[BITList] Fwd: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague

[Michael Feltham]

One of the Articles promised

Mike
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Begin forwarded message:

From: enquiries at lloydslist.com
Date: 16 February 2009 12:25:24 GMT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague


The below article was sent to you from Mike Feltham (mj.feltham at madasafish.com 
) with the following message: I thought you might be interested in the  
article below.

Pie, ships and home truths about lay-up
Monday 16 February 2009

IT WAS the famous Sea Pie Supper of the Southampton Master Mariners  
the other evening, easily one of the best events in my maritime  
calendar, with some 600 cheery folk singing sea shanties after the  
pudding.

Spanish Ladies is the penultimate song in this unvarying and  
traditional programme, which I always think rather sad, when you bear  
in mind the extraordinary reduction in the number of “true British  
sailors” now available to “rant and roar across the salt sea”. It has  
become a sort of threnody, that almost brings tears to my eyes.

And blow me down, my newspaper was telling me that it is no longer  
politically correct for children to sing “what shall we do with a  
drunken sailor?” as it apparently encourages binge drinking. So  
sailors are going to be marginalised further, although these days they  
must be among the most sober members of society. It seems to me that  
it is drunken bankers we ought to be getting moral about. Sailors,  
even after they put away their “full bumpers”, never did as much harm  
as was done by the financial folk, who surely must have been in their  
cups when they did their worst lending?

The following morning, I tried to further justify my visit to  
Southampton with a wander around the various vantage points which give  
you a good view of the docks. There are plenty of them, despite the  
enhanced security of the International Ship and Port Facility Security  
Code, and long may they remain so, as anything which encourages  
citizens to see something of the magic and mystery of ships is to be  
encouraged. I have said so before, but these vantage points would be  
immeasurably improved if some noble maritime body would put up a few  
public information boards telling the viewer something about the ships  
they are likely to see coming and going in this busy port. They do  
this in Rotterdam, to good effect. It could be a job for the highly  
effective Solent Sea Vision, or perhaps the excellent little Maritime  
Museum could become involved in this campaign for a greater awareness.

Southampton, like those Spanish ladies, was itself a little  
melancholy, with not too many ships in port. I have noticed this  
before, in just about every port I ever set foot in, the ships have  
all fled, and the port manager will tell me that if only I had come  
there the previous day, record numbers of ships had been alongside  
loading and discharging. That’s life.

In common with most deep water ports around the world, these days,  
Southampton had its non-working berths mostly occupied by inactive  
ships. There was an liquefied natural gas carrier at the end of the  
dock, a capesize spoiling the view from my hotel room, with another  
couple of bulkers parked around the corner. On one of the car berths,  
there was a gigantic car carrier, either loading or discharging cargo  
that, if the truth be known, we could probably do without as car  
salesmen vie with estate agents as the least busy profession at present.

Lay-ups are very much on the agenda, although many owners are sensibly  
just watching and consulting any oracles they respect, as they wait to  
see how the market changes. The UK P&I Club, which clearly sees the  
direction of the prevailing wind, has justpublished a useful set of  
guidelines for the layup of ships, which they hope “will help minimise  
P&I claims, including personal injury, wreck removal and pollution and  
other contamination of the local environment”.

When you come to think about it, laid-up tonnage could well be thought  
of as a sort of “contamination of the local environment”, although  
that is not entirely what they mean. Just as I, after paying extra to  
enjoy a harbour view from my hotel room in Southampton, had been  
somewhat miffed to discover it blocked by the great slab side of an  
idle capesize, you can imagine a lot of objections if people’s sea  
view starts to get bunged up with a whole lot of ships that are not  
going anywhere, for months and years.

Waterfronts tend to change over time, and in many places the filthy  
slipways and engineering works and general grot of 20 or 30 years ago  
has been now replaced with serried rows of condominiums, their  
inevitable balconies overlooking promenades with their palm trees and  
the occasional posh waterside watering place. You can imagine the row  
the well-heeled residents will stoke up if they look out one morning  
and discover their view of the blue bay and distant hills besmirched  
by half a dozen enormous bulk carriers all rafted together nose to tail.

It is one thing to appreciate “the beauty of homebound ships,  
harbouring on the flood” (although they better not make too much noise  
as they pass). It is another thing entirely if the price of your  
property is to be diminished further by these great inert lumps of  
steel, gathering rust and guano as the months progress. While beauty  
is in the eye of the beholder, modern ships, it has to be said, are  
not visually interesting, except to the occasional passing naval  
architect, or a wandering seafarer, who might ask himself “how on  
earth did anyone build something looking like that?”

The UK Club’s guidelines, which have been produced with the assistance  
of BMT Marine & Offshore Surveys, make other points which tell us how  
the sort of ships that are going to be laid up today, need a rather  
different approach to those which were rendered inactive during the  
long years of the late 20th century recession.

During the early 1980s, I wangled a trip out with a maintenance squad  
to a couple of old passengerships, which had been laid up in Perama  
Bay for many years. The ships were rafted up with a whole lot of other  
redundant vessels of varying vintage in this crowded anchorage off the  
port of Piraeus, in the tender hands of a couple of elderly  
shipkeepers, whose main function as far as I can determine was to  
ensure that they were not actually sinking. Looking around the  
harbour, at that time you could see one or two that were in a very  
precarious state.

It was a ghostly experience, looking at the weed covered submerged  
boot topping as we hauled ourselves up the ladder, and walking around  
the deserted promenades and dirty decks. Inside the wheelhouse, it was  
airless, and the temperature of a furnace with the sun beating through  
the windows. Dust lay thick on the surfaces, and I wondered how they  
could ever reactivate this old lady, if somebody suddenly cultivated a  
need for her. I peered into the blackness of the engine room, with a  
torch, but was advised to go no further. There was absolute silence,  
just the occasional drip, drip of a valve or leaky tap sounding from  
the depths. It could have been my sweat.

So it is interesting to see, in the UK Club’s advice and  
recommendations, concern expressed about sophisticated modern vessels  
with all their computerised and electronic equipment going into long- 
term ‘cold’ lay-up, with nothing kept running aboard the ship.

Not many people know, it is inferred, how this equipment will react to  
disuse over months and possibly even years, and whether, when there is  
an attempt to reactivate it, there will be a deafening silence, or by  
contrast an enormous bang. It could be argued, of course, that as  
every computer is virtually redundant itself within five years, it  
will be a case of merely replacing all the control electronics,  
printed circuits and the like, furnishing new software, if not the  
hardware, to go with it.

All of which will surely make lay-up itself a more expensive  
proposition. It also begs the question that such is the pace of  
change, it might be hard to find anyone who remembers how to work the  
equipment of a ship put to sleep four or five years before.

As the advice points out, documentation is crucial, especially bearing  
in mind the adequacy of the manuals that tend to be supplied to many  
modern ships.

The recommendations have much to say about the importance of climate  
control in the internal spaces, to prevent corrosion and facilitate  
air circulation. There were all sorts of legends doing the rounds a  
quarter century ago, of people trying vainly to reactivate ships,  
where the machinery had completely frozen solid, or where long unused  
structure had lost any elasticity it once had and became subject to  
brittle fracture. There were pictures of ships in dry dock having  
literally hundreds of tons of goose-neck barnacles, each about the  
size of the cardboard tube inside a kitchen roll, being bashed off  
them with long handled scrapers. Piping systems aboard tankers where  
every gasket and seal was completely shot. One would hope that  
something will have been learned from the past, and that this useful  
advice fills in some of the gaps.

“What do we do with a laid-up bulker?” It might be a politically  
correct shanty for our times.

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