In defense of professional mariners

How about a show of hands for any on here, particularly us that do not cruise all the time because work and family intrude, who has not bumped into something or somebody even if it was just nerves damaged? I will bet there are very very few. Yes, we enjoy going on cruise ships, and I never miss an arrival or departure to watch these guys work. I am docked fairly close to the cruise ship pier here in Galveston and it is cool to follow at a distance. Of course, the Coasties have pointed a .50 cal for maybe not chopping throttle but maintain steerage, once. That gun seemed to have a muzzle the size of the USS Texas’ big guns!

anybody can make a mistake , part of being a professional is how you handle it after it starts.
Hollywood

hollywood8118 said:

anybody can make a mistake , part of being a professional is how you handle it after it starts.
Hollywood

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Exactly....with the advent of crew coordination over the last 3 decades... Those who embraced it are probably still happily in command or peacefully retired.

Professionals that ignored it's value, one we're never professionals and are paying the price.

Steve DAntonio said:

In 2005 a Canadian ferry essentially plowed over an entire marina, destroying quite a few boats. Remarkably no one was killed. The investigation later revealed that the accident occurred as a result of a missing cotter pin. Indeed, small things do matter when it comes to machinery, ships and the sea.

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Thanks for posting Steve. What isn’t mentioned here is that the ferry was in its final moments before docking, and when they went to apply reverse power to do their final slowdown, they had no reverse.
The very quick thinking captain ordered a hard to starboard turn and they gradually came to a stop albeit at the expense of a few docks and boats.
It beggars the imagination to think of the injuries or worse that would have occurred if they came to a hard stop at the berth.

In Defense of Professional Mariners

In curious why the author would post such a very long comment on this website. Early in his comments after giving a link to an article showing a shipping accident with videos he says;

"It kinda pisses me off. It upsets me partly because I'm a millennial snowflake, and I'm very sensitive (humor), but also because I'm a captain, and it's difficult for me not to take this sort of thing somewhat personally. I realize that's a failing of mine, but the reality is, this job is a HUGE part of who I am as a person. It's a significant part of my identity. I take it seriously, and when I mess up, I feel it. I failed, and it hurts deeply."

What sort of thing are you taking personally? The article in G Captain about the event? The videos? The contents of the article? The fact that someone else saw it?

If you were my son, I'd tell you, I'm proud of you for having a job that involved such skills and responsibility, and.....GROW UP, stuff will happen, and it will probably happen to you some day! And being captain of your vessel, you ALWAYS will be responsible, regardless of fault, because that comes with the job. If you can't live with that, you shouldn't be a captain no matter how good you are at all the other parts of being a captain. Sorry, but that's the truth of the matter.

Like the armchair quarterback, nobody knows anything until you’ve been in the situation.
Everyone at one point or another will make a bad choice or decision which seems right at the time which is why hindsight is 20/20.

It is a fact that one of the first lessons in command is to know you will make mistakes and be blamed for things and not to react to that.... or think everyone will like/respect you.

Sounds like the same thing law enforcement officers go through on a regular basis. A decision made in a split second, in a high stress situation, is reviewed for months, by people sitting comfortably and safely in chairs.

Meanwhile, thanks to the internet, thousands of others, with no real subject matter knowledge or expertise, whose sole base of knowledge comes from watching fictional tv and movies, dissect and provide ongoing critical review of your every action.

Sad to say, it just cones with the territory and our new world where everybody is an expert on everything. I like being retired.

After watching the accident I automatically assumed it was equipment failure. It is hard to believe how a professional Mariner could just run into the dock like that

Two quotes come to mind from this episode...

"Only a fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man learns form the mistakes of others"
Otto von Bismark

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward."
Vernon Law

Nicely said. I spent twenty-five years flying close to a million people in 4-5 hundred-thousand pound airplanes for a living with out scratching an airplane or any of the people. I've had an MMC for ten years. The same know-it-alls that piss you off piss me off.

A colleague once remarked that many people who can afford the price of an airline ticket think they know more about running an airline than the people who are actually doing it.

Same with ships, I guess.

IWAB said:

In curious why the author would post such a very long comment on this website. Early in his comments after giving a link to an article showing a shipping accident with videos he says;

"It kinda pisses me off. It upsets me partly because I'm a millennial snowflake, and I'm very sensitive (humor), but also because I'm a captain, and it's difficult for me not to take this sort of thing somewhat personally. I realize that's a failing of mine, but the reality is, this job is a HUGE part of who I am as a person. It's a significant part of my identity. I take it seriously, and when I mess up, I feel it. I failed, and it hurts deeply."

What sort of thing are you taking personally? The article in G Captain about the event? The videos? The contents of the article? The fact that someone else saw it?

If you were my son, I'd tell you, I'm proud of you for having a job that involved such skills and responsibility, and.....GROW UP, stuff will happen, and it will probably happen to you some day! And being captain of your vessel, you ALWAYS will be responsible, regardless of fault, because that comes with the job. If you can't live with that, you shouldn't be a captain no matter how good you are at all the other parts of being a captain. Sorry, but that's the truth of the matter.

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I guess I never specifically said what cheesed me off in the first place. Apologies for any confusion. I was reacting to a comment/discussion on Reddit about the incident referred to in the article. The knee jerk reaction from a lot of people was that the captain was an a$@%hole, or just terminally stupid. It annoyed me that people just started throwing turds immediately, without having ANY context of the situation.

I've been responsible for unfortunate situations in the past, and I've had people armchair captaining and flinging turds at me personally, and seeing it come up again just brought up some bad memories and hard feelings.

I posted my rant here, because this is a nautically themed community filled with people I respect and enjoy having discussions with.

I don't have any quarrel with anyone here, gCaptiain, the article, the videos, or the fact that anyone saw them. I didn't lose any sleep over any of this, but I'll go ahead and try to grow up anyway.

Thanks Dad.

Wait till you have had someone screaming at you in a public place calling you a chicken, a coward, a murderer because you wouldn't fly in severe icing conditions ( strictly prohibited by regulation) to go out and look for somebody that wasn't even declared missing yet. It was ultimately proven that no amount of searching would have resulted in saving anyone's life that night..... It would have just wound up risking the rescue crews life.

Armchair quarterbacking on the Internet is small stuff in the big scheme of things..... But it hurts no matter what.

psneeld said:

Wait till you have had someone screaming at you in a public place calling you a chicken, a coward, a murderer because you wouldn't fly in severe icing conditions ( strictly prohibited by regulation) to go out and look for somebody that wasn't even declared missing yet. It was ultimately proven that no amount of searching would have resulted in saving anyone's life that night..... It would have just wound up risking the rescue crews life.

Armchair quarterbacking on the Internet is small stuff in the big scheme of things..... But it hurts no matter what.

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I can't imagine how frustrating that must have been.

I noticed a news report suggesting that one of the assist tugs lines parted. If this is indeed the case then there is little one can do that close to the dock. Having spent a career doing ship assist as a towboat captain, it's usually more complicated. Given the headway at the time, there is is likely more to it than a parted headline. That may be the tail end of the error chain.

Greetings,
Mr. T. Welcome aboard. Yes, I'd read about the parted line but had no idea of it's importance or lack thereof.

Some jobs, almost every decision you make is potentially important and critical. Others, not so much.

One of the nice things about being a shoe salesman, I suppose, is knowing that the worst thing that can happen with a bad call is that somebody’s feet hurt a little.

I've noticed that there is a major divide between people who have operational experience and those who have not. By operational I mean activities that cause tangible things and people to move through and interact with the surrounding real world environment. Everything from hard rock mining, SAR, rigging heavy lifts, leading a squad, driving the Shuttle or skippering a push boat. All of this happens realtime with serious potential losses at stake while requiring decision making on the run with usually imperfect or insufficient data.

People that have been operational tend to recognize that despite even the best efforts, it remains a messy, dirty real world. Those without such experience tend to be more and sooner judgmental.

I'll wait for more info.

Man plans, God laughs.

'People that have been operational tend to recognize that despite even the best efforts, it remains a messy, dirty real world. Those without such experience tend to be more and sooner judgmental.'


But they do suffer paper cuts .

When I rode motorcycles, the old sayings were:

"There are two kinds of riders, those who've Gone Down, and those who Will Go Down".

"Dress for the crash, not the ride"

"It's not a matter of IF, but WHEN"

(Enter the chucklehead with the "I've been riding for 'x' years and never gone down"; Good for you, you're the statistical anomaly")

I used to look at guys who accidentally went aground, particularly when cutting corners or going on the wrong side of a marker and say "Look at this idiot"; "Look at this credit card captain".

Then I accidentally went on the wrong side of a marker 1/2 mile from my marina. One I've been down hundreds of times, even in the dark. It happened on a beautiful sunny day. The marker was missing on my side of the daymark, but that shouldn't have mattered. I had my electronics on, but was practically in my backyard, and didn't bother to even look at them. I was too busy thinking about the first leg of my vacation.

I don't criticize people who go aground anymore. :|