MARINE SUPPORT

'Is Reliance Upon Electronics Killing The Art Of Seamanship?'

by Capt. Herb Carol: Marine Support & Training Service

After reading an article recently regarding the effects of ‘solar storms’, I was intrigued enough to start asking a few questions, the first of which I put to an Extra-Master Mariner, with 40+ years of experience, was:

“If the satellites go down, what happens?” I was floored by the response,

“Well, there are plenty more of them up there, so it’ll be OK.”

“So what happens if they all go down simultaneously, possibly due to a blast of solar radiation?”

“In that case, then, we’re in deep trouble!” was the reply!

The following paragraph is from the NASA website, which contains some fascinating information…

“If a coronal mass ejection (CME) collides with the Earth, it can excite a Large Geomagnetic Storm. These have, among other things, caused electrical power outages and damaged communications satellites. In space CMEs typically drive shock waves that produce energetic particles that can be damaging to both electronic equipment and astronauts that venture outside the protection of the Earth's Solar flares, on the other hand, directly affect the and radio communications at the Earth, and also release energetic particles into space. Therefore, to understand and predict "space weather" and the effect of solar activity on the Earth, an understanding of both CMEs and flares is required”. (http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sftheory/cme.htm)

That then started me thinking…

The key words, to my mind are “….caused electrical power outages and damaged communications satellites”

In these days of increased transportation of goods and raw materials by sea, an exponential growth in cruise liners, and a year on year increase in leisure boating, would we still retain the requisite personal skills demanded to move a vessel from ‘A’ to ‘B’, should the electronic systems suddenly go off?

We are not talking here about the power simply being, effectively turned off. We are discussing the probability of the power surging to such a level that it effectively ‘fries’ all of the electronic components prior to burning out the generation equipment! Even unplugging the equipment from the power source would make no difference, as the electro-magnetic pulse would have sufficient power to burn out the equipment at component level!

Just imagine a large commercial vessel moving at 40Kts, when the Master finds that suddenly he has no electrics, which means no lighting, no GPS, no radio, no fluxgate compass, no RADAR, no SONAR, no echo sounder, no on-board computers, no engine-room telemetry, and in many cases no steering!

The engineers should in a few hours, be able to jury-rig and bypass the controls to manual, which would allow them to control speed and steering. Within 80 miles ??? Hopefully, the engine controls will ‘fail safe’, and maybe drop down to a ‘tick-over’. If all propulsion stops, then what……..??

Let us turn the clock back, not to the days of cat and hammocks, but rather look at the tools available at the time, which were updated with each new practical discovery.

“The skill and the art of navigation is to get from any starting point, to a position when pilotage takes over”

Starting with the Chronometer and the Sextant. I have grouped these two together because in navigation, the Sextant will not work as an effective instrument without the chronometer.

The sextant combined with a chronometer, is one of the most powerful tools employed by the navigator, as it allows him to work out his longitudinal position – although, I must confess that even at my own most precise, the nearest I managed to work out our position was within 25 miles! If only they had kept the vessel still!

It has been noted that the Royal Navy is ‘downgrading the importance’ of the use of sextants for navigation, and in the commercial world of shipping, the use of radar alarms, satellite navigation systems, and satellite communications systems is now the norm.

Increasingly, the sextant is being ‘downgraded’ into a pretty mantelpiece ornament, rather than being kept as a fully functioning precision tool for the purposes of navigation.

ColRegs state that a “good lookout shall be maintained at all times by whatever means are available”

With no RADAR, SONAR or echo-sounder, reliance would revert once again, to the ‘Mark One Eyeball’. A precision piece of equipment which when fully trained, is able to compute the approximate speed, closing range, distance and bearing of another vessel, landfall, etc.

The standard ‘Mark One Eyeball’ can also be trained to read, decipher and respond to semaphore, flag-code signals and Morse Code. Semaphore is no longer used for signalling. Morse Code is no longer a prerequisite for communications, and the use of single and multiple-letter code flags has now all but disappeared – with the possible exceptions of ‘A’ (I have a diver down: Keep well clear at slow speed), ‘B’ (I am taking in, discharging or carrying dangerous goods), ‘P’ (In harbour – all persons to report on board as the vessel is about to proceed to sea), and ‘Q’ (My vessel is “healthy and I request free pratique).

How do we as the Marine Support & Training Service, alert and convince the decision-makers that all of these are traditional skills must, as a matter of course and urgency, be reinstated within the core of the maritime training syllabus?