What a great pleasure to meet these guys at the harbour - they could not have been more helpful and forthright about their work. At first glance, the glide of these orange powerboats up and down Belfast Lough seems an almost effortless task, but close up this is a very skilled trade and constant management of risk 24/7 in high and low seas, jumping from ship to boat to land taking safe control of the great volume of steel vessel coming in and out of this busy port. Though a hub of...

On this episode of What's Going On With Shipping, Sal Mercogliano - former merchant mariner and maritime historian at Campbell University - we compare and constrast the grounding and salvage of MV Ever Forward (March 13, 2022) with that of MV Ever Given (March 23, 2021).

Google Maps and ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display and Information System) can be considered to essentially serve the same purpose. While Google Maps is used for finding our way on land, the ECDIS facilitates navigation at sea.

At one point, the Captain on the Ship while being highly respected, also carried great responsibility and had the ultimate accountability for everything on board. But this respect, responsibility and accountability has not come overnight, or just when the Captain wears his four stripes.

From deck 13, we can see the harbor pilot jump from the ship to his little boat after navigating us out of Lyttleton

Although it cannot be said that ship piloting is the world’s oldest profession, most maritime experts do agree that pilotage does date back to antiquity.

This movie belongs to the operation of ships with POD propellers and discusses the approach for using a vector model from only the pods’ thrust forces as resulting force to imagine the potential effect of the pods on manoeuvring motion.

MPA 7 and MPA 8 are our latest 15m Pilot Boat built for the Maritime & Port Authority of Singapore.