By Michael Grey* A ship which can charitably be thought of in the autumn of her days. A cargo known to be problematical and with which there will be no second chances should things turn nasty. Two life rafts and two survivors out of a crew of 24 after the vessel horrifyingly took reportedly just […]
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By Michael Grey* Without delving too deep into any debates about gender, some of us are better than others at “multi-tasking”. But the arrival of hand-held, portable communication devices has led to us all, at some time, communicating, when our attention should have been upon something more urgent. It is why many governments now ban
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By Michael Grey* There is an open season on merchant mariners at present, and not in a nice way, with the warring parties around the Strait of Hormuz accompanying their confusing messages with a willingness to fire into innocent merchant ships in international waters. At least twenty seafarers have been killed in these incidents, which
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By Michael Grey* On the occasion of last month’s “Day of the Seafarer”, I wonder how many of them felt properly appreciated. As members of a largely invisible workforce, in most of their home countries, it would be forgivable if this annual event was greeted with no more than a shrug. Even those trapped behind
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When things break on board ships, the natural inclination of seafarers is to “work around” the problem, seek alternatives and use their training and initiative to restore the situation. It is, one might think, in the seafaring genes and one only has to consult the maritime history books to find umpteen examples of heroic voyages
On our Forum: Don’t try to fix mechanical failures yourself… Read More »
By Michael Grey* As this is being written, and if nothing more untoward occurs, the little expedition ship Hondius is due to arrive at Rotterdam after her grim encounter with the deadly Hantavirus on her latest cruise in Southern waters. The crew, who have been operating this ship in what appears to have been heroic
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By Michael Grey* “Hormuz commanded the traffic along the shores of the Indian Ocean, linking what are now Oman and Pakistan, as well as the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz up to Basra in Iraq.” It was “a dust blown port with no natural resources, but with as many as 40,000 inhabitants.” Seeking some
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By Michael Grey* It was in the 1950s, during an earlier Middle East crisis, that the wife of a British Prime Minister complained that the Suez Canal was flowing through her sitting room. Today, of course, we have a different watercourse dominating the news and it is difficult to consider anything else. Nevertheless, we must
By Michael Grey* You would like to hope that all sorts of useful lessons are being learned from the current conflict in the Middle East, and not just about the consequences of offending irrational world leaders, with a short fuse and no sense of history. In staff colleges and war studies institutions, where cerebral military
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By Michael Grey* There can be few who were even remotely surprised at the guilty verdict and six-year jail sentence for the master of the container feeder Solong, which plunged like a misguided missile into the side of the anchored Stena Immaculate off the Humber last March. There seemed to have been no rational explanation