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8th May 2012, 02:55 PM
#11
Our Commonwealth friends
Regarding our Indian and Pakistani Officers.
Having sailed with them as well as deck and engine & catering crew I can honestly say the following.
For the ratings, it was like having a bunch of primary school kids to look after regarding their welfare but they were damm good workers and in the main well trained and skilled but would never own up to doing any damage even if it was obvious that they had damaged something.
Some of the situations you had to handle were quite comical, such as the secunny who refused to come out of his cabin because the third mate had put a recruitment poster featuring a press gang on the bulkhead outside his cabin and he (the scunny) believed that the rest of the Indian crew had hired them to murder him in his bunk!. Took the poster down, got grateful thanks over and over again and a secunny returning to his duties.
Indian Officers rerrified me. They believed radar over their own eyes and even when told by a VTS they were on a collision course refused to believe the VTS as their radar said otherwise, or the Indian officer supposodly carrying out weekly lifeboat maintenance by standing one deck above the lifeboat shouting at the rating in the boat telling him to hold up every object in the boat one by one and tell him the condition of it, whilst he in his immaculate white boiler suit, ticked each object off on his list.
And they wondered why you got angry with them.
Rgds
Capt. John Arton (ret'd)
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