[QUOTE=follow40;163296]150 years ago a person was considered to have good seamanship if they were proficient at ship handling and had an excellent ability to work with rope and sail, in the modern day someone is considered to have good seamanship if they are proficient at ship handling and have an excellent ability to work with Microsoft office.[/QUOTE]
Yes, some truth there.
I’ve been thinking about a skill that we would think of as almost pure seamanship, say launching and recovering a boat at sea, particuly with any weather. Going back a bit in time, preparing the deck, or before that, planning, calling out the crew, breifing the E/R etc, no seamanship skills in using the phone, mostly organizing or management but still the task has a heavy element of seamanship.
Now on the other end of spectrum, a clerical job, say typing out a crew list, it’s on the management end of the scale. But that’s where the attitude or the big picture comes in. Even while sitting at the computer using Word or Excel you’re still aware of the general navigaion, weather and traffic situation. You can feel the motion and vibration of the ship. You can glance out the window. You can hear people carrying out the ship’s routine etc. You never get 100% fully engrossed in your crew list task. You alway multi-task, not a term I like but it fits, no matter what you do the other constant task is awareness of the ship.
The mix of seamanship and, say management are along a continuum, “a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct.” Recovering a boat is nothing like typing out a crew list but aboard ship you are never free from the requirement to use seamanship.