “I wouldn’t ever go to sea again without it.” I tend to agree with him.
More applicable to today’s story, however, several commercial software firms market services that capture AIS data and use it for any number of purposes, but primarily for traffic control in harbors, port security and, with money usually the driving force any new technology, demurrage and time logs for charterers, marine terminals and other interested stakeholders.
1984 has come and gone. Arguably, much of what was depicted in George Orwell’s now famous book has come to pass, albeit in a slightly different context. Thankfully, much of the fast and loose things pulled by shippers in another time just wouldn’t fly in today’s wired and closely monitored world. And, on that cold, dreary winter morning in 1984, limping up the eastern seaboard on my decrepit 1940’s-era parcel tanker, we could saved ourselves a lot of heartburn had we been made aware from the “git-go” that we didn’t have a prayer of winning the race to the sea buoy. Our beloved Captain would have had to find something else to harp on. He always did. I bet that’s one part of shipping that hasn’t changed much. – MarPro.
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Joseph Keefe is the lead commentator of MaritimeProfessional.com. Additionally, he is Editor of both Maritime Professional and MarineNews print magazines. He can be reached at jkeefe@maritimeprofessional.com or at Keefe@marinelink.com. MaritimeProfessional.com is the largest business networking site devoted to the marine industry. Each day thousands of industry professionals around the world log on to network, connect, and communicate.