A fleeting Star

Edmonton based travel agent, Newwest, has pulled out of the deal that would have seen Norwegian Cruise Line's Norwegian Star, dock near the Lion's Gate Bridge, in Vancouver, to serve as accomodations during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. The Winter Games will take place in and around Vancouver starting in seven days.

The last minute decision has thrown a considerable wrench in the travel and accommodation plans of many Olympic visitors. The surrounding communities and nearby accommodations, meals, entertainment, travel, (etc), providers are left salivating at the thoughts of desperate hordes tourist ready for the picking. Taking the Norwegian Star out of the pictures, and its capacity to house, feed and entertain 1,600 people, will undoubtedly impact the overall tourist based businesses of the city and surrounding communities.

Newwest cited lack of interest and mounting costs in pulling the plug on the project, which is kind of strange seeing how they have reportedly sold 800 of the 1100 rooms available. You can see their brief apology on the Facebook page, and read further on local media website.

Back to the future !

Hello, hello and welcome to 2010 !

Its nearly the end of the year's first month, so I will extend my apologies to my loyal blog followers for the desperately late first entry of the year. I spent pretty much all of December at work, which, apart from the normal separation from family anxiety, included much work related headaches.

Upon my return home in the first week of January, normal Christmas activities had to occur with my family. Follow that with a full on kitchen remodeling job, and a skeleton in the closet that came home to roost, and you have a typical seafarer month at home. Unfortunately these event conspire to take my maritime mind out of my daily activities at home, and thus today, the 27 of January, I take some time to post a small post, while my drywall mud dries, to say hello.

Over on The Common Rail, the forum at www.dieselduck.net, a question was posed as to where the jobs were in 2010. Although I am not an expert on the subject, I do like to keep abreast of what's going on in our industry, especially in Canada, so I posted a reply with my thoughts on the subject, which I expand on below.

The last few years, 2005-late 2008, have been pretty good years for marine engineer and seafarers in general. With a real worldwide shortage of experienced, and qualified seafarers, wages and opportunities were benefiting seafarers. However, in mid 2008, and in earnest in 2009, world markets suffered a significant "earthquake", which forced a consumer society to take a pause. Shipping is responsible for moving nearly all commodities and goods, and so we were hit with a major slowdown, pretty much right away. The St Lawrence Seaway just reported preliminary findings that it believes that 2009 will post the lowest tonnage numbers ever.

So where does that leave us in 2010. Right now, and subject to daily change, the consensus is that the Canadian economy, and the marine industry, has reached bottom some months back, and that the early part of 2010 growth would be name of the game, although slowing down in the second half of 2010. We saw indications of this in the Seaway's late season rally.

From my personal perspective, I see that, yes, things are improving, but I also see lots of people still out of work and trying to make ends meet. Luckily for us seafaring professionals, we have been somewhat less impacted, due to the previously short supply of "us" in the first place. Although I am worried that "fresh blood" into the industry is sure to be disappointed with their options right now, as I have seen a little meaningful action by shipowners, in way of addressing the shortage before the economic slowdown, and even less over the last year.

By regions...

I think in central Canada, we will see an improvement of the overall marine business, but it will not be super dramatic. The last few months of the season in the great lakes and seaway was considerably busy compared to the start of the season - mainly due to a bumper crop of grains, and the resurgence of the steel industry. Perhaps this will continue in the new season, I believe it will.

On the East Coast, oil prices are stable and slightly climbing, new PSV vessels are being built for Atlantic Towing to service the Deep Panuke project. New O&G projects, such as Amethyst and a additional significant discovery by Husky to the White Rose project, as sure to drive some maritime assets and jobs for seafarers.

The West Coast's Truck Logging Convention just wrapped up in Victoria over the weekend. The word there, at the smallest convention of their history, was that the industry was picking up, and looking up in 2010. Lumber exports to China is reportedly making 25% of BC lumber industry, and growing rapidly. The governments efforts to market lumber is to China is finally paying off, having being too dependent on the US market has played havoc with the industry, which impacts heavily the local maritime transport sector. So with this in mind I see the job front picking up for engineers with the bigger vessel coming back online. I suspect BC Ferries traffic will be back up to the their normal expectations this year, especially with the lingering effects of the Olympics, so we will see jobs once again becoming more frequent for engineers there, although the company is still dealing with a negative employer image.

Also on the west coast, Kitimat LNG export start-up was swallowed by Apache Corp, a significant oil and gas player in the area, which lends some serious credibility to the aspirations of the northern BC port of Kitimat being a energy exporting hub, and thus spurring more maritime asset involvement.

Arctic waters have garnered much publicity but I don't think you will see much changes in landscape, other than attitudes. Which such high capital cost involved in untested schemes, it will take some time for any real maritime impact to occur. On the other hand, arctic resupply has been reported to be increasing over the years with mining and O&G projects gaining traction. Canadian companies are well poised to see an increase there. With added traffic and an soon to be retiring workforce, I think seafaring opportunities will develop in this region, assuming they start offering work conditions that are more appealing to folks other than mushrooms and or prisoners.

Government is in "cost cutting" mode these days, yet again. So like usual, all forward thinking new build projects will be shelved, so I think they will be more or less the same. With other sectors coming back online, manpower will be drained from Coast Guard, in particular, and to some extend DND operations. I predict that most of the manpower issues, regarding qualified engineers will start creeping back to the forefront of agenda fairly quickly, but probably towards the mid and end of 2010.

I must say that the Canadian Coast Guard seem to be the only organization taking a personnel shortage seriously, and doing something about it through their Coast Guard College. DND (civilian national defense personnel) remain underpaid, and about to retire en mass, which I predict, will mean some major changes coming to that organization, on the seafarer front.

Other things to keep in mind, and ahead of in the marine industry in Canada, a lifting of import duties on foreign built ship and a review of the Coasting Trade Act (our cabotage rules, equivalent to the Jones Act in the US). Both these topics have the potential to seriously impact our life as seagoing Canadian.

The lifting of import duties means a real possibility for new ships, with up to date standards, plying our waters - which is great, and badly needed. This of course means a serious viability impediment to our floundering shipbuilding industry, sadly dying for quite some time, due to a lack of support from the ship owners, and passive government policies. I am ambivalent about the relaxing of the Coasting Trade Act, to which Canadian ship owners are starting to loudly object to; they want their cake and eat it too. Why should they be surprise when the tactics they use, be use on them, and they may end up like the Canadian shipbuilders. Sad indeed for our country, but greed is what it is.

In the end, seafarers and ship builders will most-likely be the major losers in the outcome of these two topics - they traditionally are. I doubt the government will have much balls to enforce a competitive atmosphere for us Canadians seafarers - as demonstrated in the shipbuilding sector. I personally have no problems competing with any other nation's seafarer for an engineering position, as long as they are paying the same taxes as I am, and getting the same salary. If you want to put foreign ships and crew in my backyard, fine, then give me the same tax break as their home countries give them - which makes them so much cheaper to hire.

In finishing, the large boxship fleet operators are reporting that in 2010, they will return to profitability, or increase in profits, which will bode well for port operators and port services across Canada and the world. Overall, I think this slow down has been good for our collective souls, maybe not so good for shipping in general. I don't think the "numbers" will be back up to pre- "meltdown", but nonetheless I would rather take stability over gambling mentality any day, and hopefully signs of stability will be evident in late 2010.

The above are my own observations of course, based on my limited perspective, but I don't see anyone else offering their opinion, so please, feel free to let me know what you think.

Roll on out 2009

So here it is, the end of another year and decade.

Roll on out 2009 and let in a New Year and a new beginning.
My Dad always has said that every 5 years your life changes completely. When you think about it, it is true. I don’t think he meant it would happen all at once like mine has. All those changes led to me working on the West Coast, temporarily, for the last several months. It has been quite the experience seeing how things work on the Pacific coast as opposed to the right coast.
The great thing about the marine industry is people tend to move in and out of your life through the years. You pick up the friendships right where you left off. Or in some cases put them away ‘til next time. Working in the West has let me catch up on the doings of old friends I haven't seen in too many years.

As part of this new position on the Pacific Coast, I also get to fly a lot, really a lot. My old knees are protesting it, in fact. It has been an education to see how auditing a company’s SMS system leads to a better industry. It gives me hope for the marine industry in Canada. Uh-Huh.

Like the flight from Toronto to Calgary, when the plane suddenly started to turn and drop altitude. After a bit, the pilots came on the ICS and told us they had a cracked windshield and were dropping down to relieve the strain on the remaining windshield. And, we were going back to Winnipeg because they couldn’t land in Calgary due to their thunderstorms. Must admit that it was an educational trip back across the prairies as we were almost at crop dusting levels. (Well, OK, maybe not quite that low).

Then there was the flight that we landed in Toronto during a thunderstorm and got to sit on the tarmac for a couple of hours while they waited for the tornado warnings to stop. When we did get the OK to move, the plane had lost the steering to the nose wheel. That lifted a few eyebrows, considering we had just landed on it.

Then there was the flight out of Ottawa, where we all trooped on, locked ourselves in, waited 20 minutes, then all trooped off. A radio had failed. Or the flight out of Victoria, when they came on 5 minutes before the flight was to board and told us it would be delayed because of a tire change, only there was no one to change the tire, they had to come from Vancouver. I wonder if he had to bring his own tools?

Or the flight from Victoria to Vancouver or was it the other way around, when they had a dashboard problem. Or witnessing the near riot in Toronto airport when the passengers protested the third cancellation of their flight in 12 hours. Air Canada handled that nicely by calling in the Peel Region PD bad boys. Great entertainment, if you didn’t happen to be on that flight.

Let's raise a glass to 2010. It is like a field immediately after a snowstorm. Still untouched, the promise and hopes still there.

May the next decade bring much joy, happiness and unusual prosperity to all. (Actually I am hoping for the unusual prosperity as part of my early retirement dreams.)

A bolt offers lesson

On September 8th 1989, Norwegian airline Partnair, lost flight 394 with 55 souls on board, off the coast of Denmark. You may ask what exactly how does an "old" air accident affect us in the marine industry. As it turns out, this particular accident had profound affect on the Wilhelmsen Lines, the prominent Norwegian shipping company.

That fateful flight, had been chartered by the shipping company to attend the launching of a new RoRo carrier, in Hamburg, Germany. The fifty employees who perished where from the Oslo based head office, and represented half of the company's office staff, a devastating blow to the operations for sure.

The purpose of this post though, is to highlight an increasingly large problem that we face today in the maritime world, and which was determined to be the source of the ultimate demise of Partnair 394. The end of flight 394 was determined to be a result of inferior quality parts. Bolts which held the tail of the plane on, were actually counterfeit parts, and were only 60% the strength of the ones specified by the plane's manufacturer. They failed, the plane tail fell off, and the flight was doomed.

As a result, a massive focus by government regulators was placed on the airline industry and its widespread problems of counterfeit and non spec parts . They initially thought is was an isolated incidents, but soon discovered that fake parts were used everywhere in the system - even on the US president's famed Air Force One.

I have been noticing over the last few years quite an increase in stories about counterfeit equipment on board as well. So when I saw the documentary about the plane crash, you may start appreciating the implications of the problem. Ironically, Unitor (now a Wilh Willemsen company) Emergency Escape Breathing Device, (EEBD) was subject of counterfeit attack on their products. Some locks used in securing shipping containers were also found to be counterfeit, even the US Navy has been in the news, they found counterfeit computer chips in their equipment.

I always had it in the back of my mind, to be on the look out for counterfeit parts, but a couple of months ago I really started thinking about it. I was ordering some replacement filter elements for our Separ fuel filters, as in turn out, those could potentially be counterfeit. They were not that expensive (the OEM ones), not that big, yet they were subject of counterfeiter's attention. It drove home the point that if a seemingly mundane filters could possibly be fake, what else could be as well.

All this, to highlight a serious problems that we should all be wary about. Check your parts to make sure they are not counterfeit before installing them of your equipment, and possibly jeopardizing your safety.

I read an estimate online, that the cost of global counterfeiting is around 680 billions dollars per year, that's probably because it is not always easy to spot a fake part.

Some simple tips that I have seen online, which probably wont help, but may be good to keep in mind...

• If its too good to be true, then it probably is. Often times on ships, you just get the part, the cost is not advertise. Most times you don't even know where in the world it was sourced or how it even got on the ship, so this will make it hard to determine if the price was too good to be true.
• Look for spelling mistakes, packaging errors, or flimsy packaging. Probably the opportunity for actually spotting a fake on board.
  
• Know your suppliers and the Original Equipment Manufacturer, they will have information on what to look for in their products and those passing off as theirs. Check their website's "news" area, looking for informational bulletins.
  
• Take time to get to know your suppliers, and their sources.
• Always be skeptical - this sounds depressing and hard to implement, but your safety and that of your ship may depend on it.
  

I have not been able to find a good source of information on this topic, but I think that we should all be reminded of this problem and keep vigilant. Here are some other web site offering some tips. Wikihow, AC Delco, consumer goods overview.

Happy Holidays

For all of you at sea, or taking time off from the ship or the office, I "ship you" my sincerest wishes for a great holiday season.

I am currently on the ship, we will be entering the St Lawrence Seaway tonight, bound for Hamilton. I sure wish I was at home to be with my wife, and three young sons, but it is the job we have chosen to do. So if you are at sea as well, you're not alone. Merry Christmas !

Good and Bad Marine News in NS

Some very exciting news for a small Nova Scotia yard in Methegan, NS. Earlier in decade, they worked very hard at developing their workforce and exploring composite core construction of smaller vessels. They really do great work there and they are an excellent company to deal with. I am delighted for them that they are in the running for this work.

Shipyard could get busy

Military training firm likes Theriault’s work and wants yard to build more boats, but wants cash from government

By CHRIS LAMBIE Business Editor

A COMPANY that makes small remote-controlled targets for the navy wants to build large training ships in Meteghan River that could deploy the fast-attack simulators like a swarm of bees.

Meggitt Training Systems Canada of Medicine Hat, Alta., has built 50 of its unmanned Hammerhead targets at A.F. Theriault & Son. Now the Alberta company is talking about building ships more than 30 metres long at the Meteghan River yard.

"Now that we’ve been working with A.F. Theriault for five years, I’m very interested in giving them this work," Spencer Fraser, Meggitt’s general manager, said Monday.

The deal could be worth a lot to the western part of the province, he said.

"We’re talking in the tens of millions of dollars, so it’s not inconsequential," Mr. Fraser said.

A.F. Theriault plans to make hundreds of the fibreglass composite targets. But that work employs only about 15 people, so the company is keen to get the contract to build support ships for Meggitt.

"That’s what we’re hoping," said Arthur Theriault, president of the Digby County shipyard. "It was a pipe dream six months ago."

The yard now employs about 130 people but the workforce could grow if the company gets the ship contract.

"It would either add to it or it would prevent you from laying off," Mr. Theriault said.

Meggitt now has proper drawings for the support vessels, he said, and it would take 50 to 80 people to build the ships.

"We’d have to put an expansion on one of our buildings to accommodate that" project, Mr. Theriault said.

"We’re hoping that there is more than one."

Meggitt’s Hammerhead targets retail for $50,000 to $70,000 each. Navies around the world use them to mimic small vessels attacking a warship.

"It’s like the Lilliputians holding down the giant, (or) teenagers swarming an adult in a park," Meggitt’s general manager said. "And that’s what we’re replicating — the swarm threat.

"Literally, it’s like bees attacking a human. You’ve got to swat them at very close range."

Mr. Fraser said Meggitt is looking at building some larger vessels that would carry, for example, 16 Hammerheads.

"When it comes to these bigger projects, it’s absolutely required that (the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency) and the province play a role, because the international market’s fickle," Mr. Fraser said. "If we get out ahead of the game and you get down a learning curve, they’ll say, ‘We’ll just buy one from Nova Scotia.’ But if you dither and you wait two or three years, they’ll say, ‘Well, why don’t we just do it at home?’ "

The ships would be similar to the Riverton, a 60-metre vessel used as a support ship during the trials of Canada’s 12 Halifax-class frigates, Mr. Fraser said.

"This would not just be for targets. This would be a training support ship. And yes, there are multiple customers internationally," he said.

"It would provide long-term employment for a lot of people."

Meggitt has taken the idea to the Dexter government and would be looking for incentives to make the project work here.

"We’ve made approaches to the government of Nova Scotia saying, ‘Listen, folks, we think we’ve got a hot item here. You guys have got to get engaged in a big way here.’ Otherwise, Meggitt’s got 8,000 people with $2 billion in revenue. We’re in 40 countries. We could do this anywhere."

Mr. Fraser is a former naval officer who spent 15 years in Halifax.

"I’d like to see the work in Canada, just as my American boss would like to see the work done in the States, and his boss, who’s a Brit, would like to see the work done in the U.K. So, at the end of the day, it’s the guy who comes to the table on these big, big projects with all your ducks in a row and can make the compelling case."

Meggitt has talked to Russell Metals Inc. of Halifax about cutting parts for the shipbuilding project.

"We were quite pleased with what we learned," Mr. Fraser said.

"There’s world-class stuff there."

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Business/1158887.html

But in the same day, word is that the Cat is done in Nova Scotia. The ferry has run from Nova Scotia to Maine during the warmer months for the last 10 years and the provincial government has sunk 20 million into the operation. So 180 people will be losing their jobs there.

Must say the timing could have been better for this announcement. Merry Christmas, Bay Ferry.

8 year old boy dies after accident with USCG

A United States Coast Guard stretch defender class boat, commonly known as a 33 footer with five guardsmen on board, slammed into a 24 foot pleasure craft yesterday, Dec 20, just before 18:00hrs. The resulting collision sent five people to hospital; two adults with serious injuries, two children with minor injuries and a third child, an eight year old boy, Anthony Cole DeWeese, died at the hospital, shortly after arriving.

The 13 people aboard the Sea Ray pleasure boat had just finished watching the fireworks in San Diegos harbour, a floating holiday parade was to follow. Media reports say that the father noticed the fast coming USCG at the last minute, and had little time to react, as he estimated the boat doing 30-40 knots. Parade watcher onshore, said the coast guard boat was traveling fast and rapidly changed course, shortly before running into the pleasure craft. The USCG press release state the 33 footer was responding to a vessel grounding at the time.

The NTSB and USCG are investigating the accident. Nobody was thrown in the water as a result and near by 87 footer cutter, Haddock, assisted in the rescue as did private vessels. Both vessels made it back to the dock under their own power, where fire and police aided in the rescue.

You can read more about the accident here and here.