IN THIS ISSUE
1. Douglas Lindsay Replies Re the Stellar Daisy
2. Port Essay Award Winners
3. The American P&I Club–Past Present and Future
4. Confidentiality in Arbitration–Boon or Bane?
5. Seminar–Cruise Ships & Passenger Liners – Operational Challenges
6. People and Places
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1. Douglas Lindsay Replies Re the Stellar Daisy
Andrew Craig-Bennett’s piece on the loss of the Stellar Daisy in Issue 689 had a familiar ring to it. Suddenly sunk in calm conditions? It reminded me of the loss of the coaster Rema some years ago. She had loaded stones in Berwick-upon-Tweed for Thames discharge. The normal practice in that trade was to load on the rising tide and sail immediately around high water, the berth being partially drying at low water.
Unusually, the Rema lay over on the berth for a tide then sailed in early evening. It was a calm clear night with virtually no sea state. She was somewhere off Whitby with just the watch officer awake when she suddenly put her bow under, stood on her nose and went down in no more than a minute, bow first and still at her full sea speed of around nine knots. Inevitably, the whole crew were lost.
I was asked to look into this loss and it became clear that the ship had sprung a leak from sitting on the drying berth at Berwick. Loading is by a fixed arm and the ship moves up and down under it to distribute the cargo along the length of the hold. Over time, a little hard hump had built up directly under the loading arm. Normally this would not matter as loaded ships sail right away. But the loaded Rema did not, and it seems fairly certain that she had strained herself drying out on the lump sufficiently badly to have opened up a leak into her hold. It goes without saying that the lump was dealt with directly after the ship was lost.
Now, it is an irony that if you are going to spring a leak sufficient to sink the ship, the worst conditions for this are calm weather. Silently the ship fills up and settles deeper in the water until the reserve buoyancy point is lost and she goes down, well, like a stone. In a gale one would notice that the ship was no longer rising to the seas. In a calm all seems well until the last moment unless the watch officer happens to notice that the freeboard is decreasing. This is what happened to the Rema, in the dark and I suspect is what happened to the Stellar Daisy.
My memory of the ore carriers of my younger days, built for the job, is that they had holds built almost like hoppers to keep the cargo’s centre of gravity at a reasonable height so that the ship’s behaviour in a seaway was reasonably normal. This left a lot of space round them for ballast or void spaces. Fill those up in a loaded ship and it wouldn’t take long for the ship to lose all reserve buoyancy, and once that happens Doctor Lardner’s prophecy suddenly becomes real.
For the Stellar Daisy to develop a list and flop over suggests that she had got virtually to the point of no buoyancy when something tipped her a little to one side. Free surface would do the rest, with the mass of water rushing downhill and giving the loss of GM a little added dynamic push. Why the Stellar Daisy sprang a leak is not known, but it is a well-known part of the trade that loading operators can be fairly unsympathetic about finicky loading plans designed to reduce strains on a ship’s hull. ‘Get the ship loaded and off the berth as quickly as possible’ is their mantra. An elderly hull could be very susceptible to cracking from some unfair strains being put on it. Or it might just have been corrosion. A smallish leak would take some time to fill the void spaces of a hull as large as the Stellar Daisy’s, but it would do so with an inexorable certainty to the vanishing buoyancy point.
There is no substitute for the officer of the watch being alert to everything that is happening to and with the ship he has charge of.
2. Port Essay Award Winners
Hiro Nagai, the Under Secretary of the The International Association of Ports & Harbors (IAPH) writes from Tokyo:-
At the Annual General Meeting held on the last day of the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH) World Ports Conference in Bali, Indonesia, 7-12 May 2017, IAPH recognized and honored two individuals for writing a
distinctive essay on their home port operations and eight ports for presenting their innovative and exemplary port projects.
Originally started almost four decades ago with an IAPH Essay Contest where personnel of IAPH developing member ports competed to write an essay on the subject of port efficiency and productivity, the IAPH’s biennial awards program has gradually been expanded and now includes five award categories to compete for excellence achieved in port communications, environment and IT. This traditional and prestigious award program has long been appreciated by the IAPH members as a means to enhance human resource development and, more importantly, share best practices. The recipients of the 2017 awards were as follows:
1. Akiyama Award – an essay contest named after the late Toru Akiyama (IAPH Secretary General)
Mr. Pramithodha Chiranthaka Halpe, Junior Manager (Terminal Systems), Sri Lanka Ports Authority, Sri Lanka
Entry: “Sri Lanka Ports Authority: Moving towards an exemplary green environmental footprint of the South Asian region”
2. Bali Open Award – an essay contest commemorating the Bali Conference
Mr. Giyeul Jang, Manager, Port Engineering, Incheon Port Authority, Korea
Entry: “STEP-CAR, Easier and Faster walking down from the Cruise ship”
3. Port Communications Awards
<Gold plaque>
Port of Rotterdam Authority, Netherlands
Entry: “Havenkrant” – the Port’s Newspaper that has been delivered to the residents
in the Port of Rotterdam area four times a year since 2009
<Silver plaque>
Adani Petronet Dahej Port Pvt. Ltd, India
Entry: “Effective Stakeholder (Community) Engagement – What are the greatest
communication challenges your organization has faced when trying to garner
support from community stakeholders?”
4. Information Technology Awards
<Gold plaque>
MGI and Port of Marseilles, France
Entry: “Marseilles-Fos : The SMART Port 2.0” – “Port Spirit” attitude for more
collaboration and communication to improve the port’s competitiveness and
productivity
<Silver plaque>
National Ports Agency, Morocco
Entry: “Safety and Security Management System (SM 25)”
<Bronze plaque>
Israel Ports Company, Israel
Entry: “Digitalization of containerized dangerous goods declaration process”
5. Port Environment Awards
<Gold plaque>
Port of Los Angeles, USA
Entry: “San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan”
<Silver plaque>
bremenports GmbH & Co. KG, Germany
Entry: “LUNEPLATE – A unique natural paradise and valuable green port infrastructure”
<Bronze plaque>
Hamburg Port Authority, Germany
Entry: “Virtual Depot”
To see the winning entries for the above go to:-:
http://www.iaphworldports.org/2017AwardsWinners
3. The American P&I Club–Past Present and Future
:New York Maritime Inc. (NYMAR) recently hosted the annual meeting of its members in New York. NYMAR represents the many maritime service related businesses in New York, and seeks to promote the city as a leading global maritime cluster.
The keynote speech at the meeting was delivered by Joe Hughes, chairman and CEO of the managers of the American Club and a director of NYMAR. Entitled Celebrating the American Club’s Centennial: Reflecting on the past to gain perspectives for the future, his speech reviewed the first 100 years of American Club history and the changes in the P & I world which had taken place over the last 40 years; made predictions as to what the future might hold, both for P & I insurers in general and for the American Club itself; and assessed what the Club and its managers had learned from their experience of recent years, including what perspectives that experience had provided for the future:-
“The International Group will maintain its basic shape; the cooperative deployment of Group resources will strengthen; there will be a growing emphasis on financial and risk modeling; Group market share will be maintained; regionalization of service delivery will expand; there will be continuing product diversification by the clubs; and specialist, fixed-premium insurers will continue to have a respectable role in the market.”
To read his speech in full go to:-
https://www.scribd.com/document/350160356/Joe-Hughes-Speech-24MAY17
4. Confidentiality in Arbitration–Boon or Bane?
Singapore Claims Correspondent M.Jagannath turns to a subject which has featured in this zine throughout its history. He writes:-
One of the advantages of Arbitration is that it is confidential in nature and that parties can arbitrate their disputes without this being available in the public eye (which is not available under the court system). Is this really a benefit? The article below considers issues arising out of this “implied confidentiality” and argues that it is best for parties to expressly decide as to whether they wish this confidentiality to be retained.
http://nau.com.sg/articles_detail.php?id=132
5. Seminar–Cruise Ships & Passenger Liners – Operational Challenges
Andrew Bell, who is the Marine Manager at Stephenson Harwood has sent in these details for an event on Monday 5th June
Short Evening Seminar
Presented by The Nautical Institute, London Branch
Cruise Ships & Passenger Liners – Operational Challenges
A panel of industry speakers, including a Staff Captain, a former Manager and an insurer, look at the challenges facing the cruise ship and passenger liner sector today.
1730 for 1815 at HQS Wellington, Victoria Embankment, WC2R 2PN. (Temple Tube)
Bar open before and after.
contact Andrew Bell on:- 07769 142466
6. People and Places
Helen Tung will speaking at this Symposium on Autonomous Shipping in Amsterdam next week:-
http://www.autonomousshipsymposium.com/
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Hans Günther Kersten, formerly UIC Freight Director, has been selected as Deputy Director General of FIATA, the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations and has started his mission on June 1st, 2017. Mr Kersten has been designated to succeed FIATA’s Director General and CEO Marco Leonardo Sorgetti this September, when he retires.
Hans Günther Kersten has studied Business Administration, Economics and Law at the University of Cologne, Germany. Besides German he speaks fluent English and French and has a good understanding of Spanish and Dutch. After obtaining his licence as a lawyer, Mr Kersten started his career as an associate at Oppenhoff & Rädler (later merged with Linklaters).
For the last 18 years Hans Günther worked for Deutsche Bahn in various senior management positions, four and a half years of which seconded to the international railway association UIC in Paris, where he held the position of director of the
freight department.
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Alfonso Castillero has been appointed Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of the Liberian International Ship &Corporate Registry (LISCR), the US-based manager of the Liberian Registry. Castillero was the Director-General of the Panama Registry for 16 years before joining the Liberian Registry as Vice-President in 2014.
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John McMurtrie, who has just reached the age of 80, is stepping down as Secretary of ISCO and handing over to Matthew Somerville. He will continue to edit the always interesting ISCO newsletter for “a while yet”.
http://www.spillcontrol.org/2013-02-05-11-11-41/2013-02-05-11-26-54
From the Avo Archive
The website of this newsletter contains all the editorial material since the inception of the Maritime Advocate as a print based quarterly in 1997 under the founding aegis of John Guy, Chris Hewer and Manfred Arnold. Readers can go to the site and search the database on the home page in its entirety. If you are looking for an old case, an old controversy or you would just like to see how many times you and your firm have featured in our annals feel free to access the archive. It is like this e-zine, free to Readers and we always appreciate the support of advertisers and sponsors.
Spading through the many references to the confidentiality of arbitration awards, we turned up this characteristic corker from Issue 30 of 12th November 2001. Things are much better now (hear hear):
Vicious but fair
THIS week we invited a leading member of the LMAA to write a commentary on the recent ICMA meeting in New York. He said he was too busy but, even if he wasn’t, he would have had the greatest difficulty in agreeing because, “Frankly, I have had enough of the silly … vicious and often totally unjustified sniping at London arbitration … that goes on in the printed and now the online version of the maritime advocate.”
Not the sort of grown-up response you might expect from an experienced commercial arbitrator, perhaps, but not in the least surprising in this case.
Two things. First, if you want a dispute settled, always choose a busy arbitrator.
Second, if it is silly and vicious to point out that the LMAA bangs on about confidentiality and then publishes belated summaries of selected arbitration awards on its official website with the permission of a commercial publisher who may already have published the awards three months earlier; if it is silly and vicious to point out that the LMAA website is out-of-date and incorrect; if it is silly and vicious to point out that the LMAA is always pleading poverty in a most unedifying and unnecessary way; and if it silly and vicious to point out that the LMAA doesn’t do enough to publicise its own important news, then we are happy to be silly and vicious.
One former LMAA president, on being invited to subscribe to the “Maritime Advocate” when it was launched four years ago, famously replied, “Thank you, but it’s a little light for me.” Sadly, he was right. Some of our best friends are London maritime arbitrators. But, for an object lesson in how to take yourself too seriously, there is no better example than certain London maritime arbitrators behaving badly and, sadly, in character.
Dark Humour
These famous grim last words come to us courtesy of the Joke-of-the-Day zine published by Paul Dixon. Your editor in some distant past went from a supporter to a skeptic on the subject of capital punishment as his belief in the competence and fairness of criminal justice administration waned. Lex talionis may arise in and of itself in the mind but it is best for us to resist:-
Last Words of Men About to Be Executed
As George Appel was being strapped into the electric chair, he said to the witnesses, “Well, folks, you’ll soon see a baked Appel.”
Before Thomas Grasso was given his lethal injection, he complained, “I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.”
Sir Walter Raleigh said, “So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth.” And then he was beheaded.
On his way to the chair, James French said to a newspaper reporter,” I have a terrific headline for you in the morning: ‘French Fries.'”
Francis Crowley remarked “You sons of bitches. Give my love to Mother.” Then he was electrocuted.
Just before being hanged, Neville Heath’s last request was for a whiskey. “In the circumstances,” he added, “you might make that a double.”
Said Johnny Frank Garrett before being lethally injected: “I’d like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me. And the rest of the world can kiss my ass.”
Erskine Childers called out to the firing squad, “Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.”
Jimmy Glass said, “I’d rather be fishing.” Then he was electrocuted.
As British serial killer Dr. William Palmer stood on the gallows, he asked the officials, “Are you sure this thing is safe?”
Office Architecture
A career spent in and around the City of London impressed upon your editor that everyone working in marine insurance in other parts of the world had more agreeable office conditions. It is thinkable that ugly office surroundings are part of the successful formula of the square mile. Dilbert is right on the money here:-