Greetings, Yankee Jockers. Apologies for the unexplained absence. It has been a funny couple of months.
To be completely honest, I have had time to write. Indeed, I have been writing plenty. But since the Dali incident and article, I’ve been feeling a bit of a change in my internal constitution that has made the act of public writing seem a little inappropriate. I’ve been too uncertain of things, and too engaged in confidential matters to be able to write freely. It has been destabilising.
It began with the combination of reading Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary, and the fever-pitch level of paranoid chatter about the maritime industry circulating the internet in certain circles.
A few engagements in London also left me feeling like the capital has fallen. That the government and the inner sanctum of the clubs that I’m not invited to are so insulated from reality, and so besieged by uncertainty, that the centre is now a void.
The department for transport can’t answer what it means to be ‘a British ship’ any more, because the people who work in the British government don’t appear to think that Britishness is real at all.
People who live on the edge of society need the centre to hold more than anyone. I don’t like this cultural experiment that has been going on, and I think it only a matter of time now before our governments and our flimsy institutions are scattered to the wind. And I’m not too happy about that, since I still have to make a living in the meantime while waiting for the demise.
No matter. It’s just good intel to know that your nation-state will likely be unrecognisable and functionally unavailable when making your next ten-year business plan.
Starting McGilchrist’s book feels revelatory. The opening chapters are so densely packed with social and biological facts that seem to have explanatory power, that I often had to pause and reflect on past relationships and life events. Opening old wounds and reliving them in light of new information can feel a bit like involuntary sky-diving. A good rush, but not necessarily a welcome or expected one.
Finishing the book was, however, rather a different experience for me. I’m not a psychologist, and although I have a science degree, I’m not research-minded. I’m an ops guy. So it was a tortuous slog at times. I was grateful that my average commute to the marina was 128 miles per day. Plenty of time to skip back and re-listen to audiobook chapters that I did not fully grasp. Traffic jams became a welcome moment of contemplation.
The audio version of The Master and His Emissary lasts over 27 hours. The print version is over six hundred pages in length. The gist is that people are getting caught up in the details of and missing the point of everything. And that as a culture, the West (, and increasingly the East), is dominated by this autistic/schizophrenic mode of being, it becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare of reinforced myopia at a societal level.
Well, until the inevitable collapse.
Yep. Great. Got it. Thanks, Iain.
SO, now what!?
The problem with writing a scientific treatise on the decline of right-brain thinking is that it materialises and concretises the very problem by naming it.
Describing problems like that doesn’t go any distance toward solving them. You can’t (as several Substackers have implied since reading this tome), go say to people ‘start using your right brain more!’
You cannot rationally deal with excessive rationality. It’s like pointing out that Microsoft Windows is essentially malware and Google and Amazon are spyware. Knowing that doesn’t mean we can stop using them.
That was the problem with Dawkins, et al. They just went around shouting at everyone to ‘be rational’.
I’m certainly not trying to say that Iain McGilchrist is of that ilk. Quite the opposite. I found him tremendously thoughtful, deeply educated, penetratingly insightful and necessary. But it’s just, what do I do with all that now?
It’s hard to integrate philosophy with life.
As McGilchrist helpfully points out, philosophy is a disease that purports to cure itself. But doesn’t.
The same can be said for:
· Corporate nation states
· QE/Fiat spending
· Multi-generational ‘national’ debts
· Identity politics
· YouTuber’s Calls To Action.
I’ve taught a couple of training courses since we last ‘spoke’, including one that I wrote myself. I have developed a fairly niche training course for shoreside maritime services professionals, to help them better understand the collision avoidance regulations.
In so doing, I have been trying to help solve the very problem that McGilchrist describes. They gave me a room full of PhDs, Master’s degrees and brains, who make a very decent living being ‘experts’. High-flying boffins all.
The problem with specific expertise is precisely that it is not general. These fine people have spent years dipping in and out of the corpus of maritime law and regulations and fishing for a specific element relevant to the current project they are working on. Their primary role is then to gather data, apply metrics, and quantitatively assign a ‘risk’ value to things like the risk of collision for an offshore platform, a piece of port infrastructure, or vessels operating within the site boundary of an offshore wind farm.
Often, in risk analysis, the rules are cherry-picked to fit the data. This can happen just as much as data being cherry-picked to fit the desired outcome. It is not necessarily corruption or malicious intent. That’s just the way we think now.
My course – which went reasonably well for a pilot course, according to feedback – was designed to get them thinking about the wholeness of the regulations. The definitions. The characters. The alphabet of the sea. The grey areas. The exemptions, exceptions, and the finer points of what constitutes responsibility at sea.
The International Regulations for the Prevention of Collision at Sea are thoroughly British in evolution and character. The COLREG convention is the acronym we use because the abbreviation (IRPCS) is too cumbersome for conversation. Even though the word ‘COLREGs’ somehow implies grammatically that these are regulations describing how to have a collision, rather than avoid one. The regs are based on the simple principles of:
- You are always responsible.
- Actions speak louder than words. The aspect you present to the world is how you communicate.
- Don’t hit anything! Ever!
- Nobody should ever, ever, ever break the rules, under any circumstances.
- Except when they need to break the rules, then they absolutely, 100%, jolly well better get on and break the rules, and get themselves out of danger.
- Common sense determines when it comes to discerning when to follow rules, and when to ditch them
- Everyone at sea has as much right to exist as the other. Might does not make right, and so there is no such concept as ‘right of way’, or a necessary evil.
- The precautionary principle applies at all times.
Fairly good rules for life. Although sadly, few professionals actually realise the full significance that these rules of the road could play in their lives, if they applied its logic to all aspects of their conduct in the world.
I’ve been on a couple of ships recently too. The last one I was on prior to this was an absolute pleasure. A futuristic cable layer with all the bells and whistles, an open-minded Master and a crew whose management and safety cultures were just best in class. They made me feel so welcome that when I finished my survey activities I was up on the bridge giving lessons in the finer points of electronic navigation and helping the bridge team troubleshoot their ECDIS.
It was a high-functioning environment of professional excellence.
This ship is different.
It isn’t a terrible ship. Probably more typical for the offshore world as a whole. In fact, I’d even say above-average, globally. But that isn’t saying much given how stagnant and broken maritime labour and education have become.
Built in India ten years ago, you’d think this vessel was much older. Rust is cancer for ships, and this girl looks like she’s got the nautical version of advanced childhood leukaemia. There is pitting and corrosion everywhere. The tap water is brown, like the house in Fight Club. The carpentry feels warm and welcoming at first, compared to the stainless steel on most ships, but the detailing is crude. It’s as though it was just built as they went along, rather than from a planned drawing. All of the little curtain hangers that close off my bunk to the rest of the cabin are cracked and broken. The curtain is quite nice in itself, but when I went to draw it closed to stop the glare of glow-in-the-dark signs keeping me awake, I cut my finger on the improvised fishhooks that now hold it in place.
I have found five or six different safety problems each time I take a walk on deck. I’ve reported each one through the appropriate channels, only to receive an excuse or dismissal from the Master before I’ve even finished my sentence. Or for the project crew to take the report, log it, generate further reports, and thank me for the additional statistical input for their model.
One of them even said ‘It’s only for statistics’.
Needless to say, recording safety observations is not supposed to only be for statistics. You’re actually supposed to go fix the blooming problem before it becomes an incident!
One thing that really annoyed me was that I reported loose plastic garbage on deck, after I came in from an inspection. This was noted, logged, and discussed. It was then broadcast across three contracting firms in their respective daily reports and discussed next morning in the daily satellite call involving project crew, vessel crew and shoreside management. That afternoon – 24 hours after the initial observation – we went and did a dedicated ‘safety-walk’ around the main deck, with all heads of department present. Not only was the garbage still present from the initial report the day before, but the vessel Master was just ushering us past it and trying to do his best Officer Barbrady impression: ‘OK, move along folks. Nothing to see here’.
You then had me (3rd party surveyor), and five other managers representing various contracting firms (each paid about £1000 per day to be here) picking up arm-full piles of garbage that had been dropped and ignored by the project and vessel crew. Not only were we clearing harmful trip and slip hazards out of the way of the crew, but we were keen to get loose plastic garbage off the deck before the wind and waves increased and blew it into the ocean, where it becomes not only a pollutant but a potential financial and reputational liability.
The over-arching heavenly mission of an offshore wind farm project is supposed to be about improving the environment. Whether you agree if they achieve that or not, is beside the point. That is the stated mission objective. So it is a sad state when guests who are just passing through the vessel for a few days care more about the health, safety and environmental protection of a ship than your own sailors and skippers. And possibly even the charterers who are paying for the whole show.
The management on board seems not to be ‘on-mission’. Rather, they see their customers not as potential repeat clients, but as a temporary and nosey nuisance to be endured.
It’s all fine. But everything is just a little bit crap. And it just seems to be coming out of a little bit of cynicism.
The ship was built in India, is flagged in the Marshall Islands, owned and operated by an Australian company, and crewed by Polish citizens. The project managers who have contracted the vessel are mostly continental Europeans, but most of the lads embarked on deck to climb the towers and rig the subsea cables into the offshore turbines are from the north of England, or are fellow Jocks. The boat has been down in West Africa for a while and by the looks of the barricades and anti-piracy gear, in the thick of it.
The dated décor, tattoos, poor fashion sense of those embarked and the constant swearing do give it a sort of war-time vibe on board. There are a lot of Andy Kaufman and Live Schriber lookalikes among the Poles. Albeit a sort of charity shop version, with a thousand-yard death stare. With poor internet, no TVs in the cabins, and no alcohol, a lot of guys end up in the gym or doing the prison walk on deck. Smoking is a full-on pastime for some.
Almost everyone is polite and nice, however, and the younger deck officers are clearly less cynical than their superiors. Their hopes, dreams and souls haven’t been crushed, yet.
It is ironic then that I remember it was an old Polish skipper who taught me that when something is wrong on board there is always one primary cause:
‘The fish is rotting from the head’ – said Captain Waldemar.
I only sailed with Waldemar twice, and he was an absolute hazard with computers and electronics. But he was a really memorable old gentleman. He also had puppies at home and would crack me up every time his wife would email him a photo of them, and he’d say with his squeaky little accent: ‘Scott let me show you my poopy. Oh, he is so beautiful, my poopy’.
Here it is a little different. I’ve gone into what I call ‘spider mode’.
When I lived in Charleston, and then Mount Pleasant in South Carolina, there used to be these tiny little spiders you’d get. They were small and almost translucent. Either on the porch or sometimes in a high-ceiling corner. You could hardly even tell they were there, and they even moved slowly. Somehow whenever I saw one though, I knew that it knew I was looking at it. Not like spiders at home in Scotland. These were weird.
I call them ‘ghost spiders’. They creeped me out.
I think they were really called Yellow sacks. They are venomous, but not deadly. Somehow I just felt that I should leave them alone, which is uncharacteristic for me. Especially if you consider how I used to go after the Palmetto bugs with a claw hammer (the apartment was a rental). But their transparency struck me as something of an interesting strategy.
That’s how I’ve become on this ship. Silent. Watching. Waiting. Invisible.
I can be venomous too. I did have the authority to prevent this ship from working here, but like I said. They weren’t ever actually that bad. Just generally a bit pants.
Without going into interminably dull details about paint, and shackles, and the nuances of DP operator technique, etc, it’s enough to say that nothing in itself is really ‘out-of-limits’, or a ‘ship-stopper’ here. But there are a lot of little details, that add up to a bigger story of indifference, defensiveness, and Teflon-Shoulders among management.
My essay on manners a while back is important to remember. What is the difference between a ghost spider who watches, and a ghost spider who bites?
Manners.
I may not be able to engage the management here into better housekeeping or improving their practices and safety culture. And my attempts to engage in discussion may be instantly shut down with ‘I know, I know’. But I’ve been treated politely and professionally. The food and hospitality have been wonderful. And when I did stop a potentially serious unsafe act, I was thanked.
That is enough to show me that they do care about the big things, if not the details.
But the devil is in the detail. And that’s what has me on edge looking for things. If the attitude was less defensive and more willing to listen or learn, I wouldn’t have any misgivings. I’d be doing hours and hours of unpaid overtime, tutorials and making friends among the crew, like on the last boat.
But not with this lot. They are closed. They don’t listen, because they think they know enough.
I can tell you now, that the outcome will be that this vessel will irritate the client, and ‘Do Not Rehire’ will be stamped in their file, and they’ll be on their way back down to mediocrity and hazardous work of Nigeria and Benin before you can say cabbage and pork soup.
So who knows what is going on? Is it the skipper who doesn’t care? Or has he had the care knocked out of him after decades of being neglected and abused, like a naughty poopy, by an unscrupulous owner?
Finding out what’s gone wrong in a safety culture is something I love doing, but that’s unfortunately not what I’ve been engaged to do here.
Instead, tomorrow, they’re going to drop me off on an offshore wind turbine that’s under construction (using an absolutely awesome bit of kit called a type-E Ampelmann gangway). I’ll wait there for a couple of hours and then hope that another ship comes and picks me up by a similar method and takes me back home to the UK.
Is it called being marooned if it’s voluntary?
People do sometimes get stranded on partially built offshore wind turbines, so they have sleeping bags and some ration packs out there for me in case the weather picks up and that happens. Although there are no toilets, so – if it all goes pear-shaped – I may have to pollute the marine environment after all. Although I’m sure the marine life prefers the organic sort of pollution anyway.
I know people hate offshore wind farms. But I think that’s mostly because they’re built using taxpayers’ money as incentives or collateral, then auctioned off to foreign owners who gain all the profit. But the indirect environmental benefits they provide include:
- The submarine cables provide an accidental marine sanctuary where trawlers are unable to rake up the seabed. Therefore accidentally allowing the ravaged benthic environment of the North Sea (& Baltic) to begin to recover slightly.
- They act as an artificial reef and are teeming with lobsters.
- The submarine cables act like a giant underfloor heating system for the ocean attracting bottom-feeding fish to their slightly warmer waters. Thereby welcoming them to partial sanctuary from trawlers.
- There isn’t actually any concrete in these monopile foundations, they are solid steel, hammered into the seabed by a heavy lift vessel. So they’ll stick around for a long time providing these benefits, long after their insignificant ability to generate electricity has been blown off-grid by a Russian warhead-induced tsunami.
I won’t be sad to leave this vessel. The crew were nice enough, but I don’t need to know any more stories about how this guy has only slept with prostitutes for the last 25 years, or how that guy fell and broke his ankle and tried to work through it, etc. The sound of two Polish cooks shouting and screaming at each other in English language, even with the best Andy Kaufman impressions in mind, is wearing thin. Although the cooks arguing in English was actually more inclusive and welcoming than the four Polish officers refusing to speak English in my presence for almost the entire duration of my survey on the bridge. Despite English being the official operating language on board.
I think if they’d even just listened a bit better, it could have been different. But they don’t even have the sense to pretend to listen or pretend to care. They don’t even know the game they are in.
No. I have had enough of this one. It’s not funny any more.
Like my interest in politics, my reason for being here dwindled the moment I realised that there was no point in trying to make things better if they don’t want them to be better. That isn’t the game being played here. So, like those who believe in politics, I’ll leave them to act out their own little slice of hell on earth and move on to the next one.
I don’t know if there was ever a golden age of seafaring, or if the officer class ever had a broad understanding of good leadership in the Merchant Navy.
In fact, I doubt it.
However, I don’t think it is beyond the reach of any company, manager or leader to improve. Leaders just need to be able to listen up. As well as listen down.
What does that mean?
As Matthieu Pageau points out in his excellent book, The Language of Creation, the leader occupies both a spatial and temporal place. He occupies both a vertical and a horizontal axis. His role is to act as an interface between heaven and earth.
To put that in concrete material terms that even a simple sailor can understand:
- A captain needs to lead himself to become the interface between what he knows should happen, and what does happen.
- He needs to listen to those above him – the warmongers, the owners, the charterers, the flag state, the port state, the coastal state, maritime custom and maritime law.
- He needs to be able to transmit the principles gathered from those higher-order ideals, and transmit them down through his ranks, and onto his vessel.
- He needs to lead his officers, crew and contractors to do the same, each at their own appropriate level.
- And he needs to get them to want to make those ideals real in the world and hold them accountable when they fall short of that aim.
- And, he needs to get off his arse and away from safety reports and statistics and do the damned ‘safety-walks’, and inspections, and interact with his own crew before he is forced to do so by outside parties. Micromanagement isn’t always a bad thing!
- He needs to put his hands on things and on the people in his care. That’s literally what ‘management’ means.
- He needs to polish and refine the things on his own deck and see the problems as problems from the perspective of the bottom.
- And then – only then – does he have the authority to serve his crew, and the knowledge to lead those above him in the hierarchy.
- Then he can steer the stars in heaven, like a real captain, instead of cowering from the gaze of the ideal.
It starts very simply:
- You have two eyes, two ears, and two hands – but only one mouth. Use them both in that order, and that proportion.
- Pause for at least one second before you answer any observation, comment or question, instead of reflexively making noise.
- Learn, and use people’s names.
- Do the right thing, because it is the right thing, and not because you got caught in the wrong.
- Build trust.
Try it. That’s a good start.
Now, look at me, look at me. You are the captain now!
I can’t blame people. But at the same time, I can’t help them if they are not interested.
This is true of all of us, all the time.
If we complain, and feel sorry for ourselves, and helpless then we get nowhere. Poverty, misery and agony are the default state of things. If you don’t believe me, just sit and wait. These things will come.
Since the governments of the world betrayed all of our ideals in 2019, many of us have felt this kind of false helplessness and a kind of nervous urgency that awaits an impending unknown disaster. Living in a world without trust is exhausting, and unsustainable. We need to get over it. I for one do not believe that the way to do that is through politics, or by debate, or by protest. I think the only way the world gets better, is if we start to make ourselves better.
SO let us try listening, up. And listening down. Rebuild some trust in your own life, and see what happens from there.