We absolutely do have to vet everyone that comes aboard with a towing license.
30 days of “observation” time, a one day TOAR simulator course, and a USCG exam taken at a school where everyone passes, are NOT any sort of assurance of towing competency.
The scary thing is that HR assumes a license is an assurance of competence.
We have all seen enough guys that are just a warm body with a license.
If the USCG had serious requirements for towing licenses that suggest a reasonable probability of basic competence, I’d be in favor of keeping the towing licenses.
Agreed but most companies take this approach. Most times it’s trial by fire. No shadow or training program in place. Just a warm body filling a billet.
Canada has a couple of smaller tonnage towing licenses. As I recall its 150 GT and 350 GT.
Tugs under 15 tons (about 40 feet) built before a certain year, and new tugs under 10 tons, do not require any licenses. There are a lot of these small tugs in British Columbia.
Perversely, this above 10 or 15 ton license requirement made small tugs less safe because they were built with very low freeboard to keep them under tonnage.
The guys I’ve met on bigger tugs and even the smaller and older OSVs all have Unlimited licenses, but no towing endorsements are required.
In the UK, there may be a “home trade” small tonnage towing license, but generally the job openings for tug Masters require STCW II/2 500 or 3000, but no towing endorsement.
Isn’t that interesting?
I am no longer towing but me and one other crew on my current vessel hold MOT.
He took a sim course and spent 30 days on deck of a small tug that sat at the dock for a month for his observation time.
I spent half of my nearly 30 years in the industry on towing vessels with several of those years being split between conventional, oceangoing tractors, ATB’s, moving barges and docking/escorting tankers with an ASD in harbor.
We are not alike..but according to the CG..same same.
I think the TOAR is good in principle, but poor in practice. One day simulator courses make a mockery of it. There’s no way you can learn to handle a tow by using a simulator over the weekend.
Basic skills are still needed. When everyone’s GPS is getting knocked out on the coast, it’s your responsibility as mate to navigate and know where you are. Call the captain. The captain is gonna ask if you know where you are? And it would be a bad look if you don’t know. You’ll get fired. You better have a damn good idea of where you are and be able to show the captain how you know / what you did.
Most younger tugboat Mates today only know how to follow the green line on the chart plotter.
They don’t know how to look out the window and navigate by eye.
They might know how to navigate with the radar, but not how to transfer radar ranges or bearings to the chart plotter.
That’s why we still have uncorrected paper charts marked FOR REFERENCE ONLY in the draw. And need Mates that know how to plot a position on paper charts.
If we can split endorsements between Fishing, OSV, Special, Ect, I agree the TOAR should be split further than Western River/Inland/Ocean/Near Coastal. Having spent just enough time on wire boats to know I don’t want to work on wire boats, and going to giant ATBs that never come out of the notch, It’s wild to think they are even in the same category. If they made a TOAR - Assist/Wire/Push/ATB it would make a lot more sense, especially given it’s just a pain in the ass formality on the ATBs that pretend to be ships to get your TOAR.
Right now I think these 0 to hero classes are used by a lot of folks who aren’t actually doing tug stuff, but are technically on a tug.
Not to perpetually beat a dead horse across the forum, but if you are at the point where both of the properly configured ECDIS’ are completely dead, you likely aren’t going anywhere because the main generators, the EDG, and batteries would have failed, and you probably would not have propulsion or steering at that point. so really what is a plotting sheet going to help you with anyway, try and make paper airplanes to throw at the vessels responding to your distress message? message in a bottle maybe?
But if it it’s just a GPS failure, you’re still in the same boat you’d be in if you were paper primary and your GPS failed. The difference is, we’ve been teaching navigation roughly the same way since someone got so lost they confused the Caribbean with India, and there are a ton of old dogs who need to learn new tricks, especially in decision making and teaching positions. I think a lot people are just trying to survive till retirement, and I don’t blame them, but we really need to be churning out mates who can work an ECDIS as well as they could when we were on paper, and we need Captains who have the same or a higher level of competency.
I’ve had a glitch where we couldn’t download charts for a new area. Had to call support, took a while to sort out. Separately I’ve needed charts we didn’t have, once to drop off a medical.
Complex systems fail in unexpected ways. Maybe someone needs a plotting sheet to plot celestial, stranger things have happened.
This is the type of skill gap I’m talking about. I’ve had it too where Charts just “Disappeared” when in reality my relief either didn’t renew the license, forgot to load the license or someone before my time never ordered the ENCs to begin with. Worst case scenario, all the NOAA ENCs can be downloaded for Free in the US and it’s only like 700 megabytes.
With highspeed internet becoming a reality onboard, any oopsiedaisy or deviation is a 10 minute fix as long as you’re following OEM maintenance and backup procedures. The problem is we’re usually hoping the 2nd mate keeps good notes and the new guy has an idea of how to keep things running, rather than cross training everyone on what voyage planning looks like in the modern age. If I straight up didn’t order paper charts for Mobile, AL back in the day, I think my time onboard would be short-lived because we all understand how the process works and It should have been caught when the master is revieing the voyage plan. But if the Master doesn’t actually know what they’re looking at either, I can blame it on a “Technical glitch” when you can’t see the channel while we’re approaching the sea buoy, now we’re on the phone with Wartsilla when someone should have remembered that licenses are loaded separately from corrections. I don’t know for sure that’s what happened in your case, but that’s usually the case every time I see it.
It seems that the British and New Zealand companies that employed me all those years ago were well aware that we had been taught to construct a plotting sheet and they were never supplied even though they are listed in the chart catalog.
Yes, I think you’re correct about the licensing. We were still using paper charts when this happened, there was a label on the ECDIS “FOR TRAINING PURPOSES ONLY” and that’s where we were doing, training. I hadn’t even taken the class at that point.
Isn’t the single point failure here the sat link? Without that how would one receive a chart for a new area?
