Michael Grey of lloyds List
Monday 3 October 2011
Some years ago I was chairing a conference on quality shipping. It was a sort of high-profile event, with industry leaders shoulder to shoulder in the body of the hall. Everyone was united about quality — it was what they all did with their particular fleets and speaker after speaker arose to acclaim, with disarming modesty, their particular take on this essential component to safe shipping.
Lunch was approaching when some mischief maker — who I hesitate to name because I cannot actually remember who it was — held up his card to speak. We had spent, he noted, a couple of useful hours discussing the importance of quality shipping, but what do we mean, he asked, by the word “quality”? And furthermore, before some clever legally trained mind told us that a quality ship was one that was not substandard, what did anyone mean by this extremely subjective term?
There was, confusion, if not uproar, in the auditorium at this intervention, which seemed to goad virtually everyone into a wish to speak at once. And because both quality and substandard were indeed subjective and ill-defined terms, we nearly missed our lunch. The best, as I recall were some thoughtful ideas on what these things were not, on the grounds that, like the elephant, you knew one when you saw one and it very definitely was not a giraffe.
I was reminded of these fatal few hours of chairmanship when reading the account in this newspaper of the debate at the Annual Conference of the International Union of Marine Insurers where a demand was made for a new definition of what constitutes a ship. There is apparently some confusion as to this point, with various sticklers for precision confused by alternatives such as vessel, craft, boat or suchlike.
I have some sympathy with this difficulty as I used to get angry letters from a fierce Norwegian shipowner for my treating the words as virtually interchangeable. I know English can be very confusing for those charged with translation, and were some gigantic claim to hinge on such a definition, one would wish to be absolutely precise about such matters.
Such is the pace of maritime technology that what was once perfectly obviously a ship, craft, vessel or boat, sometimes defies description. Recently I received from a friend a series of pictures showing the demolition (we better call it recycling) of what appeared to be a pretty substantial offshore oil platform somewhere off the Indian coast. This was accomplished, so the sequential photographed showed, by the strangest craft I have ever seen; a self-propelled pair of enormous barges linked together by a pair of gigantic steel arches, the apex of which was sufficiently tall to tower over the doomed structure it was then able to lift in one and carry off triumphantly to its stowage it on a transport barge.
The VB-10000, which I understand was working for Marathon Oil, was able to make short work of the 2,600-tonne topside, the whole lift being accomplished in but a few hours. But if I had been proceeding around the Indian coast and had happened to encounter this monster, I would have rubbed my eyes in disbelief. I suppose it is a ship, craft, vessel or boat, but I don’t suppose I would have recognised it as such.
Indeed, if I had been sitting harmlessly in my box at Lloyd’s and some chap had asked me to take a line on it, my first reaction would have been to refer him to an underwriter specialising in civil engineering, or bridges, or even the ceremonial arches found fashionable by mad dictators. “Ships is what I chiefly insure, old boy,” I would have told him. But there are all manner of quite extraordinary floating objects masquerading as ships at sea these days, and the offshore industry has quite a few of them, if by no means a monopoly.
I was brought up to believe that a ship had a bow, a stern and a hull in between these extremities, but there are figments of the naval architect’s imagination which make such views ridiculous simplicity.
There are crane barges, and workover barges, and semi-submersibles for every conceivable use, from drilling holes in the seabed to providing luxury accommodation for offshore workers.
There are dive support ships and craft that trench the sea bottom for other craft to lay cables and pipes in, and still other craft for burying the contents with great lumps of stone ballast. There are all manner of submersibles, and even a craft that tips up on its end to enable brave scientists (braver than me, anyway) to measure the height of swells.
There is a whole class of offshore supply craft with a new bow profile which is so strange that unless you carefully plot it on the radar, you cannot tell whether it is going astern, going ahead, or submerging. And we haven’t even got on to floating storage units, full of oil or gas, or even coal!
But all of them are ships, craft, vessels or boats, even structures, when not attached to the seabed or shoreline, so you can see why the IUMI believes the time has come for a bit more precision. But first, should we define ‘precise’?