By Michael Grey* You would be, to say the least, extremely angry, if your car came to a grinding halt and the nice person from the emergency services looked up from the engine compartment and told you the engine had been wrecked because of the fuel you had been supplied by the filling station. […]
On our Forum: Questions aplenty about ship fuel problems and ‘green’ solutions Read More »
By Michael Grey* Will what we used to think of as “normal” ever return? Black swans used to be rare, but now they are coming by the squadrons, like migrating geese, as one daft occurrence succeeds the last in bewildering succession. There is a world shortage of lorry drivers, as they all opt to drive
On our Forum: Stranger than fiction in a world ‘not far short of chaos’ Read More »
By Michael Grey* One of my happiest assignments was during the 1970s when I found myself the part-time “Maritime Editor” of the new children’s weekly “Speed and Power”. It was a wonderful role, with a readership that could be relied on to respond vigorously to just about everything the journalists said in their pages. And
(On our Forum)Fantasy Island and the realities of decarbonisation… Read More »
By Michael Grey* The results of an inquest in the UK on the deaths caused by a tram coming off the rails gave one pause for thought. The driver, it had concluded, had suffered a “microsleep” at the very moment he should have been applying the brakes and the tram had rushed on with
The many challenges to one-man bridge operations (Forum) Read More »
By Michael Grey* These are tough times for the professional salvor, with concern being expressed about weak revenues and worries about capacity. To the casual inquirer about salvage matters, it might seem that marine casualties have been both frequent and spectacular of late, what with containership fires, blazing tankers and car carriers that won’t stay
Marine salvage expertise must not decline… (Forum) Read More »
I have always been terribly enthused by Oliver St.John Gogarty’s poem The Ship and its first stanza – “A ship from Valparaiso came/ And in the Bay her sails were furled,/ She brought the wonder of her name/ And tidings from a sunnier world.” It came back to me last week reading about all
Of congestion, ships and crews Read More »
By Michael Grey* There will be few seafarers today who sail off to the Gulf of Guinea with a light heart and cheerful demeanour, any more than they did a couple of hundred years ago, when disease was endemic along its shores. It is a different sort of blight today, with the depredations of
Shipping’s nightmare with the Gulf of Guinea pirates (Forum) Read More »
Widely regarded as the senior statesman of world shipping journalism, Michael Grey* offers in our FORUM section, another impassioned commentary and an urgent suggestion for the intervention of BIMCO on seafarers so inhumanly treated during the mounting COVID crisis. Do seafarers have souls? Are they sentient human beings, with natural rights, or, as the last
The ongoing seafarer crisis: do charterers have hearts? (FORUM) Read More »