After grabbing some breakfast and getting changed I took over the watch from the guy I was relieving and he packed up and headed off to the airport. We sailed later that evening on the Red Sea Magic itinerary, basically it starts at Sharm-el-Sheikh, heads north to Aqaba, where she stays overnight and then sails for Sokhna, then down to Safaga for another overnight and back to Sharm.

Alas we were unable to call at Sokhna due to a strike by the port employees so we ended up at anchor at suez operating a tender service ashore for the day.

The remaining 7 weeks were pretty uneventful apart from the odd technical problem. Red Sea is very boring with very little traffic, not that we spent much time at sea – thanks to our lovely overnights – although with the exception of Aqaba which is in Jordan all the Egyptian ports were dumps. The only real reason for going to them was so the tours could operate to far away places such as the pyramids, valley of the kings and Luxor.

Aqaba was nice though – we found a lovely restaurant at the yacht club which I went to twice and a pub called the Rovers Return which I went to for lunch a few times.

We also mixed the watches up a bit; briefly testing out a 6 + 2 system;

0000 – 0600 & 0800 – 1000
0600 – 0800 & 1200 – 1800
1000 – 1200 & 1800 – 0000

It was ok, although spending 6 hours in port stuck on the bridge is shockingly soul destroying. Fortunately I was only onboard for 8 weeks, i’m now at home killing time before heading down to Warsash to sit NARAS(M) and some other short courses before doing my chief mates exam.

Having had an awesome time out in Hawaii, it was time to leave and I flew from what is probably the nicest airport I’ve ever experienced to Las Vegas. We left Hawaii early afternoon and touched down in Las Vegas around 10pm.

We were staying at The Mirage and after checking in and dumping cases in the rooms we went a walk around the hotel & casino and did a quick spot of gambling before heading to bed.

Woke up early the next day and we went exploring the various hotels on the strip starting with the Venetian. It took most of the morning to walk around the Venetian – its huge although not the biggest and we ended up having lunch in a nice italian (funny enough) themed restaurant.

After lunch we walked down the strip having a look at the various hotels on the way down, we walked down as far as New York New York where we had pizza and started wondering back to the Mirage. While at the Venetian we had booked a helicopter tour to the Grand Canyon, we didn’t have enough time to drive to it.

That night we had dinner in the hotel and took the tram over to Treasure Island to catch the “Sirens of TI” show and then headed back via the street to watch the Volcano eruption outside the Mirage.

The helicopter tour was definitely worth it – we were picked up from the hotel just before 7am and taken the short drive to the airport. After a brief safety briefing we were on our way, the entire flight takes just under an hour and a half and its around 30 minutes flying time to the Hoover Dam. The tour we went for didn’t land at the canyon and on the way back it flew over the strip giving an excellent view of the hotels before landing (Video is below).

We were back at the hotel by 10, so after a quick coffee we headed out took the monorail down to MGN Grand and then headed down to the Luxor and Mandolin Bay to have a look at them. On the way back we wondered into pretty much all the hotels on that side of the street including spending a long time in Caesars Palace shops – there huge!

That night we had dinner at the Stratosphere in the restaurant at the top which rotates round as your eating giving you some amazing views over Las Vegas and the desert. We had timed it so we were having dinner during sunset and although its expensive its well worth it for the view and the food was excellent. Since we were at the north end of the strip anyway, we also took the opportunity to have a wonder along the old part of Las Vegas (Fremont Street) before heading back to our hotel.

Due to Virgin Atlantic canceling the flight from Vegas to London, we were having to fly with Virgin America to San Francisco and then catch the Virgin flight from San Francisco to London. Virgin America are awesome – there planes as well as having live TV also have wifi! Why can’t we have that in this country?

We got back into a snowy London and after collecting baggage and walking from Terminal 3 to 1 we checked in for the BMI flight from London to Edinburgh. The airport was pretty empty on account of a lot of the flights being cancelled.

Unfortunately due to Virgin not putting the flights on the same booking we had to wait ages to collect our baggage at Heathrow and then take it with us to the hotel.

Nice and early next morning we were up and on our way back to the airport to catch our flight out to San Francisco – Virgin Atlantic don’t do twilight checkin at Heathrow for some reason so even if you arrive the night before you can’t drop your bags off until the morning. Bag Drop is really the wrong word for it… It took over an hour to drop the bags off despite there only being around 20 people in front – clearly old people and people who don’t travel lots should have dedicated checkin desks – it would make it a lot quicker for everyone!

Anyway, the flight itself went quite quickly (around 9 hour flight time) and gave some awesome views of Iceland, Greenland and Canada before flying into a windy San Francisco.

A quick taxi ride to the hotel and then it was time to have a nap then pop out for walk around Fishermans Warf and to a bar for a quick dinner.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Fishermans Warf which is located close to bars and restaurants and only a short cable car ride from the centre of San Francisco.

The first full day was spent on an open top bus tour of the city, including going to the Golden Gate bridge, unfortunately it rained quite a lot both days we were there which is a shame.

The second day we went over to Alcatraz in the morning and spent the afternoon riding the cable car and having a wonder around the main shopping area.

We were only in San Francisco for 3 nights as a stop over on our way to Hawaii, so the next morning we were up nice and early again to catch the 830 flight from San Francisco to Honolulu.

Arriving in Honolulu we were instantly hit by the warmth – 20 degrees hotter than in San Francisco. We’re staying at the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort on Waikiki beach. It’s a huge hotel consisting of different towers, several bars, restaurants and hundreds of shops set amongst tropical gardens, 4 swimming pools and right on the beach.

At night the entire resort is illuminated by torches (of the flame variety) which they run around lighting at 6pm.

So far we’ve spent most of the time here at the beach or the pool, but today we took an open top bus ride of the city and went out to Pearl Harbour. Tonight there is a firework display after sunset which luckily we can see from our balcony overlooking the beach.

I’m here for a few more days then it’s on to Vegas for a few days before flying back to Scotland and then back to work in Egypt a few days later!

The first few times you join a ship you will undoubtedly have loads of stuff with you that you don’t need – most likely you’ll also not have stuff you need – I have deduced over the years that the higher up the chain you get, the less baggage you take; having observed most captains traveling to / from ship with what I would class as “hand baggage”!

If you are flying to a ship, chances are your company will have booked you on “marine tickets” – this is a special type of booking which normally entitles you to increased baggage allowance and some perks, while costing your company pennies for the flight – there also flexible tickets which can be cancelled / changed by your travel department pretty much up until the time of departure.

Always check with your airline what your baggage allowance is… you might have 40 kg, but its probably between 2 bags, maximum of 23 kg per bag. Some airports will refuse to accept baggage that is over 23 kg – regardless of your allowance!

A useful tip; normally companies will leave you a few hours between connecting flights to ensure you make the connection, on marine tickets its normally possible to change to earlier flights once you arrive at your connecting airport – even if your baggage is checked all the way through – so if you have 4+ hours wait and theres a flight leaving in the next hour or so, its always worth asking if you can be transferred.

So back to packing, what you need to take and how much you need to take depends on length of trip, what type of ship and where you’re going! Obviously if your spending 3 weeks on a ship in the North Sea, you’ll be able to take far less than someone spending 4 months on a ship down in Antarctica.

Toiletries: Ensure you take enough shampoo, toothpaste, shaving foam, toothbrushes, razor blades and deodorant to last you at least a month (if you aren’t sure if you can acquire them onboard and you’re likely to be sailing somewhere that you wont be able to get off – take enough to last you the entire trip). On a side note; toiletries are surprisingly heavy and will take up a substantial amount of your baggage allowance – so if you can do without 6 different brands of shampoo it’s worth taking the minimum you can survive with!

Uniform: Make sure you take the correct uniform! Your company will be able to tell you what you need to have with you – normally safety equipment (boiler suits / safety shoes / hard hats / etc) will be supplied onboard the ship, but you normally have to cart other uniform items around with you. You can save space by sticking socks inside the shoes and make sure you put at least 1 shirt on the top of your suitcase so its wearable on arrival!

Personal Clothes: If you’re on a cruise ship, you’ll wear uniform 90% of the time – you could even wear it 100% of the time if you particularly want, so theres no real need to take 100’s of t-shirts, shorts and trousers. I get away with 4 or 5 t-shirts, 2 pairs of trousers / jeans, 2 shorts and a jumper which I basically only wear when ashore or if i’m to lazy to put uniform on to go for breakfast.

Underwear: Take enough to last you at least 7 days! Bare in mind that black / dark colours are normally visible through the white trousers / blouses (for girls) so best to take some white if you’re going to be in the tropics!

It gets cold! Pretty much everywhere gets cold at night – so remember and bring a jumper. Also bare in mind that even if your out in the tropics you have to fly back to the UK at some point – nothing worse than arriving in London when its -8 with nothing but a t-shirt and jeans on!

Electronics: If you’re a cadet its a good idea to take a laptop with you. Once qualified you will take a laptop with you as it provides hours of entertainment when your bored! Don’t bring loads of DVDs with you – copy them to a hard drive otherwise its just wasted space and weight in your baggage. Do get a portable hard drive and / or a USB pen drive and always keep a copy of your work on it. If the worst happens and your ship sinks its easier to grab a portable hard drive than the entire laptop when your running to the boats. You’ll also want a camera, your mobile phone and if its separate iPod / mp3 player.

Do remember to bring the chargers and USB cables! I recommend you put the charger (or very least USB cable) for your phone in your hand baggage! Its also a good idea to bring a USA & European adaptor since chances of the sockets on your ship being UK style are pretty slim.

Documents: Do NOT put your documents in your hold baggage – if it goes missing your screwed. This includes your Discharge Book, CoC, STCW Certificates, TRB, Medical, Vaccination Certificates, Passports & Visas. Its also a good idea to take your Ops / Nav workbook as hand baggage just incase! Take copies and stick the copy in your hold baggage, also leave a copy at home! Whenever you return home take an updated copy of your discharge book.

There’s probably quiet a lot of other stuff I’ve missed, so if you have any tips or spot some omissions feel free to comment below.

Firstly as every UK officer is taught “VHF should not be used for collision avoidance” there’s even an MGN (#167) regarding it! For those non nautical readers basically the COLREGs are written in such a way that if everyone follows them it is clear who is responsible for giving way to the other and ships should not collide with each other.

Regrettably as anyone with any experience of time on watch will tell you there is a large number of ships out there who either do not know, or fail to follow the rules.

Situation 1: Overtaking with head on vessels

In this example, Vessel A was heading east in the Rhodes channel, I was approaching her from astern, with the intention of overtaking her – at the present time I was debating whether to take her on her port or starboard side. Vessel C was a Greek ferry proceeding at high speed and planning to overtake me on my starboard side. Vessel B was approaching from the east head on with Vessel A. Expecting Vessel B to goto starboard and pass between the shore and Vessel A, I chose to alter to starboard and overtaking A on her starboard side. Shortly after altering Vessel B called up Vessel A and after switching to another channel eventually (after some discussion between the two vessels) confirmed that they would pass each other port to port (quite why there was a need for this conversation I don’t know since the COLREGs require this maneuver anyway). An approximation of the initial situation is shown in diagram 1.

Vessel B proceeded to alter slightly to starboard and vessel A also altered to starboard as expected. A few minutes later Vessel B proceeded to alter to port – which resulted in a flurry of VHF excitement from vessel A – which went unanswered by vessel B – vessel A then proceeded to go back to port. Vessel B now found herself in a collision situation with myself and the ferry Vessel C which was overtaking me – B then proceeded to go back to starboard and eventually passed 5 cables down my port side and approximately the same distance from Vessel A. An approximation of the eventual situation is shown in diagram 2.

Additional situations will follow over the next few weeks…

So what happened since the summer? I sailed around the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea quite a lot visiting Turkey, Greece, Israel, Cyprus and the dreaded Egypt. After a 4 month trip I signed off in Limassol, Cyprus and got home to a very chilly Scotland on the 15th December.

This year, after a few more weeks at home I am off to Las Vegas, San Francisco and Hawaii for a 2 week holiday then heading back to sea in February for a short 2 – 3 month contract.

I have now completed the minimum sea time required to be eligible to sit my chief mates examinations and plan to do this during the summer of 2012. The present plan being to return to Warsash Maritime Academy near Southampton and complete NARAS(M) and a few weeks of revision in May.

All going well, I should then be back at sea sometime in August / September.

VTS for those not aware stands for Vessel Traffic Services, of which there are various types; most simply provide navigational advice and assistance and have no legal power whatsoever to direct traffic / tell you what to do, some however do.

On my present ship, we regularly transit an area (twice a week) which has a compulsory VTS reporting and traffic control system – local regulations permit the VTS operators to direct traffic and non compliance with the instructions (without good reason) results in a very large fine. The primary language of the VTS is english, however as its a non english speaking area – they also conduct communications in the native language of the area.

Without naming the area, basically you travel through various sections and will speak to a variety of VTS operators / stations during your transit – the entire thing is also a massive TSS (Traffic Separation Scheme). As a regular visitor we are used to simply calling each section on entering / leaving their area and being told to simply “navigate as necessary”.

The area is extremely busy with lots of crossing ferries, small boats – especially fishing boats and lots of anchored cargo vessels awaiting their transit times who randomly start moving and enter the lanes at the worst possible moment.

However, VTS are generally excellent and if we need to overtake something (which is pretty much at least once an hour given our tight schedule and speed) we simply call up VTS and they either tell us to use the opposite traffic lane / separation zone or tell the other ship(s) to get out the way.

This time however I was on watch and happily proceeding at 18 kts down the traffic lane and as was customary one of the cadets had the con. We observed a ferry was planning to cross the lane from starboard and that she had altered her course to pass astern of a cargo ship which we were 3nm behind and pass ahead of us at just over 1nm with a CPA of 0.8 down the port side.

As she was almost ahead of us, there was a sudden flurry of VHF traffic in the native language of the area – where the name of our ship was mentioned a few times. This was promptly followed by one of the lookouts reporting the ferry, which was now directly ahead of us suddenly altering her course 90 degrees to port aiming directly at us.

At around the same time VTS called up and stated “XXX proceed, ferry on your starboard bow will wait you”… said ferry was now under 1 nm directly in front of us, closing fast and aiming straight for me. The end result being I had to switch to hand steering and put the rudder hard to port – the ferry passed VERY close down the starboard side – exact distance is unknown since ARPA was buggered up by the sudden alteration but she probably passed by around 1 cable.

Now, the important point to note here is that the ferry was already ahead of me and passing well clear at 1nm in front and 8 cables down the port side (which given the situation was more than acceptable) when VTS decided to intervene – they were clearly watching the situation develop so why did they wait so late to intervene? The other point is that the ferry’s watch officer for some reason proceeded to simply obey VTS despite the obvious stupidity of their instruction!

So the lesson to be learned… always think what VTS has instructed you to do – BEFORE you do it!

Through doing this I (and we) have noticed a few, for lack of a better phrase, common mistakes that are being made;

I wish to point out that each of these was a different cadet – and the last one is not really a mistake, just something to keep in mind!

Getting distracted by other tasks!

Yes, fixing the vessels position, completing log books and dealing with fire alarms, phone calls etc. are all important, however – your primary focus should be the SAFE NAVIGATION of the vessel. Spending 10 minutes behind a chart table position fixing and working out EP’s is all well and good – but do pay attention to what else is happening round about the ship.

In one of the many examples I could choose, I had asked the cadet when we would be 12nm out (a requirement for black water discharge) – as he couldn’t tell me he was promptly told to work it out. This took rather a long time, during which time 3 other vessels entered both radar and visual range – despite both lookouts announcing the presence of the traffic the cadet failed to reappear and either acquire them on ARPA (a system that tracks targets and calculates various information such as how close it is going to come to us) or look out the window!

Trial Maneuver is your friend!

On several occasions cadets have altered course at way points or to avoid ships without actually knowing or appreciating the affect the alteration would have on the traffic situation. Modern radars have a very useful feature that you should get acquainted with called “Trial Maneuver”. This feature as the name suggests allows you to key in course alterations &/or speed changes and see what effect it will have on surrounding traffic if you did it instantly or delayed your alteration.

In the most recent example, the cadet chose to alter course at a waypoint onto the next leg (it was a 100 degree alteration), when he started to alter I enquired what course he intended to come round too. “The track” was the response… I then pointed out that if he did that we would be in a head-on situation with 4 north bound ships, so what course will pass us clear with a safe CPA – again he had no idea – in fact he had not even acquired the targets on the ARPA he was using.

Learn the damn COLREGS!

As our cadet’s are realising there are a large number of ships out there who either don’t know the rules, are asleep or generally have decided to disobey them. I have came close to throwing a cadet off the bridge because they, despite being last trip, had no clue about what the COLREGs actually said.

Sometimes a speed change is the best action!

Don’t forget that sometimes changing your speed is the easiest way to resolve a situation. In this example we had a vessel overtaking us from our starboard quarter. This had been going on for some time, it had started before my watch and 1 hour later he had managed to get 2nm away still with a bow cross range of 0.1 cables. The cadet had enquired earlier what action / when you should take action if a vessel is overtaking you fails to keep out your way and this presented a nice example for him.

The first suggestion of the cadet was to call him on VHF; I promptly shot this down mainly because he was clearly not paying attention since we are a nice big bright passenger ship and if we wake him up he might do something incredibly stupid and hit us.

Second suggestion was to make a course alteration to port, as he had correctly identified that turning to starboard was a stupid idea – when I enquired how big an alteration would need to be made the cadet was surprised with the huge answer the trial maneuver provided.

At the time we were making 12kts (with a top speed of 20kts – although with the present engine configuration we could only make 14kts if necessary)… I then asked what speed would be required to pass ahead of him at 1nm? He was surprised that if we increased by half a knot to 12.5 he would pass at least 1nm astern of us.

Anyway, this is just a few, I will add some more when I come across them… Next week will be VTS Assisted Collisions :)

• Europe
• North America
• South America
• Antarctica
• Asia
• Africa

Meaning only Australia is outstanding, but hopefully not for long though!

So I was lucky enough to get a chance to go to CSMART, in Holland, to attend a ship management course run by my company.

The course was half theory and half practical and focused around the various forces that affect the ship during the maneuvering stages of the voyage (arrival / departure in port).

CSMART is owned by Carnival Group and focuses on cruise ships. Since the ships operated by my company are mainly ex. Holland America Line or Costa Cruises vessels CSMART had the models for them on their simulator. This gave all of us a chance to practice maneuvering the ships into / out of ports with various conditions ranging from strong winds to strong currents without the risk of damaging anything.

The course was a lot of fun and put into practical terms the theory that you learn during your OOW course which you never get to try out in real life until your higher up the chain!