Small boats and a 90 foot tug. We once spent four hours simply shifting in and out of gear at his command to “get a feel for the throttles”
A very nice guy, but light on experience and not a boat or ship handler by any means.
While I was working on ATB’s we had a deck cadet come on for the summer from SUNY. He left his dirty clothes beside the washer & every day his pile got higher. On the 4th day he asked the captain who washed the clothes on the tug. We pushed the barge to Tampa, disconnected & moved to the other side of the slip while the barge was offloaded. The facility prohibited the crew from walking across the yard so they gave us a truck to use for watch changes & for bathroom breaks. The cadet was fidgettting back & forth on the barge & asked the AB Tankerman to give him a lift back to the boat. The guy had never drove a car or truck in his whole life. Needless to say the crew & cadet had a very long summer.
The lesson to be learned here, when you get a new guy, academy grad or hawespiper, assume he knows nothing & take it day to day until he has proven himself or until you discover where his limites lay.
If I remember right, my z-card as a cadet said something to the effect of “Able Seaman - while in a maritime cadet program” or something like that. Do Cadets these days not get that in their MMC’s?
And therein lies part of the problem. So many times I’ve heard crew say, “I’m only here for the money.” These are the guys that I keep an extra close eye on. They don’t really want to be there and from my experience only do the bare minimum to keep their jobs. I’d rather have the guy that comes on the bridge, looks out the windows at the sea and says, “cubicle/office work would kill my soul. This, is the life for me.”
A person’s lackadaisical attitude can rub off on others, especially on newbies who might look up to them because of their experience. Best to get rid of them ASAP before their negative influence spreads.
1 Like
I don’t know as I haven’t been directly involved with academies for awhile. Probably not, there is nothing in the CFR and U.S. Code to support that. It sounds like something from before the RECs were centralized (2008). Prior to the rule-making in 2013, there was a regulation that a member of “the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps” could only be endorsed for deck cadet, engine cadet, and lifeboatman. But as prior to centralization, some RECs did not always strictly follow the CFR.
An interesting conversation. The simple answer is, they should have learned all that in the Academy. I have to admit, I have a pet peeve against any answer which amounts to, “They should be taught it as 3/m, on the job”. What did they go to four years of school to do? When you go through four years of medical school you might not be a real doctor, but at least you should know enough to wash your hands before the operation begins. Adjusting course for leeway=washing your hands.
The basic skills of being a mariner–what KC is talking about-- are best done before they step foot on a ship, And on the water, and not in a simulator. I graduated from an academy 34 years ago and I still remember how little time we spent on vessels of any size. Three spring cruises, with how many paltry hours per student?. One internship. A few days ship handling on a T-boat. That’s it, for 4 years.
But I also remember endless “watch” in a laundry room ashore–that counted as USCG seatime, you betcha. Guarding the front gate to the academy–that was USCG seatime, too, as were two or three other shoreside, make-work duties requiring not a lick of seamanship to accomplish, and which taught us nothing but contempt for the process.
This academy is situated at the confluence of two major rivers, on one of a succession of large bays leading to the ocean. No place on the face of the Earth is more ideal for learning the basics of navigation, ship-handling, and navigation. A raft of boats of all kinds and sizes was tied to the dock–and were seldom used. Yet we stood valiant guard over those laundry rooms, and it must have been valuable, because not one ever sank or collided with another laundry room.
It strikes me nowadays we would have learned far more if they had stuck is in a rowboat and told us to row up and down river for four hours a day, damn the weather. We would have learned about the power of tides and wind, the utility of taking bearings, how to steer, and how to stay focused. We would have remembered the lessons because of callused palms, sore backs, and the mud in our drawers from all the close calls. Try simulating all that.
I’m sure this has all changed now, I’m sure every academy students spends eight hours a week out on the water trying to get from Point A to Point B using applied lessons of seamanship, while experiencing the joy that comes from knowing that at any given moment their miscalculation could result in their physical discomfort/demise, and worse yet, that of their crew.
The company I work at is small. Only 2000-ton licences are required. That being said, our boats travel through 700 miles of rock-bound inside passage without a pilot aboard, and then face up to the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea in winter. A tough school of seamanship. Most of our people come up from the hawsepipe. Some come from Maine Maritime (a fantastic place). That being said, we still take the time to make sure they are mariners, regardless of what their license says, before sailing them as watch officers. Why? Because we’ve learned the expensive lesson of not doing that over the years
It’s one thing to get a license, it’s another thing to be a mariner. A mariner has a basic mental skill set about the relative motion of vessels and landmasses. A mariner has experience steering vessels in all weather, and a visceral knowledge and respect for the power of tide, wind and waves. Visceral, not theoretical.
Nowadays the company has a 65’ long training boat, without all the bells and whistles. If an AB wants the company to pay for their mate’s license training, we put them on the training boat with a company captain for a week, up and down the labyrinth of the B.C. Inside Passage. The trainee does all the voyage planning, manages a helmsman, and navigates without recourse to any electronics. No GPS, no radar. If they can’t navigate safely that way, getting from port to port using their brains, they don’t pass the test. Not an hour on a simulator, but 8 hours a day, for seven days. No excuses. No bullshit.
For the cherry on the cake, we do something no one else does. because we want mariners for deck officers, not license holders. We stick them in a eighteen-foot long open boat, without an engine. Only oars and sail. Then we tell them to travel 130 miles through a maze of islands and rapids, and be at such-and-such place in seven days. No GPS. No plotter. We give them a compass, charts, and some camping gear, in case they stumble on a place were they can land and sleep. Oh-- and an experienced trainer, so they don’t kill themselves.
The trainees do the voyage-planing and the navigating–and the rowing. If they screw-up, they pay for it with pain–rowing hour-and-hours to make-up for their screwed up tidal calculation, or for taking a wrong bearing, or for not knowing how to read a chart, or not allowing for leeway, so that a 6-knot current sucks them down the wrong channel.
Usually a crew of two or three trainees, many of them MMA students, as prep for their summer co-op. If the trainees can’t do make the journey in a week, they aren’t navigators–or they don’t want it enough. Either way, why would you want them in command of a 260’ long, or 1000’ long ship?
But shouldn’t an academy be doing all that? I guess not. It’s not like ships are running aground left and right, because truly, those are rare occurrences. There’s not a major collision every day, let’s face it. So if we want a minimum level of proficiency from tax-payer funded beginning mariners, I guess that’s OK by us.
I mean, no one is complaining about the constant stream of officers academies are churning our every year, are they? If you increase the demands of the training you would end up with fewer, albeit more skilled officers, and how does that help anything? When you decrease the pool of certificated labor for a given trade, you increase the wages for that pool of people. How does that help anyone?
And think about the future. If the mariners we churn out from our training systems have superior skill-sets you should see fewer ship accidents over the years. Decrease the accidents, and you decrease the necessity of improved navigational software. Do that, and you delay the implementation of the drone vessels that all of us so desperately want to see.
The crappy mariner of today is the beta-tester of the software that will replace 90% of us, allowing our children their bright futures as chefs and nail salon technicians.
So I think my point is clear,
12 Likes
Y’all should start a production company and sell this to discovery channel. It sounds awesome
1 Like
It’s important to remember that the teaching and mentoring never stops, as Captain when you are training a cadet you are training a future mate, when you are training a mate you are training your future chief mate and when you are training your chief mate you are training your reliever. These people you will trust to look after you when you are sleeping and look after your ship when you are on leave so that you have a job to go back to. If a mate lacks knowledge, that isn’t a problem in itself as long as they are keen and willing to learn.
You can train the mates how to navigate visually and how to pilot and manoeuvre a ship.
There is a big difference though between the mates that are driving 3000t offshore boats and those that are driving 100,000t ships. The skillset is going to be different. The mate on the 3000t should have the opportunity to get on the sticks and drive, coached properly will build up those visual skills and become a competent and confident Master.
Teach them properly, give them your time.
5 Likes
Having a mate that lacks knowledge is a small problem easily solved. It’s easy to show someone how to perform a new task, for example configuring the SAT-C. There is little risk to making an error, no anxiety involved.
Errors made during collision avoidance and navigation on the other hand have severe consequences and therefore can cause high anxiety.
For example I’ve had the third mate call me to the bridge at night telling me that there are problems with the radar. When I come to the bridge there are numerous brightly lit fishing boats on the horizon but are not on the radar.
Telling the mate that the boats are too small and too far away to be detected by radar does not “teach” them this fact nor does it reduce the anxiety felt.
If left alone at this point they will focus completely on an attempt to “tune” the radar till in fact there is something wrong with it, totally out of tune.
What is required is that new mates become confident in information obtained visually. A high bar.
It would be helpful if training was improved to the point where it would lessen the amount of time and effort required and the level of frustration involved to “unlearn” new mates what they think they know but don’t.
1 Like
We could call it “At sea with the Luddites” or “Dinosaur Factory”
Speaking for myself I’m no Luddite. When we got the ECDIS I had the mate’s switch from plotting fixes on the paper charts to doing it on ECIDS instead.
I’ll use any tool that’s useful, I want an ECDIS, Doppler, an anemometer etc, and now I want a swing meter.
But, having said that, new mates lack the ability to cross-check what should be aids because they can’t interpret what they see out the window.
2 Likes
Just so you don’t feel alone, many new engineers are the same. Misery likes company!
1 Like
I was referring to matey with his week on the African Queen before you can cross the harbour!
I was tempted to jump in to this thread with some of the horror stories that I had regarding some of the assistant engineers that sailed with me that had little knowledge. . . and whether or not they were hawsepipers or not. . . but I let it slide. . .
Thinking the same thing. There are times when “Mr. Automation” is your best and only friend on watch down there.
Start a new topic.
1 Like
There are times for both answers but they should at a minimum come out of the academy and be able to stand a sea watch in moderate traffic unassisted. Then there are some things, like high level boat handling, that require a knack that many people simply don’t have.
What do they do in four years at the academy? Basic STCW classes, learning the book knowledge necessary to pass the tests, getting minimal sea time to be familiar with vessel operations, and also getting a Bachelor’s degree. If you cut out the degree it’s a two year program, including sea time, and it’s done at PMI and SUNY.
I think all programs should be required to do a “sea year” instead of cruises on school ships and a two month cadet shipping. That should be enough time to get them standing their own bridge watch under supervised training such that when they get their license they are actually competent.
Isn’t that basically how many European Nautical colleges work. You get a ton of experience as a cadet at sea. I think the big difference doing it this way is that people would have to be much better at teaching themselves a lot of the material and not be babied through it all.
I’ve always thought that the academies should start out with an Outward Bound type of experience in small boats.
It sounds like you are providing better training than any company I have ever heard of.
Or copy maine maritime’s VOT program and require a cadet ship every summer, for three total. You’ve more or less got to find your own jobs and with three different work experiences you end up with a little variety.