Amen. It is healthy to stay in contact with family. The luxury of knowing your wife & kids are just a 11 digits away makes life more bearable at sea. I have something written up as such in my engine room standing orders. I tell the crew to use their phones to contact their families as appropriate while on watch. If something comes up & family business becomes more important than ships business then call the chief or someone else to take care of the ships business while the crewmember steps away. We’re all family men/women & we’ve all been there, handling a crisis at home while on watch happens to everyone eventually. For most cases, it’s best just to let everyone know, step away & take care of it. The only thing worse than a crewmember on their phone on watch is a crewmember lying & hiding it while on watch. This isn’t for FB, checking the news, stocks, gCaptain Forum, Instagram etc. of course. Do the frivolous internet stuff off watch.
very simple thing - once you start to prohibit it will spread a lot! nobody playing games on watch, that’s true
Lots of mention lately of twelve hour bridge watches.
How is that length of watch ever possibly safe?
There’s a big mismatch between how attention works and how people intuitively believe it works. Don’t know the nature of your work but it seems unlikely your crew is an exception.
If ship pilots lack a good understanding of attention how likely is it that a typical vessel crew can avoid making similar misjudgments?
As an engineer on the bridge coming into port I often noticed pilots using their cell phones. I thought about how grateful I was the pilots on the airplane I flew on didn’t do the same while landing. Of course others will say not the same thing and it’s not until something happens.
When I observe Pilots on the bridge on their cell phone, it’s often useful work related fiddling. VHF radio works great, but calling or texting the pilot around the corner who can’t hear you on the radio works better. Same goes for confirming tugs, line handlers, calling the agent, or whoever they need to to keep things running smoothly. Obviously I’d be uneasy too seeing the pilot playing candy crush while approaching the dock, but everyone can probably maintain better situational awareness shooting off a text to another pilot vs everyone being distracted by the radio for low priority communications.
Similarly, I’d imagine some would be getting real time info from either some sort of AIS service, or maybe even a custom PORTS dashboard.
Same here… though texting is nice when it’s not something that requires a long conversation.
I really miss the old Nextel phones we had when I started with Chouest. Never had a problem with signal and you could actually hear and feel them when they rang/buzzed. The one we have on board now is the cheapest “burner” type phone that I wouldn’t give my six year old. I know they make better (read as: louder) ones that are “rugged” and actually can get signal when they’re not right next to a porthole/bridge window.
At about the same time the third officer, who was on the main vehicle deck in the vicinity of the CCR, started a personal call on his mobile telephone.
During his phone call, he walked along the starboard side of the main vehicle deck and at 1925, on to the starboard side of the stern ramp.
At 1926, a tractor on the lower vehicle deck started to push a semi-trailer up the vehicle deck ramp towards the main deck and the stern ramp.
Meanwhile, the third officer loitered on the ramp’s starboard side, gradually moving down the ramp towards the quay while talking on his mobile telephone.
At 1926:38, the rear end of the semi-trailer that had been pushed from the lower deck reached the top of the stern ramp, while another tractor driver in his cab, who was on the quay and approaching the stern ramp, saw the third officer facing down the ramp and the semi-trailer moving towards him, so sounded his horn to warn him.
Three seconds later, the rear of the semi-trailer struck the third officer.
Although the third officer was trapped between the trailer’s rear wheels and was declared life extinct by attending paramedics.
I remember as a third mate on a small Ro-Ro seeing a forklift truck slide sideways with a 20ft container on a wet steel deck. They had barely invented Wilkie talkies then, mobile phones were the Maxwell Smart model. You had to be on your toes when it rained.
Right around the time that cell phones became common the best Captain I ever sailed with said: “… I should have quit this industry when they put the put the first satellite phone on the ship”.
Amen to that. I remember getting frequent phone calls to leave a berth in a gale and refusing, finally telling the originator that I will monitor the fax machine. Peace returned.