Safe ice sailings on Primorsk
Marstal computer training secures skill on ice-tankers
How does a shipping company with a large portfolio of ice-strengthened tankers on order provide the necessary experienced crew even before sailing on the tankers? The answer is: put all the data into a computer and send the navigators on a training course at Marstal Navigationsskole.

The three screen workstations at Dover CNIS are highly configurable. Here a watch officer takes a mandatory report from a vessel approaching the South West channel.

Latest IT makes Dover
Strait passage safer
The Dover Strait is the world’s busiest waterway with almost 60,000 movements in 2006 down the South West (British-monitored) channel and approximately the same number up the North East (French-monitored) side.
The total tonnage moving through this relatively narrow channel is close on three billion. The figure does not take account of the daily criss-crossing of ferries, which add many thousand more movements.

A high-tech trip across
the English Channel
It perhaps ought not to be surprising that mariners prefer to stick to what they know. Even when it comes to the digital bridge and advanced radar chart plotters, experienced sailors do not always enjoy working with an unfamiliar system. It is not unheard of, for instance, for complaints to be made that a newer system such as Furuno has more data on screen and is therefore more confusing to work with than a more familiar competitor like Sperry’s Bridgemaster.

3D – the next generation
of nautical charts
In May last year Thomas Porathe from the Information Design Department of Innovation, Design and Product Development at Mälardalen University, defended his doctoral thesis about what he calls “The next generation of nautical charts”.

Internet provides valuable
aid for winter navigation
Although the performance of ice strengthened vessels tends to improve all the time, the winter navigation skills of deck officers on vessels visiting the Baltic Sea in general seem to go the opposite way. Now a new web service has been opened at the address www.baltice.org to assist navigators.

AIS makes life easier
for service providers
The ship surveillance system AIS, short for Automatic Identification System, has turned out to be a useful support tool for a number of service providers in the Maritime sector. From the start on July 1, 2002, when the equipment had to be installed on all new ships above 300 GT, it had a bad reputation as just another government imposed gimmick brought down on the heads of mariners. It has certainly changed into a quite useful and highly valued tool that can ease up the daily work.

Simulators are more and more often used for the training of critical situations. Photo: Pär-Henrik Sjöström

Towards the virtual ship
In the foreseeable future the bridge simulator will be the central part of
a complete virtual ship. Originally, bridge simulators were used mainly as a means of learning ship handling in maritime colleges or the shipping companies’ own training centres.

The Petuja in harsh weather. Photo: Joachim Sjöström

Quantum leaps in forecasting extreme weather
Extreme weather at sea is nothing new, but in the past few years the extreme has gone from bad to worse. Therefore the demand on weather forecasting is increasing all the time, not least from shipping. Weather routing has gone from being convenient to become a necessity.