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Here are a list of 10 things that you should remember if you are shipwrecked. The list comes from Yan Martel’s prize-winning novelLife of Pi, via listverse.com

1. Always read instructions carefully

2. Do not drink urine. Or sea water. Or bird blood

3. Do not eat jellyfish. Or fish that have spikes. Or fish that have parrot like beaks. OR that puff up like balloons.

4. Pressing the eyes of fish will paralysis them.

5. The body can be heroic in battle. If a castaway is injured, beware of well-meaning but ill-founded medical treatment. Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses.

6. Put your feet up at least 5 minutes every hour

7. Unnecessary exertion should be avoided. But an idle mind tends to sing. So the mind should be kept occupied with whatever light distraction may suggest itself. Playing card games, twenty questions, and I spy are excellent distractions.

8. Green water is shallower than blue water

9. Beware of far-off clouds that look like mountains. Look for green. Ultimately, a foot is the only good judge of land.

10. Do not go swimming. It wastes energy. Besides, a survival craft may drift faster than you can swim. Not to mention the danger of sea life. If you are hot, wet your clothes instead.

You have a PASS Device for your shipboard fire team..right?? Why not break it out of the gear locker during confined space entries?

For those who have never seen one, a PASS device (sometimes called a Man Down Alarm) contains a motion sensor and high pitched alarm. The firefighter clips it on his bunker gear and if he passes out the motion detector senses his lack of movement and sets off the alarm. It also has a panic button that can be pushed to inform the scene leader the team is in trouble or to help the back-up team locate a lost firefighter.

We all know how unreliable UHF radios are during tank inspections. While the old trick of banging a wrench 1 time to signal OK, 2 times to signal GET OUT and 5+ times to signal SEND HELP works inside the tank it won’t an unconsciousness victim. At a cost of around $225 these devices are an inexpensive way to protect your life.

Still doing tank entries without a personal O2 meter? Sniffing the tank at the point of entry is no longer enough, instead bring along a Personal Gas Detector

*Note read more about this tip in the Confined Space Entry Handbook

Here is a video describing the P.A.S.S. device including it’s shortcomings:

I don’t have many pictures of my father but I recently ran across one posted on the website of his fire company “Rescue 3“. Following Vietnam and the Physician Assistant program at Cornell he joined the Fire Department of New York and was soon accepted into the department’s elite company Rescue 3.

These were the “War Years” and the Bronx was burning. He didn’t talk much about the fires so when he did I hung on every word. One day he was discussing the severity of the situation in the Bronx with an out of state firefighter and said “How many massive, fully engulfed fires with multiple casualties have you seen in your career? There were weeks I saw 5 or 6 per night!”.

What does this have to do with Marine Firefighting? [Continue Reading →]

Catching a flight to your ship soon? Here are the best websites to help you get there on time:

• FAA’ s Real Time Flight Delay Status Map: LINK
• Seat GURU, pick the best seat for your flight: LINK
• Track your flight with FlightAware: LINK
• Or track flights with Google Earth: LINK
• Get Flight Status SMS on your cell phone: LINK
• Enter your plane’s Tail number into google for a maintenance / safety history report
• Find what you can carry on: LINK
• Arrive awake with the Jet Lag Calculator: LINK

Planning a trip of your own:

• Predict the best time to buy your ticket: LINK
• Search all the travel sites with kayak.com: LINK
• Find the vacation spot to fit your mood: LINK

Let’s face it, mariners need to be experts in sleep. From split watch schedules to operations requiring “All hands On Deck” sleep not only comes at a premium but is a critically important factor in accident prevention and remaining healthy. To highlight these issues we have brought you many articles on the subject including the popular “Night Shift A Cause Of Cancer” and “Get Some Sleep! Accident Photo Of The Week“. This week we will continue the series with tips on how to cheat sleep.

Editorial Note: Sleep loss and driving ships is a deadly combination. We don’t suggest you ever attempt to cheat sleep, we simply hope to broaden your knowledge in the subject.

The Basics Of Sleep

Quality not quantity. No matter how much your mother tells you that you need eight hours of sleep, if you’re not tired and you can’t truly relax, your sleep time will be worthless.
The key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy. Each sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, which exhibit different brain- wave patterns. For our purposes, it suffices to say that one sleep cycle lasts an average of 90 minutes:

• 65 minutes of normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement), sleep
• 20 minutes of REM sleep (in which we dream)
• Final 5 minutes of non-REM sleep.

Source: CentACS

00-04 Watchkeepers: Maximize “Core Sleep”

“Core sleep” is a variant of Uberman sleep that adds a block of sleep, usually several hours, to the Uberman schedule, replacing one or two naps. (This term is also sometimes used to describe accidental oversleep by someone following Uberman, though one will more likely see the term “crash”, and occasionally “reboot”.) Another variant is called Everyman sleep schedule. Buckminster Fuller advocated Dymaxion Sleep, a regimen consisting of 30 minute naps every six hours. A short article was published about this schedule in the October 11, 1943 issue of Time Magazine. According to this article, he followed this schedule for two years, but after that had to quit because “his schedule conflicted with that of his business associates, who insisted on sleeping like other men.”

Source: Wired How-To

Keys to the Midday Nap

A successful midday nap depends on two things: timing and (no kidding) caffeine consumption. Experiments performed at Loughborough University in the UK showed that the sleep-deprived need only a cup of coffee and 15 minutes of shut-eye to feel amazingly refreshed.

1. Right before you crash, down a cup of java. The caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in.

2. Close your eyes and relax. Even if you only doze, you’ll get what’s known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness.

3. Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30 minutes to reboot.

Source: Wired [Continue Reading →]

It’s the classic scenario from the Academy… You are the stand on vessel with no room to maneuver and a zero CPA contact is bearing down on you. You try the radio but no answer… what do you do next?

This post doesn’t answer the question but gives you other options not available when you were at the academy.

Use your AIS & VHF DSC:

1. Head to the AIS and get the contact’s MMSI number & name
2. Enter the number into your VHF DSC controller
3. Select a working frequency.
   
4. Hit send then start hailing on the working channel

What happens next is the GMDSS alarm will go off and his VHF will change to a working frequency. If he was away from the bridge he’ll have to return to silence the alarm at which point he hears your hail.

What if the alarm doesn’t wake him or he has it disabled?

CALL HIS BOSS

1. Get his name from the AIS.
2. Look him up in your ITU pub.
3. Find his INMARSAT-B number and call him.

Why does this work? As it was explained to me “Most captains have an INMARSAT-B extension in their office, most captains spend most of their time in their office. Most of the time the captain will answer the phone and rectify the problem post-haste.” …smile

On a recent story I confused the Norwegian Dawn with the Norwegian Dream. The error itself is small but the implications are large and the reason for the error gives me the opportunity to shed light on the cause of so many maritime incidents. A short explanation might give you a look into the mind of a ship’s captain, so here it is;

Some articles are the result of hours spent researching, writing and editing while other posts are simply excerpts of stories found elsewhere on the web. My Norwegian Dream post was part of a general interest series we run called “Incident Photo of the Week“. These posts are designed to be short, interesting and easy to write and only require one line of explanation but, sufficient to say, I did not put much time into the “easy” job of posting the article.

Aboard ship 90% of the navigational jobs are easy. Some jobs, like departing Valdez Alaska, seem difficult to an outsider but are simple tasks for an experienced mate. This is the very reason Capt. Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez left the 3rd mate in charge of the watch. These simple tasks, however, can result in tragedy caused by an even simpler mistake.

Moving large ships is not the only profession requiring complicated mathematical calculations, little room for error and disastrous consequences but marine navigation differs from professions like structural engineering because we have no brakes. The time is ticking on a large ship and errors are often not seen until after the danger has passed. During the incident you can not stop the job and spend hours reassessing the hazards, Newton’s law of motion doesn’t allow it. This is why my error in reporting the story is significant and had it been made aboard ship would be cause for alarm.

So how does a captain prevent the simplest mistakes from becoming catastrophic incidents?

The first is training. While a brilliant structural engineer could be given the top spot at a young age this is not the case with ship captains. At the minimum regulations require 10 years of sea time in addition to hundreds of hours of course work and multiple levels of testing prior to being allowed by the Coast Guard to sit for the Master Unlimited exam. This method of advancement prevents a shining star from rising quickly but not for his lack of knowledge, rather from his lack of experience. This is required to give an officer the time not only to learn the theory and application of job specific tasks or even to give the time required to actually witness the full gamut of possible situations, although both are important. The primary reason is to a mate the time needed to feel the ship and understand/compensate for his limitations. The ability to master this is the mark of good captain and one reason companies prefer promoting older chief mates and rarely hire someone based solely on his qualifications (note: this is changing).

The best captains can identify instability by the feeling the roll of a ship, correlate the simplest annoyance with a larger problem (e.g. a sticky door caused by hogging) or recognize the tone of an officers voice that masks concern. They not only can identify but also have developed processes for solving problems. Last they know their own shortcomings and have built a system to identify and manage them.

In my case I have the occasional tenancy to correlate similar information so in this case my mind failed to separate the Norwegian Dream from the Norwegian Dawn. Aboard ship I would combat the problem by writing down each name on opposing sides of a yellow note pad and keeping relevant notes separated by space.

Second I am careful to listen for the voice in the back of my head that whispers “Something Is Wrong”. I have found this voice to be present 90% of the time prior to identifying a problem. It is important to note that incidents are not caused by single failures they are always the result of what our industry refers to as an error chain. The clearest example of this chain would be a catastrophic cylinder failure in the main engine. To most this type of failure would be classified as bad luck but mariners are trained to realize this is not the case. I use the following example because I recently read an incident report on a cylinder failure that was ten pages long and took 6 months to complete. The findings were nothing spectacular, rather they described many small problems dating back decades. The findings included an overworked engineering officer in charge of lubrication (days before the incident), the supplier substituting lubricants not ideal for that particular lube oil pump (the previous year) and even the designers failure to relate this seemingly small problem to the manufacturer 15 years prior to the failure. In this case all seemed well but I would bet heavily on the presence of a voice in back of the Chief Engineer’s mind calling out “I can’t identify it but we have a problem” his daily routine simply drowned it out. If he had identified just one of the links (minor causes identified in the report) in the error chain and removed it the incident would not have occurred.

Last I always step back and take a “time out”. This simple and effective technique taught in Major Emergency Management, an optional class in managing nightmare situations, closely resembles something we learn at a young age; step back, take a deep breath and ask yourself “what doesn’t make sense here?”

So putting it all together I could have avoided the mistake by first writing the key points down on a note pad and separating similarities (the ship names). Then I could have actively listened for the voice whispering (or in this case shouting) “something is wrong” and finally, if I had failed to identify the difference in the first step, I should have called a personal time out, stepped back and asked myself “does this make sense.” If I had done this I would have quickly realized the obvious fact that containers do not belong on a cruise ship.

Why didn’t I? …well this is just a blog, right?

Many thanks to our loyal readers for finding the error, especially Perry. Despite my initial annoyance from his repeated corrections a good captain must always smile when a concern is related (even when woken at 0400) and hopes all of his makes are just as diligent and persistent. It’s the “easy” posts, after all, that often results in longest incident reports.

Stay Safe,

John

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John Konrad is a USCG licensed Master Mariner of Unlimited Tonnage and the editor in chief of gCaptain.com. Since graduating from SUNY Maritime College he has sailed 4 of the world’s oceans and reports from his ship via satellite.

Interested in writing for gCaptain? Contact us today.

Last week I signed up for the new web service MINT and I’m impressed. The new takes your financial information and breaks it down by cost. Why is this great for mariners? Quite simply we either have slow internet access or little time in port to monitor our bills. Mint solves this problem by aggregating your data and displaying it with awsome web 2.0 graphics. It also allows you to set up email and SMS alerts for all your financial accounts… in one place. A great feature for those whose ship’s internet access is limited to email.

Lifehacker tells us Mint’s real strenght

is in it’s Presentation, Integration Features {and} Automatic, no-hassle importing of your financial transactions from over 3,500 banking and credit card institutions is what Mint does best. Mint’s real strength

Drawbacks;

As soon as any web-based financial software like Mint is mentioned, the security watchdogs among us pounce on the comments to let the rest of us know that we should never, ever trust anyone with our financial data, especially our aggregated financial data.

Find Lifehacker’s full review HERE or visit Mint directly by clicking HERE.

One of the worst things that can happen on board any vessel at sea is a main space Bravo fire. If you’re in charge of your Damage Control organization, you may have asked yourself if your organization have what it takes to combat such a casualty. Do they realize what coordinated efforts have to happen in order to give this story a happy ending, or is it simple irony that we end each scenario with an Abandon Ship exercise?

As a damage control leader, you should be constantly on the lookout for better ways to train your fire parties. This training should be as realistic as possible (in other words, just short of setting an actual fire). Your organization should be in constant critique and review, asking yourself a simple question: “Is it good enough, or can I make it better?” The best way to do this is called “Assets and Deficits.” Using this process, we’ll take a step-by-step look at a main space Bravo fire.

You have a fuel leak in the engine room. The leak increases, causing an atomized spray pattern onto an extremely hot engine manifold. The fuel smokes and becomes a combustible mixture in the atmosphere. The leak increases more. Excess fuel has pooled onto the deck and is running down into the bilge. Finally, the fire triangle has balanced enough to start sustained combustion. You now have a fire with an extremely large source feeding it.

Think how you would fight this fire aboard your ship. Think about your assets and deficits, then tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of this story: “Discovery.”

This series was written by Timothy Ciciora, Command Master Chief USN, Retired, Atlantic Beach, Florida, author of short stories, including “The Homecoming,” the opening selection in the Marlo Thomas best selling collection, The Right Words at the Right Time - Volume 2.