Feedbacks

“We work hard and we play harder.”
‘When do you sleep?’ I asked.
“Isn’t that boring?”

At midnight my ex Navy friend, now well settled in Singapore, was taking us around in his spacious SUV. I was having trouble trying to keep my eyes open. According to that fellow Singaporeans found ‘sleeping’ a boring activity. The families sitting behind laughed.

On the roads there was quite a bit of traffic. Some pedestrians on the sidewalks. The scene outside resembled a normal evening in any of the cities around the world. But this was past midnight.

I was in Singapore to attend an ECDIS conference. The conference was well attended by shipping companies. This is the one group generally missing from seminars and conferences. As usual the main subject was IMO’s resolution to make ECDIS mandatory from 2012 onwards.

Whereas OEMs are enthusiastic about embracing every new technology that comes their way, ship-operators are more circumspect. Their attitudes towards new gizmos was summed up as:

"Keep looking out of the window because, When technology becomes your Master you can navigate faster to disaster.”

One shipping superintendent gave a realistic picture of how his company was dealing with ECDIS, digital charts, AIS, GMDSS and other peripheral developments that have invaded the bridge in the recent years.

The people who run the ship – Master, Chief, Second are not very highly educated. Most of them do not have a college degree. After school they do a few months of specialized training from an institute before joining the ship as a cadet. The real training begins then.

Without any formal degree deck officers are expected to grapple with the sophisticated equipment arraigned on the bridge. A guy is considered knowledgeable if he can master the operating manual of a fitted equipment. Most times the fellow memorizes the one page instruction sheet that is attached as a quick reference guide to the instrument. But then he is a practical fellow. Faced with operating a huge vessel in a real world where a moment’s lapse could result in a spectacular incident the OOW finds out all that is useful about the equipment from the point of view of running a ship.

My instinct says that OEMs who have developed a system in response to the industry feedback stand a better chance against those that have been developed by highly technical engineers and scientists ensconced in their cubicles but cut off from the real world.

C-Map digital charts was created purely from the point of view of the navigator. It was modeled according to the market response. It has succeeded despite there being no regulations forcing its usage. On the other hand the ENC is an IMO/IHO creation. Howsoever well-meaning they are but they have not catered for the user feedback. There are hardly any users to start with so where is the useful feedback?

S-57, S-63, ENC, SENC, RENC, WEND are all alien words to the bridge OOWs. Even today, at least in India, books on the subject haven’t yet penetrated to competency students. As such, students retain at most 10% of what is taught in the classroom. Rest of the knowledge comes from the field through practical usage. The majority of ships out there do not have ECDIS. The percentage of ships fitted with ECDIS hardware could be 10% or 5% or even less.

When the bridge OOW sees an ECDIS he doesn’t realize that as per the definition it would not qualify as a proper ECDIS. Maybe as an ECS, but not as an approved ECDIS. Truthfully speaking even a properly approved ECDIS might become an ECS without the knowledge of the user if the ENCs that he uses are not up-to-date. There would be no alarm because there is no specific definition for an up-to-date chart. Up-to-date as of when? A month, a fortnight, a week or a day? Even the hydrographic offices have not reached a consensus amongst themselves how often to issue corrections.

Back on the bridge the OOW doesn’t know (as yet) that he doesn’t have ENCs on board. Maybe raster charts or some other vector charts. So they learn to use ARCS, C-Map or Transas charts. Unfortunately for him the rules are ambiguous. SOLAS has a definition for the vector ENCs but is not clear about non-ENCs. In the absence of specific information some of them feel C-Map is ENCs.

“Isn’t it vector?”

Sealing the argument by implying that raster is non-standard and vector is better. And acceptable.

When some owners buy ENCs to go along with C-Map the OOWs realize that in certain parts of the world C-Map is far better than the ENCs.

Mariners talk amongst themselves. C-Map comes out tops mainly because it was there not because it was mandated but because it was useful. ENCs are considered heavy, complicated, time-consuming, difficult to select from chart catalogs and expensive. After all that unraveling of instructions and breaking your head the official charts turn out to be a damp squib.

The next few years are going to be interesting. Let’s see whether the seafarers who come under the SOLAS regime will get their choice of charts on the bridge.