Time used at sea.

[vic mcclymont]

#post 49, Ivan, if the Engine was bridge controlled and under control of the Officers of the Watch then surely they are responsible.
When we were under bridge control we were instructed not to interfere with the controls no matter what.
As part of the controls there are/ were an emergency stop and emergency full astern located on the M. E. Consul on the bridge.
Vic

[Ivan Cloherty]

#post 49, Ivan, if the Engine was bridge controlled and under control of the Officers of the Watch then surely they are responsible.
When we were under bridge control we were instructed not to interfere with the controls no matter what.
As part of the controls there are/ were an emergency stop and emergency full astern located on the M. E. Consul on the bridge.
Vic

Vic, I understand your point, but if the engines are not working, how do you control them, surely good seamanship practice would ensure that someone was down below to monitor things, and surely if the Ch.Eng was aware of trouble shouldn't he have advised the Master, (maybe he did, maybe he didn't) surely under those circumstances he would have stationed someone at ER levels as a back up.

Surely a local pilot would have advised a Master that they were going too fast for local conditions,that's why you employ them, for their local experience, the same as tugs to assist in manouvering and also act as a brake if needed.

Haven't got access to any in-depth report, but the jail terms and absolvence of responsibilty on some, just seems a bit skewed to me.

[Lewis McColl]

Unless things have changed or my grey cells are failing me the engine room can over ride Bridge control anytime they feel the need. Certainly was the case on fixed pitched direct drive slow speed engines. The reasons for doing this some masters thought they were driving a Ferrari trying to go from Dead slow ahead to full ahead. Big chunks of metal do not like being abused. Fortunately they cannot do this now as there is a load up programme, but even this can be over ridden in am emergency.

[vic mcclymont]

Ivan, on standby we nearly always had full complement in the E. R. control.
We witnessed some ridiculous movements, but we couldn't interfere as we had no knowledge of what was going on up top.
Any alarm sound we monitored it, but as stated previously we could do nowt.
Vic.

[Ivan Cloherty]

Ivan, on standby we nearly always had full complement in the E. R. control.
We witnessed some ridiculous movements, but we couldn't interfere as we had no knowledge of what was going on up top.
Any alarm sound we monitored it, but as stated previously we could do nowt.
Vic.

Just curious now Vic, if you could do nowt, why be down there at all, I'm only assuming that if the Master was getting no response to his telegraph/joystick input there would be an OOW on the E/R telephone quicker than a seaman into a whores drawers wanting to know why. I find it perplexing that you say there was no over ride, was this peculiar to a particular/type of vessel. If things went wrong in the old days it was a double ring on the telegraph (ahead,stop or astern depending on what was required to let the engineers know that we on the bridge were in trouble and needed immediate engine response

[vic mcclymont]

Ivan, from memory no override in the E. R.
Once on ato all controls were from the Bridge.
A safety feature was two switches one in the E. R other on the Bridge must be be both set on same setting. I. E. atuo or manual.
Vic

[Lewis McColl]

Vic engine room could take control in case of an emergency. There was a switch on the control console informing the bridge that the Engine room wanted to take control. I am sure the engine room switch if moved from the setting for Bridge control , control was automatically returned to the Engine room, failing that there was always the emergency stop.

[vic mcclymont]

Lewis, don't remember the switch as you describe or the emergency stop.
Think on it, the danger of the E. R. staff taking control when manoeuvring in confined area and a dangerous incident occurred there would be hell to pay.
Vic

[Ivan Cloherty]

Lewis, don't remember the switch as you describe or the emergency stop.
Think on it, the danger of the E. R. staff taking control when manoeuvring in confined area and a dangerous incident occurred there would be hell to pay.
Vic

Vic, no one is suggesting that the E/R takes over control without authorisation from the bridge and the engineers go ahead or astern willy nilly when they felt like it, but I cannot possibly conceive that if the bridge lost auto control of the power, that they would not immediately contact the engineer on duty to advise of such and say 'fix it now!!' or 'switch to manual' Are you suggesting that the modern ship has no way of transferring from auto control on the bridge to manual control in the ER to follow engine requests from the bridge. I cannot contemplate any Master being happy to take command of a vessel that had no back up emergency system such as engineers taking orders down below. In the old days when we lost power every engineer and his dog rushed down the ER to get it back on, surely we haven't gone backwards. It was mentioned that there is an emergency stop engine button in the ER, which is quite useless when the engines are already stopped.

And don't worry about the engineers getting into trouble, as we see from this recent judgement that the Master got 5 months jail for the engine failure and the C/E only got two months for failing in his duty to ensure engines were kept available

[Lewis McColl]

Old chief I sailed with phoned the bridge one day, you have two choices, one more start or a toot on the whistle. The compressors could not fill the bottles fast enough to keep up with the starts/stops. If the master and the pilot cannot bring a vessel alongside in a confident manner they should not be on the bridge. Never been on a ship yet that there was not an ESD button on the manoeuvring console and in other areas around the engine room. There was also an Emergency shutdown button on the bridge ESDcontrol-room-extra-large-cargo-ship-all-buttons-panel-emergency-stop-53633407.jpg There you go emergency stop ESD.