During the past decade, the number of American lives lost each year in boating accidents has declined significantly. The Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Program promotes safety through its regulatory and inspections roles, inspecting merchant vessels, and licensing their masters and crews. The Coast Guard Auxiliary provides free boating safety courses, courtesy marine examinations for recreational boaters, aids to navigation verification and inspections of commercial facilities.

The Merchant Marine licensing, investigation and accident reporting function can easily be returned to civilian employees. There is an abundance of licensed and documented mariners available to staff and properly conduct any anticipated workload, even clean up back logs. Let the uniforms handle the other stuff. The change will not alter any manning,qualifications and safety problems but can improve communications and the effectiveness of service.

HA… having worked Chief Mate as recently as a few months ago I can say with conviction it ain’t much better.

Now the position was on an exploratory drillship but during my 6 years time in position I witnessed the proportion of deck time to desk time completely invert. Part of the problem is that the ship had full time internet, email and reletively inexpensive phone lines which created a second inversion. When I started company HQ was often called “shoreside support… now the majority of calls are from shore asking the ship questions like “What is the HP of your thrusters?” (actuall question I recieved on my last hitch). In Feb every ship was asked to conver all JSA’s and checklists from excel to word format. This took me and the Jr. mates a week to finish… and cold have been easily completed by a High School Intern for $10 an hour or an Overseas outsourcing agency for $0.50 per hour. And don’t get me started on the ISPS reporting.

Now the Captain has it worse BUT he also has the power to deligate tasks to the officers. The Chief Mate has the power to deligate tasks to the unlicensed crew but as you can imagine SMS reporting is not the stron suit of *most* AB’s.

-John

During the past decade, the number of American lives lost each year in boating accidents has declined significantly. The Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Program promotes safety through its regulatory and inspections roles, inspecting merchant vessels, and licensing their masters and crews. The Coast Guard Auxiliary provides free boating safety courses, courtesy marine examinations for recreational boaters, aids to navigation verification and inspections of commercial facilities.

The Merchant Marine licensing, investigation and accident reporting function can easily be returned to civilian employees. There is an abundance of licensed and documented mariners available to staff and properly conduct any anticipated workload, even clean up back logs. Let the uniforms handle the other stuff. The change will not alter any manning,qualifications and safety problems but can improve communications and the effectiveness of service.

HA… having worked Chief Mate as recently as a few months ago I can say with conviction it ain’t much better.

Now the position was on an exploratory drillship but during my 6 years time in position I witnessed the proportion of deck time to desk time completely invert. Part of the problem is that the ship had full time internet, email and reletively inexpensive phone lines which created a second inversion. When I started company HQ was often called “shoreside support… now the majority of calls are from shore asking the ship questions like “What is the HP of your thrusters?” (actuall question I recieved on my last hitch). In Feb every ship was asked to conver all JSA’s and checklists from excel to word format. This took me and the Jr. mates a week to finish… and cold have been easily completed by a High School Intern for $10 an hour or an Overseas outsourcing agency for $0.50 per hour. And don’t get me started on the ISPS reporting.

Now the Captain has it worse BUT he also has the power to deligate tasks to the officers. The Chief Mate has the power to deligate tasks to the unlicensed crew but as you can imagine SMS reporting is not the stron suit of *most* AB’s.

-John