The Bridge Team and paperwork.

No one will dispute how important an effective bridge team is. It could be the difference that will land you on the Takong Kecil or take you safe east off it.

There have been volumes written about the Bridge Team. The Nautical Institute spends a good deal of its energy in increasing awareness about an effective bridge team. And I am sure most if not every Master would agree how an effective bridge team lessens the weight on his shoulders.

Having sailed with ineffective team members many Masters have the habit and consequently the ability to multi task on the bridge and navigate despite the ineffective officer. This would mean that he could handle the situations leaving the sundry paper work to the duty officer effectively cutting him off from the active bridge team.

I am not in anyway implying that paperwork is meaningless. But I think anyone would agree that paper work is of an historical importance. The moment you plot a position, the ship has already moved at least 2-3 cables ahead. Now that plotted position doesn’t help except to show an auditor that the passage plan has been followed. An effective and continuous Parallel index is what will be most effective here.

A similar story plagues the record of soundings, the GPS log and every other log. There is even a terrestrial position fixing log. Now the duty officer has to read off ranges and bearings off the landmarks. Write that down in a log book and then plot a position. Effectively the ship would have moved a lot more ahead than just 0.4miles by then.

Yes the argument here could be to have two officers in addition to the master so that paperwork is not neglected.

But a more effective argument could be to reduce the irrelevant paperwork. Especially so when most of our ships have a printer for the GPS and the echo sounder. Can’t these printers effectively take over the role of record keeping so that you have a more active bridge team member who expends his energy in monitoring parallel indexes and soundings rather than recording them? And is more alert to the fast moving container vessel creeping up close on your stern.

The intention of this article is to set off a debate and improve efficiency and last but not the least, SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT.