Would 30–180 seconds of warning before a severe wave encounter be operationally useful on your vessel?

Maritime Topics Marine Safety
1

I’m researching a practical maritime safety question for commercial vessels and would really value input from people who have actually worked aboard ship.

This is not a question about whether the technology is possible. I’m trying to understand whether the action window is real in practice.

If your vessel had 30–180 seconds of warning before a sudden severe-wave encounter, what could the crew realistically do?

For example:

  • make a heading adjustment
  • reduce speed
  • pause exposed deck work
  • warn crew or secure equipment
  • prepare on the bridge
  • or would that window usually be too short to matter?

If you’ve dealt with fast-changing sea conditions, I’d really appreciate your perspective.

A few things that would be especially helpful:

  • your role onboard
  • vessel type
  • what action is actually realistic in that time window
  • what minimum warning time would start to become useful
  • what would make an alert like this not worth trusting

I’m keeping the technical side vague on purpose because I’m focused on the operational reality, not pitching a product.

If you’d rather not reply publicly, a DM is welcome too.

2

Interesting question.

My role: deck/navigation officer

Ship type: supertanker

Realistic action within 30-180 seconds, the most important thing I could do is alert crew on deck in danger of being directly hit. Then I could alert the captain and put out a PA announcement for people to brace for a big roll. I could attempt to change course to better stem the wave, but we wouldn’t change course by much in that time frame.

Minimum warning to be useful: even just the 30 seconds so I can have my deck crew find cover would be worthwhile.

But your last point is very meaningful - something that sets off false or irrelevant alarms is worse than useless. If it sounds audible alerts for reasonably expected high waves in a given weather system, it’ll promptly be ignored and resented. To be useful, it would have to go off for - and only for - uniquely high waves greatly above the prevailing “significant wave height.”

3

30 seconds would be great, I can yell HANG ON to whomever is working on deck and CLOSE THE F’N HATCH if it is open.

If it went off for no reason it would soon be tossed overboard and likewise if it didn’t go off when it should.