Hi everyone.
I’m curious what routine tasks during watch you find the most annoying or repetitive.
The kind of thing you have to calculate, look up, or double-check again and again.
What small tasks do you find yourself doing repeatedly on the bridge?
For some reason, I hated flipping the log to the next page and starting a new day.
Don’t ask me why — I just didn’t like it.
Also… getting new officers signing on and having to manually enter/write down their GMDSS info into the log (license number and issue date) and signing out the old officer(s)… usually because no one ever bothered to sign them in. Not as common, but I still hated doing it.
Everything else was so routine that it became a string of motions that really helped mark and kill time.
Trying to get crew to bring their Licenses ,MMCs ,Medical Certs etc to me when they board the vessel. Most of the time at least one or two people have forgotten one of them or something is expired .
Dimming everything at sunset; nearly everything is LED lit and they take forever to dim down or brighten (dim up?) in the morning.
The wing rudder indicators are good old rheostats so take about a nano second to operate.
Does supper relief qualify? Especially disliked having it when something good was on the menu, and getting below to find your monstrous shipmates had left you none. Some cooks were more thoughtful, and would set aside for the relief.
Eat on the Bridge like I did!
Hah! This phenomenon always reminded me of Richard Henry Dana’s negative view of sailing Second Mate… (even though meal reliefs are split between the Second and Third(s)…)
sending the NOAA weather message
The best thing about having a cadet on one’s watch was to have them do that. Afew days training and you’re all set.
Checking the temperature for the log… especially if it’s outside. Profesional temperature guesser…
I’ll also add one that used to get me at MLL — accepting the ER’s manned/unmanned status on the bridge.
I’d get up there and start setting up my logbook and making coffee when it would go off, like clockwork, at a specific time. I’d walk all the way around the desks and up to the console to “accept” their change of status, then walk back to the log desk to continue setting up for the watch.
Eventually, I tried to wait for them to do that before setting things up… but when I did that, the request would come five to ten minutes later than usual. I gave up and went back to starting my log and setting things up as soon as I got up there… and the requests resumed happening at that exact time as well.
It was a cruel magic trick.
Engineers have that down to a science. I was accused many times of those kind of things 
In the old days mine was endless and time consuming chart corrections and NTM’s.
Necessary but tedious as hell.
the beauty of that is to when they call up asking why you declined (S1 button)…tell them ‘no, you can’t go unattended; you still have WTDs open that are in your space.’ so much fun.
Years ago I was 2/O in a couple of tramps that kept ALL pubs, world-wide, updated, along with the current voyage charts. Mind-numbing.
Had American charts alongside the Admiralty ones.
No tracings and every position had to be plotted in degrees, minutes and seconds; tedious.
I was only in one ship that received tracings. A domestic run with few corrections.
Took over from an East German 2/O who was unfamilar with the concept of tracings.
He had glued them to the charts, some of which were about 1/2 an inch thick.
That must have been terrible for you but it could have been worse. They could have cut the power to your coffee machine or interrupted the water supply for your toilet and shower. All unintentionally of course.
The cadet next door took care of that for all of us on that deck/line… he had a penchant for flushing non-flushable items (and then denying it was him.)
