The first uniform method of assessing an operators’ DP capabilities is unveiled

SOLAS Titanic’s gift to the maritime world

Our first towmaster course gets underway

The Svendborg engineer who lost his life on the Titanic

Are there any issues about tomorrow’s technology that should concern us?

How to tomorrow’s seafarers view the challenges and pleasures of their careers

And the Svendborg connection with the new way of launching lifeboats

Esbjerg marks a first with DNVWe get blogging

Our regular offbeat look at something not totally unrelated to the rest of the magazine

Cover picture: Scaled and side-by-side two iconic vessels, Emma Maersk and the Titanic

What this issue and page is all about

The course that revealed hidden skills and uncovered a new way of tackling ship management

They helped build the Emma Maersk, now they are training for a new life

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Back tothe Future

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EditorialThe sadness of the news of the death of Maersk McKinney Møller was not diminished by the fact he lived for almost a century, but what he represented and achieved fills everyone within the Company with an immeasurable sense of pride. It is a pride, coupled with a passion which will endure.

We at Maersk Training are a very small part of a very large empire, but in Svendborg, Hr Møller’s hometown, there was and remains an obvious, understandable and perceivable feeling that we have lost something extraordinarily special. At the news locals quietly placed flowers on the steps of Villa Anna; others marked his passing by lowering the flags they’d raised for the Queen’s birthday to half mast.

When we moved to Rantzausminde it was Hr Møller who opened the building and last year two large groups of the family visited us. They reminded us that we are not just a company, we are a family. Never did it feel so much so like one as on the morning of April 16th.

Remembering the past has an important place in this eSea – regular readers will perhaps have noted that we often have a theme. This edition is packed with constant references and referrals back to something which happened a hundred years ago and which instantly resulted in some of the most dramatic steps forward in maritime law and safety.

Historians see the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as probably the world’s first global news story. Sadly it has been surpassed in terms of human lives lost by three other shipping tragedies, but it remains the pinnacle of human courage and sacrifice.

Here we look back at what changes the past hundred years have brought and how we look forward to the future.

SvendborgApril 2012

If the Titanic has a legacy it is SOLAS, the international

convention for Safety Of Life At Sea. By 1914 there was worldwide agreement on what is largely seen as the most important of international treaties – originally just five chapters covering aspects of safety for the merchant fleet and those who sail in them.

Today many revisions later SOLAS has added a further 17 chapters to the original five, which by in large remain pretty well as they were conceived. The convention’s provisions cover everything from construction to basic safety, from measures controlling high speed craft to nuclear powered vessels. The last major revision was in 1974 but since then there have been numerous additions and updates.

This is how the International Maritime Organization sees the Titanic’s legacy in terms of the vast improvements adopted since that cold April night in 1912.

It has long be documented how luxurious the liner was, but the subsequent enquiries in the US and UK indentified many corners that were cut in order that Titanic should be such an iconic symbol.

Illustration courtesy of the IMO

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Maersk Training is introducing the first standard-making assessment programme for DP operators. Instructors at their Svendborg headquarters

are putting together a programme which will enable clients to gauge the capabilities of ‘dry hire’ crews. The creation of the progamme is at the request of Maersk Oil Qatar. There has been a history of hired in crews having been on DP courses, other than on those conducted by Maersk Training, and have displayed greatly differing degrees of competence.

Maritime Instructor Karsten Haegg explained that the programme won’t have a pass or fail mark, the participant will work towards a score which will show their level of competence. It will then be up to the hiring client to decide if this level is sufficient. ‘We will make up the course and give it to the client for them to say if this is the field they want to cover, it is then up to the participant to cover it as best they can and then again it’s up to the client to decide if this is adequate for their needs and standards.’ ‘We in fact are setting a standard. Where it gets complicated is in perception – we can give the participant a scenario and task. They can then place the vessel where they like. Now there might be no perfect or obvious position to place the vessel, there might be several options, each one having a different virtue over the others. So we have to set a standard which says what exactly did the participant take into consideration, did he for example consider subsea assets, did he consider crane positions, calculate the weather? To

Maersk Training to create a world first

Dynamic Positioninggets universal standard

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able to mark this we need a very specific task, one where it is easy to gauge correctly considered manoeuvres. We need to have something that is black and white,’ said Karsten.

It is a test for competence rather than learning. It will consist of two main parts, theoretical knowledge and assessment in the simulator. The simulator section will also be in two parts, one in dynamic positioning and one in ship-handling.

Maersk Oil has requested the simulator has a vessel model with ASD, Azimuth stern-drive. That is why ship-handling will form an important part of the assessment.

The assessment will be for four participants at a time. The first of the one day assessments will be for Maersk Oil Qatar and conducted at the facilities Maersk Training shares with Elcome in Dubai, but will also be available at all Maersk Training DP training centres.

Maersk Training’s European centres are so strategically

placed that the announcement this month of the creation of a North Sea Training Agreement is both logical and timely.

The agreement simply means that a client, through a single contact point, has access to the skills and facilities at the five centres in Newcastle, Aberdeen, Stavanger, Esbjerg and Svendborg. Through a unique e-mail address – maritime@maersktraining.com – you gain access to booking.

Speed and efficiency are the keywords and we target a maximum of 48 hours from the customer’s request to confirmation. To back this up there is a central telephone number +45 70 263 283 which will deal with urgent enquiries on weekdays from 8.00-16.00 CET.

Training Agreement

ConquersNorth Sea

The wireless had not found its exact place in history when the Titanic left Southampton, within four days, two hours of frantic activity would transform its role forever. The Titanic’s wireless was the most powerful afloat, but the range of the signal only varied from around 640kms at night to about half that during the day.

The wireless room on the Titanic had little to do with the running or safety of the vessel, it was in reality one of the first commercial concessions. The operators were not members of the crew, rather they were employees of the Marconi company and their major role onboard was to respond to the whims of the First and Second Class passengers to send Marconigrams from mid-Atlantic.

For 3$10 cents (68$ today) a 10 word message could be sent and operators McBride and Phillips would send some 250 of them receiving replies about Stock Market prices and family news, interspersed with an occasional shipping message from another vessel. On the evening of the 14th several of these contained warnings of ice.

Remarkably there was no telephone link between the wireless room and the bridge, so the scribbled messages would be dispatched by hand – there is no recorded evidence that the most relevant iceberg warning from the Mesaba ever made it into the hands of someone responsible for the safety of the ship.

Once the ship’s fate was sealed operator Phillips sent out help message after help message before becoming the first person to use the new emergency code of SOS. The second operator McBride survived to witness the transformation of the wireless from a toy to a vital tool.

Here maritime instructor Lars Østergaard looks to the future of electronic navigation.

Maersk Training regularly conducts Electronic Chart Display Information System - ECDIS - courses. For the list of dates or

booking information click here.

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Never have seafarers had as much information

at their fingertips as they do today. Especially in the two decades since I first went to sea, the job of the navigator has been transformed. I think wonderfully but also dangerously so, not just in terms of a reliance on technology, but in the pitfalls in interpretation of the signals.

I’m not talking about the inability to pick up a sextant and look to the horizon and translate the data collected onto an accurate position on a chart. That is an issue we cannot skip, but it has got to be remembered that machines are not fallible and what we must retain is the human ability to question their findings.

Perhaps the majority of our navigational tools today rely on satellites. Between us and the satellites lies the ionosphere. There’s an eleven-year cycle which sees the sun pulsing out great flares which put more energy into the ionosphere, this causes the molecules to break up and disperse. The result is interference, making radio signals zig and zag. Zig and zag means a longer line, more time and a distorted message which delays reception of signals that could cause the loss of the precise position.

Misreading information or information that is misleading will lead to some seaborne mishap or disaster and the only safety valve will be the navigators’ intuition to question all that is in front,

beside and below them . . . and in their ability to being able to go back to basics.

We’ve just upgraded our ECDIS suites at Maersk Training, a routine and provident move. You know the result if you don’t upgrade your in-car navigation system and you are on a new stretch of road, ‘the voice’ gets totally confused. You get there, but not without a little recalculating.

There is however some technology up there which needs more than an upgrading. There are three satellite navigations systems up there at the moment, the Russians have GLONASS and the Americans the GPS that we have grown to love.

continued over/

Back to the FutureBut do we rely too much on technology?

asks Lars Østergaard

Titanic -The Svendborg Connection

About ten minutes after the Titanic slipped beneath the waves forever, a telegram boy arrived at the door of Augusta Milling’s house in Odense. It was 8.00am and the message was from her husband Jacob. It simply stated ABANAPAS. She presumably rushed to their homemade code book and told their two children that ‘father was feeling good, weather fine, fine ship, good company, fine trip.’

We can assume that ‘A’ meant fine. They’d worked out the code so that Jacob could communicate using the new, but word-expensive, Marconigram system. He’d sent the message at 6.22pm, just over five hours before the liner struck the iceberg. It cost him, in today’s money, $68 (388dkk).

As she read the words Jacob had just succumbed to the freezing Atlantic. His body recovered days later, was shipped back to Denmark for burial in Assistens Kirkegard in June. Jacob was one of 14 Danes on board, twelve of whom died.

He’d been born 48 years earlier in Svendborg and worked as an engineer for the Sydfynske Jernbaner Company. He was no ordinary engineer and was responsible for building two powerful railway engines for the Svendborg-Odense line. These were engines Arnold Peter Møller and his family would have known well, their home Villa Anna being a matter of metres from the line. By 1912 the engines were showing their age and Jacob was travelling to the States to investigate buying new ones.

Jacob’s widow and two children were allotted £150 (£9891 or 89,351DKK today) from the White Star Line insurers, but one report said that she refused it.

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Now the Europeans are making a contribution and it may prove to be the most significant. This is important since the GPS system is now in technology terms an old boy and is showing its age – the system is also a victim of its popularity. The old satellite will come out of commission in about three years, replaced by new versions which with three frequencies are more capable of dealing with today’s technology.

The European version Galileo, is the new kid on the block and won’t be fully operational until 2019, has certain advantages. It alone allows distress signals from the user’s transmitter to go directly to a Rescue Coordination Centre which in turn initiates the rescue. It doesn’t end there, in the professional version, the craft or person in trouble then gets a response to say help is on its way. What might end here is those long drawn out Hollywood survival sequences. What would it have done on the Titanic to have an immediate fix of location and for the ships nearby to understand the magnitude of the situation?

But back to the GPS over-use issue. What back-up is there if the screen goes fuzzy? It maybe that we have to take a technological step back and rely on shore-based beacon equipment as with RACON. Highly reliable it does have a range issue but since most navigational demands are when nearing land, it will be useful.

Many of the traditional beacons, like lighthouses, have diminished but what is opening up are areas of navigation never before undertaken by large craft. Global warming is opening up the North-West Passage creating a whole new economic region and route. Iceberg incidents are not confined to the last century, in recent years cruise liners taking adventure tourists to the Antarctic have come off second best in close encounters.

The warning signs are all flashing and one signal we are sending out from Maersk Training is that total or overreliance on technology is a danger you avoid at your peril.

Lars Østergaard - los012@maersktraining.com

The pattern flow for the 27 operating Galileo satellites and their three backup satellites when they are fully commissioned in 2019. What are the chances of a space collision? Very very very small according to Matthew Desch, CEO of Iridium Communications who have 66 satellites up there. He should know as they used to have 67 – one of their craft being involved in the first, and to date only, mid-space collision. In 2009 their satellite crashed into a defunct Russian military communications satellite – both were totally destroyed. Rather like Titanic and SOLAS, it woke the industry up and the US Air Force which has a lot of metal out there immediately began to share orbit information. Not before time since Iridium have in the last three years had to take evasive action on almost 100 occasions.

Given the choice, it seems most seafarers try to

avoid lifeboat drill. They do so with good reason, as emergency evacuation training is statistically more dangerous than an actual critical situation. Now they should have no excuse as over the past two years the biggest change in maritime history in emergency evacuation procedures has come about. It started because Maersk Tankers experienced operational problems with certain ‘fully approved’ freefall lifeboats on one particular type of vessel. They studied the problem, examined current options and came up with a revolutionary new design.

Lifeboat training kills one in eight

History: In 2001 the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) studied the UK’s merchant fleet accident reports for ten years and it showed that alongside entering confined spaces and falling overboard, lifeboat practice was the most dangerous

area of operation. Sixteen per cent of fatalities happen during lifeboat drill – one death in eight - a chilling statistic.

MAIB concluded that there were major three factors in lifeboat training accidents which in the studied decade killed 12 seafarers and injured a further 87. Ironically over the same period they did not record one single instance where someone was saved by a lifeboat.

The report emphasized deficiencies in lifeboat design, maintenance and training. Their findings were confined to UK waters and therefore only pointed towards the global problem, but they were backed up by the Norwegian and Australian authorities with their separate investigations coming to similar conclusions. The Norwegians estimate that globally there are about 214,000 drills a year causing 1,000 accidents and as many as half causing fatalities.

Much of the solution to two of the issues lies in a factory in Svendborg and the core APMM desire of seeking the perfect safety environment. Here they are building the next generation of life-preserving equipment.

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Titanic carried 20 lifeboats, enough for 1178 people. The existing Board of Trade required a passenger ship to provide lifeboat capacity for 1060 people. The liner was designed to carry 32 lifeboats but this number was reduced to 20 because it was felt that the deck would be too cluttered. In all 713 people survived in lifeboats, 1516 died - statistics which shocked the world and revolutionised safety in the maritime industry.

Drop-in-Ball mechanism

The problem lay in the ancient technology and methods used to get the survival craft into the water and how, and when, to board it. Bent Nielsen, Director Marine Standards at Maersk Tankers was amongst the first to recognise that something as traditional and basic as the hook was the main culprit. Rusting, faulty basic mechanisms and prone to misuse, the hook all too often turned the moment of salvation into devastation. He came up with the Drop-in-Ball concept which was perfected by a team under Esben Juul Sørensen, firstly at Maersk’s Innovation Board and now MD at Nadiro, the company set up by A.P.

Moller – Maersk in conjunction with Svendborg Hydraulics to produce it. To APMM, safety is not a commercial issue and the decision to market the product was in order to contribute to industry wide improvements.

Put a lid on it

The onboard lifeboat was, until the late 1980’s, open to the elements, saving many from the sea but not necessarily from the cold or hot environment that it found itself in. Now protected from hyperthermia or flames and smoke the enclosed lifeboat has become a survival capsule. The main danger now

Drop-In-Ball in the workshop - and if you are online the whole system in action

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is not the elements, but in how to safely get into it and how to launch it without catastrophic results.

‘The 80 or so designs that currently exist all rely on gravity and that is the problem. We turned the principle upside down, not the boat,’ says Esben. The Drop-in-Ball is a patented failsafe way of securing the craft to the winching device - the stainless steel ball replaces the hook and is held vertically in position by a conical collar and horizontally by a trip gate. A hydraulic action releases the gate whilst pushing the ball out, liberating it from the winch.

However there remains the method of launching and the how to protect the equipment from the sea, salt, sun, smoke, that previously made it gradually unsafe. Anyone who has walked around a ‘mature’ vessel or rig will see just how tough an enemy the environment is.

The garage goes to sea

The solution was to create an entirely new escape route, or rather a totally different way of looking at it. So for rigs they effectively came up with an elevated garage where the lifeboat is kept and where

evacuees board simply by entering a door before being winched down to the water – hence the Boat-In-A-Box, a garage at sea.

The system according to Esben is the first to comply with the strict Norwegian offshore regulations which come into force in 2015. Here lifeboats holding over one hundred people (more normally 60-80) can be stored and used with the same convenience as an elevator in a tall building. In the future the legally required quarterly lifeboat drill could be as dramatic as a flat owner nipping down to the park.

Frames for two more Boat-In-A-Box lifeboats await fitting out

M a n O v e r b o a r d P u t s S k i l l s O n b o a r dThey’d spent six years working

side-by-side as riggers fitting pipes into some of the world’s largest vessels including Emma Maersk, now they were side-by-side in a five metre rubber boat zooming around outside Esbjerg harbour practicing to save lives. Lars Henning Meilstrup and Henrik Thygesen were on the Maersk Training MOB, Man Overboard course, but the two lives they’d most like to alter are their own.

Since the announcement of the closure of the Lindø shipyard they’d been on a constant stream of courses in order to put themselves back into the workforce. Their shared dream would be to work on a rig and now, with the tiny rescue boat weaving under the legs of a jack-up in port for repair, the dream seemed tantalizingly close.

Lars estimated he’d personally been on as many as 30 courses over the past two years. ‘We don’t really care what role we get initially, the main thing is to get back to work. Once we are in a job we can prove ourselves with our past skills and move on from there,’ said Lars.

They are busy viewing the possibilities and Lars, as a father of four teenage girls, with a wry smile remarks rig work would be wonderful.

Best in 30 Courses

Thirty courses and they reckoned that the MOB with instructor John Eriksen was amongst the most rewarding. That’s probably because John’s training methodology incorporates enjoying the learning process. ‘This is a serious subject and in reality it can be a matter of life and death, but if the learning is fun, more of the message seems to stick,’ said John.

The two-day course embraces First Aid, knowledge of the MOB boast construction and how to launch and drive the boat. It also, quite naturally, covers recovery techniques and ‘Johnny the dummy’ was in and out of the water with the regularity of a diver practicing for the Olympics. For the final test Johnny was replaced by Lars and then Henrik. But they were no dummies, they were quickly retrieved, passed the course and proved that opportunities like developing skills in downtime are there to be taken and turned to the good.

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Eight members of the workforce that built the Titanic along with the designer Thomas Andrews sailed as ‘the Guarantee Group’ - their job to be on the maiden voyage to ensure that faults could be corrected. None of them survived. Some other shipyard workers also signed on in Belfast as ordinary seamen. Skilled shipyard workers got paid £2 a week, unskilled half that. Frederick Fleet, the lookout who spotted the iceberg was paid £5.25p a month - the cost of a

First Class suite was £870, one way.

People Skills instructor Morten Kaiser sharing what the course can achieve with technical staff in Lauritzen’s boardroom on Copenhagen’s harbour front

For a few years now we’ve called the programme, Train-the-Trainer (TTT), but perhaps in this instance it could be called

‘pyramid learning’ or ‘hidden treasures.’ The pyramid being the way the learning message multiplies throughout the process and the treasure being the hidden talents uncovered. These are just two of the immediate results from a substantial exercise by Maersk Training for Lauritzen Kosan’s Filipino fleet.

It’s an exercise which started with five people undertaking a week-long Train the Trainer course, then masters and chiefs gathered in a hotel in Manila for three days and recently progressed to shore staff coming together in groups in the boardroom of the company HQ in Copenhagen to get a ‘condensed’ version.

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Pyramid TreasuresWhat happened was that some years ago Lauritzen Kosan launched an awareness course in which they targeted getting core values and the company mission across to those on board, but as Christian Riis, Head of HSSEQ Fleet Management explained they quickly realised that it wasn’t enough.

‘There was a lot of technical input and the awareness course was built by ourselves and we realised somehow along the path that if we want to change things with the third officer and or the behaviour of the ratings, then we needed to change the behaviour of the captain and chief engineer. It’s not about producing necessarily a new page in the SMS (Shipboard Management System) or maybe changing a work instruction in the plan maintenance systems, its more about changing the mindset and if you want

to change the mindset you need to start with the top management and how we see the top management and then we came to the discussion about the working relationship between the chief engineer and the master,’ said Christian. What transposed was a desire to breakdown the traditional ‘them and us’ barrier which has existed between the engine room and the bridge and to create a new partnership where the Captain and Chief Engineer together became a management team capable of making joint decisions. In some fleets there is a partnership between the Chief Officer and Engineer, but this master/chief relationship, although existing on some Danish flagged vessels, was new for Lauritzen Kosan’s Far East fleet.

continued over/

In Manila Captains and Chief Engineers combine over a mind-testing exercise.

The Course Creating Process• Initial discussions• Targets identified• Timeframe set• Vessels visited• Course developed• Materials designed• 5 day TTT Copenhagen• 3 day leader course Manila• ½ day technical team familiarisation • ½ day commercial team familiarisation• Review and plan ongoing programme

Engine room heroesThe differences between the officers and deck crew and the engine room crew was never so pronounced as in 1912, nor marked more dramatically in terms of human sacrifice. None of the 25 engineers or ten boiler makers on the Titanic survived, whilst above deck four of the eight officers survived, as did all seven quartermasters.

A small army lit, stoked and fed the liners 29 boilers with 600 tonnes of coal a day – 73 trimmers had the back-breaking job of keeping the supply of coal in the right areas so that the ship was ‘trimmed’. In all 244 engineers, firemen, trimmers and greasers perished as they fought to keep the power going for electricity for lights and distress signals.

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This is where Maersk Training enters the story as Christian (pictured left) explained, ‘We were in the process of screening the possibility of educating shore-based staff with regard to piracy and simultaneously I was looking for someone to provide management leadership courses and I was introduced to the concept of Train-the-Trainer. We saw that Maersk Training had conducted a lot of leadership and management courses and we met and actually because of the chemistry and experience, it all made sense. We were in contact with various other suppliers, but decided to go with MT and we are very happy we did.’

Originally the idea was for Maersk Training to conduct the courses but it made more sense to tap into what latent skills lay within Lauritzen Kosan. Morten Kaiser a senior consultant at Maersk Training conducted a Train-the-Trainers programme (pictured left) and then stood back to contribute with overviews and occasional tweaks – pyramid learning.

One development was to bring members of the shore-based technical and commercial teams into the boardroom for a three-hour highlights version of the three-day course. The ‘them and us’ barrier doesn’t just exist onboard, but also between onboard and on-shore, between technical and commercial.

‘When we started we had to find our way. For instance when we said something different we had to create something new to solve it. So there was a lot of innovative thinking which was supported by actions we previously had never thought of. Here we talk of building a bridge between the ship and shore-based management – this whole process has changed our view,’ says Christian.

Head of Maritime Personnel Susan Flintegård joined Christian as part of the five-man training team, her role developing quickly from student to instructor. ‘The teaching role was new to me, it was like writing with the left hand, but with practice you can do it.’

Driving the message home

Susan’s main role is in the area of psychological profiling, using the Personal Profile Analyis, Thomas Test. ‘I was a bit afraid that they might be sceptical as one of them asked “what was the psychological stuff, how should their approach to this be?” But it turned out they were not sceptical at all apart from this one question and after testing we had a very good and productive discussion. Indeed I’ve been very positively surprised by the result and the participants are excited to see the results One guy said “this is me.” It was the first time any of them had done this sort of thing and it was spot on. In the end they were happy, proud even and wanted to bring their profiles home to show the family.’

Susan explained that today 65% of the captains and chiefs had been through the course but that with different schedules they didn’t expect to see immediate results. However there had already been positive feedback about better working relationships, but interestingly not just onboard, ‘Some have said they find that the tools they now have enables them to deal with situations and better manage their home lives,’ said Susan.

Do you think you or your company might benefit from such a process? You can contact

Morten to learn more by clicking here.

The Pay Scandal

In 1912 seafarers were generally employed on short-term contracts which usually stated that you only got paid when sailing. The White Star Line got caught in a massive public relations storm in the aftermath of the sinking because they followed the letter of the law. Physically the voyage of the Titanic ended with the sinking, technically that meant the surviving crew were not entitled to pay from that point on. Based on her monthly salary of £4 Turkish bath stewardess Annie Canton initially received less than a pound (77p or 7DKK) for her work from Southampton to the collision. Annie eventually got, like all surviving crew, paid until they were repatriated.

Some Titanic monthly salaries

Captain Edward J Smith £105 946DKK Chief Officer Henry Wilde £25 225DKKChief Bakers Charles Joughin £12 108DKKLookout Frederick Fleet £5.25p 47DKKTrimmer Frederick Allen £5.50p 50DKKStewardess Annie Robinson

£3.50p 32DKK

Looking

Forward

to

Tomorrow

Today’s officers face a very different world to those who opted for the sea as a career in 1912 - Jesper Roost’s story

There were thirty of them, 29 attached almost

surgically to their laptops yet listening to every word as instructor Søren Nyborg took them through a world of compressors and expansion tanks. They are tomorrow’s officers and engineers, about to embark on career paths very different to the Smiths, Murdochs, and Wildes who were proud to work for the White Star Line.

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Jesper at work . . . . .and at play

Today’s officers face a very different world to those who opted for the sea as a career in 1912 - Jesper Roost’s story

Ninety per cent of the Class of 2012 are earmarked to work for a different white star, the one with seven points, but as Jesper Roost explained his personal route to becoming an engineer was not too dissimilar to some of the Titanic’s engineers. Jesper is into his second career. Having left school to do his apprenticeship as a blacksmith, he when qualified had to face a challenge when the company he worked for pulled out of South Jutland – ‘I liked the thought of seeing a bit the world and although I enjoyed working on the bridge when in or near ports,

the long nights on watch when you do nothing but stare out of the window were not for me so I instinctively found myself in the engine room.’

There seemed to be one moment, one long moment which cemented the engineer’s ticket in his mind.

He was on a tanker when a hidden washer in a compressor pipe burst and was pouring water into the vessel. ‘There I was up to my waste in water with the pumps pumping and a wrench in my hand, the Chief thinking I was mad because I had a big happy smile on my

face. I’d found my place. ‘

The whole process from deciding to go to sea to actually graduating takes about five to six years. It entails months of head in books, sitting at desks and driving simulators interspersed with sea time. Jesper’s career path is not so very different from the junior 5th Engineer on the Titanic, Bill Mackie. He started as an apprentice in an iron foundry before deciding on the sea as a career. He then learnt his profession on a number of vessels and like many of the crew was transferred from the sister ship Olympic for the maiden voyage.

continued over/

A huge mural on the wall of the SIMAC classroom tells a story now conifned to the history books; a sailor saying goodbye to his young family is painted alongside an exciting exotic foreign port with scantily dressed maidens and a homecoming. What lies ahead for Jesper and his class colleagues is a very different career experience. ‘On one of my voyages we called at an Indian port. The vessel came from the ocean and up a channel with no port in sight, then there were cranes and we docked. We asked where the local town was, the pilot pointing out into the distance, four hours that way, by car,’ said Jesper. ‘Of course there are highlights, Hong Kong, Singapore and Hamburg, but the old image of walking down the gangway straight into a city centre is long dead.’

Cover

ContentsEditorial

SOLAS

DP Assess

Back tothe Future

SvendborgConnection

LifeboatRevolution

MOB/Job

Training thetrainers

Tomorrow’sMen

Master ofthe Tow

Esbjerg getsDNV cert

PoopDeck

The new and the old – technology dominates today. Right, the new freefall lifeboat which SIMAC students train on and above, the mural portraying the sailors’ life with a

girl in every port - an image now confined to the history books.

Another image consigned to the history books is the bottle of rum in the cabin cupboard. Jesper, who on the drinks side runs the college bar every Friday, fully realizes the value of dry ships. ‘So many things have changed, port time, pressures of working to tight schedules but on the plus side in olden days I would have shared a cabin with several others all disturbing each other with different shifts. Today we have our own space – this however is not huge.’

‘You look at the size of the vessels and you think, like my father did when he saw Arnold Maersk, “whaa, that’s huge,” but in fact there is so much of the vessel you don’t need to or want to visit. I estimate that on a modern container vessel you have about 200 sq metres of free moving space.’

Life onboard is therefore like being confined to a large house but technologic advances even since Jesper started studying have increased the mindspace. ‘Broadband is not readily available on all vessels in all locations but the internet when it is there is a huge bonus. Imagine life before. The vessel would get a printout of some news highlights, maybe two or three pages. Those pages would be the sum total of the current affairs information at your disposal for discussion. Very limiting.’

Jesper and his fellow classmates pass out in June and say goodbye to formal education, until that is they hopefully return to Svendborg to develop skills and increase knowledge at Maersk Training.

‘Only the sound is missing,’ that was the reaction of Maersk Drilling trainee towmaster Klaus Sondergaard (above) as

he completed day three of the inaugural five-day Towmaster’s Course at Maersk Training’s MOSAIC complex in Svendborg.

Maersk Training had, at Maersk Driling’s request, been working on creating such a programme since early last year, the new towmaster suite being ‘carved out’ of an area behind the main bridge A suite in what is now called MOSAIC I. MOSAIC II, the new drilling complex is rapidly being constructed just a few metres away.

What the Towmaster course represents beyond responding to a growing need for this specialised training, is another piece in the jigsaw which will see the Maersk Offshore Simulation and Innovation Centre, to give it its full title, create a whole world of realistic training scenarios which could previously only be experienced for the first time in real life situations.

Klaus was impressed with the quality of graphics and movements, ‘Yesterday I did some manoeuvres and it worked, you have the same service screens as on the rig, but without the sounds. It is comforting that it is a simulator, but I hope they take from previous case studies for something to go wrong so you can learn from it and that of course is much better to do in simulated surroundings. It will definitely be a great benefit.’

Cover

ContentsEditorial

SOLAS

DP Assess

Back tothe Future

SvendborgConnection

LifeboatRevolution

MOB/Job

Training thetrainers

Tomorrow’sMen

Master ofthe Tow

Esbjerg getsDNV cert

PoopDeck

Even if the sound of scraping on the seabed or clanking of metal on metal is temporarily missing Klaus thought he’d been transported into a real world, ‘I really felt the motion of the legs going down, it was that good.’

It takes about 18 months of training to turn an experienced anchor handling captain into a towmaster. Klaus applied to Maersk Drilling because he saw the challenge.

Klaus a master mariner for 12 years, was the first towmaster trainee from Maersk Drilling to go on the course, the previous training having been conducted in Houston, Texas. ‘The simulator gives you a head’s start you can use it to practice moves, but what is a big plus is the experience and information sharing. Also with the simulators when you are moving over mud or going too fast, you can stop and think without doing damage,’ he observed. ‘Despite it being on a simulator there is a certain real nervousness, it is very good.’

A whole world under one roof

The towmaster assumes responsibility for the whole rig during rig move operation and now with the size of the task comes the sheer physical enormity of the vessels to be towed sometimes over huge distances and through various and

varying weather and water conditions. ‘All these can be created under one roof at MOSAIC and we operate under real time calculations and therefore accurately look back and analyze where the movement went well . . . and maybe not so,’ adds Karsten Haegg, the maritime instructor charged with overseeing the course.

All simulators are equipped with an IVA survey system allowing positioning operations. The new course represents a further broadening of MOSAIC’s ability to create real-world scenarios with teams in the Jack Up control as well as the 360° and 260° bridges being able to interact and affect each others’ working environment.

The simulator is now configured with a student station for the Jack Up. The control room will have one visual channel with different ‘eye point’ positions on the rig and possibility to pan and tilt the view. Two bridges can be connected to the ‘control room’ rig as supporting vessels, training towmasters to cooperate with the vessels and try the feeling from the vessel’s point of view.

Regarding sound effects Karsten admitted they were working on it, ‘we will do anything to add to the experience and the new MOSAIC complex will feature sounds, watch, or rather listen, to this space,’ he said.

First Trainee Masters the Tow

Maersk Training Esbjerg has become the first organisation to be approved by Det Norske Veritas (DNV) to conduct all five modules of the Global Wind Organisation’s recently introduced Basic Safety Training Standard. The objective of the standard is to establish common industry training standards and best practices on health and safety in order to reduce the risks for personnel working in the wind power industry.

The Basic Safety Training standard contains the five modules: First Aid Manual handling Fire Awareness Working at heights Sea Survival

Go BloggingPress Me!

. . . “you should be open-minded but not so open minded that your brains fall out”. Ewa Poulsen on the ability to learn

. . . safety is never to be compromised, but in the real world a shipping company always has several considerations front and centre in the decision-making process. – Bo Grønhøj on double values

. . . Have you developed skills on a computer you couldn’t have possibly pickup in real life? Or maybe negatively? Richard Lightbody on the value of simulation

We’re excited, looking towards new challenges – new country, new language, new laws, new currency, new neighbours and in my case a new training opportunity. – Denis Edmonds on a new life of opportunity

Cover

ContentsEditorial

SOLAS

DP Assess

Back tothe Future

SvendborgConnection

LifeboatRevolution

MOB/Job

Training thetrainers

Tomorrow’sMen

Master ofthe Tow

Esbjerg getsDNV cert

PoopDeck

eSea 1 Instructors’ back to sea programme - Sea Time Reduction announced - Vetting for Supply - New Deepwater Horizons open up

eSea 2New Towmasters’ course gets full simulation treatment - Deepwater course piloted - Wind industry - Drill instructor gets back to the well head

eSea 3MOSAIC II announced - Offshore wind and the new challenges - West African pilots use simulator to deal with the ‘big boys’ - CraneSIM docks in Vietnam - Piracy through the ages

eSea 4MT launches new website - Chinese in big safety push - Rig crane put in a box - Teamwork is the key - Safety and People Skills combine to build platform emergency course - how to communicate across cultures

eSea 5Maersk Training pennant raised in Dubai - Platform crews pilot Emergency Response course - How to be best in Vetting class - Danger of computer over reliance

eSea 6MOSAIC II, the ground is broken - Rig participants up to elbows in some very special mud - Semi-sub crew learns anchor handling - West African pilots start payback - Class of fifteen people, twelve nationalities, one tongue

eSea 7Chinese Container crews look to safety - New rig crane simulator tested - MT Esbjerg opens its new facilities - MOSAIC II update - DP sea time reduction - Coffee Break with Bent Nielsen

eSea library

Originally built to offer protection to the stern from adverse weather, the PoopDeck was a feature on most early vessels - the Titanic class were the last

ocean liners to have them

In an emergency if you had to save just one personal item, what would you grab? Seven year old Eva Hart picked up a stuffed toy frog on that fateful night one hundred years ago – today I suspect most of us would slip our mobile phones into our pocket, after all we are totally neutralized without them. Not a bad choice. Today a single smartphone has more technology crammed into it than the combined gadgetry of every vessel afloat in 1912.

Sitting in the back garden the other evening one App told me the position of every satellite, star and planet above me, another identified the plane flying above at 10,000 metres and told me where it was going and where had been for a week, a third gave away the location of every vessel in the English Channel, a fourth told me local forecourt diesel prices and a fifth allowed me to transmit the live image of me to the world in HD. Had I the need, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration would have fed me with current information on icebergs. Technology, is there no end to it? Reading the instructions I found I can even make a phone call. It’s complicated, but possible.

I’ve long had a fascination for the Titanic. I’m not alone, the tales of heroism and survival have allowed it to be probably a, if not the, keynote event of the 20th century. Like 9/11 will do, it scarred a century of unborn generations.

My grandfather’s family and friends witnessed the Titanic doing sea trials and then with its lights glowing as it sailed out of Belfast Lough in the dusk of an April evening, just 12 days away from nautical immorality. They just saw the huge liner in the distance, I’ve touched it.

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In 1994 I waited to get into the Titanic Exposition, the collection returned from the deep, the irony of queuing for two hours and forty minutes wasn’t lost on me. It was the exact same timespan as from the moment of iceberg impact to the ship slipping to the bottom of the Atlantic. Everything brought up from the deep was behind glass, except a winch handle which was naked to the world, embedded into the wall. To touch it was to touch history.

Some years earlier I’d touched another bit of history, the 77 year old hand of Eva Hart. Seven at the time of the unthinkable, she was second class passenger on the way to a new life in Canada with her mother Esther and father Benjamin. It was he who had placed Eva and her mother in lifeboat 14 and with stoic heroism stood back to become anaother one of the 1,514 who died that night. Wrapped in a blanket all she had in her hands was a toy frog - that day 70 years later, the little Essex house was bedecked with frogs, hundreds of them, gifts from Titanic lovers worldwide. She told the story as clear and cold as that night to remember.

I’d been making a BBC documentary about one man’s belief that the Titanic, which wasn’t to be found for another seven years, wasn’t lying at the position it was last reported. The theory was long held that the ship ‘stood up’ before going straight to the bottom. The new theory was that the vessel would have used its design lines and ‘sailed’ underwater for some distance. In the end when

discovered in 1985 both theories were to a degree right and wrong. The ship had split in two, the bow section ‘sailing’ horizontally underwater for 666 metres whilst the stern corkscrewed almost vertically straight down for four kilometres. Today bow and stern lie 600 metres apart, wreckage spread over 40 sq kms.

The last twist in my personal Titanic story pops up in Chiswick West London. About 600 metres from my own anonymous front door was the anonymous front door of Violet Jessop. She was a stewardess. Now onboard there was an American passenger Margaret Brown who became famous in folklore as the Unsinkable Molly Brown – but in truth it should have been the Sinkable Violet who should have been remembered in film and music. Violet held the rare distinction of serving on all three Olympic class vessels – the Olympic, the Titanic and the Britannic. She was working on the Olympic when it hit a Royal Navy ship and ripped a hole one third the size of the one that doomed the Titanic. She was on the Titanic that fateful night and then on the Britannic four year later when a mine or a German torpedo sent it to the bottom of the Aegean.

Undeterred Violet went on to work on vessels for another 35 years – I wonder if the passengers were aware of her unfortunate track record?

Richard Lightbodyrli039@maersktraining.com

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