Young Highland cows go about their own business as Maersk makes history by inviting, for the first time, a community to meet the company and crew aboard one of its container ships. This is the view from the Clan Lamont HQ on the shore opposite the raft, where the curators, Mary and Jim Lamb, live.

The meeting began on the bridge of Maersk Beaumont, the newest of the company’s 7 B-class ships, of which 5 are in the raft of 6 ships in Argyll’s Loch Striven.

On a day that was a very real demonstration of how seriously Maersk takes its social responsibilities, a series of groups were brought out to the raft from Loch Striven via the Nato jetty and from Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, opposite the entrance to the loch.

Getting there

Approaching the raft from the loch, seeing the astonishingly neat, awesome barrage of ships in this empty and silent landscape, one is struck by its simultaneous alienness and exoticism. Same thing, of course.

As you come alongside – in this case it was Boston on the shore side – the mass of the ship is almost as overwhelming as the realisation that there is literally a mountain to climb to get up there from sea level.

One of the Engineers on the maintenance crew comes down on the accommodation ladder as it is lowered to meet the motor yacht Westwinds, chartered by Maersk to bring the visitors to the raft. Clan Lamont hit the ladder undaunted, with the Lambs climbing fast – Mary’s red stilettos causing a few near heart-attacks amongst the Engineers on ‘tour guide’ duty for the day. (They produced brand new flat rubber-soled shoes for her as soon as they saw her safely across into the accommodation block on Beaumont, host ship for the day. Now that’s social responsibility.

Even more fleet of foot than before, Mary declined the accommodation block’s lift and headed for the stairs. Did she realise we had to climb to the bridge above G-deck? Everyone else was shamed into following the hard way. Faces got a little redder. Breathing got a little faster.  A speechless group eventually staggered onto the bridge to wheeze a ‘hello’ to the welcoming skipper of the raft, Captain David Johnstone and his crew.

Among the visiting party, we should probably except from this infamous slur of breathlessness:

• Andy Lancaster from Toward Moorings and Towage (who had recently towed away to Colintraive the fishing boat Wanderer, She had broken down north of the raft and her Mayday call was also answered by Captain Johnstone in the raft’s little workboat, (they call it ‘Baby B’) beating the Tighnabruaich Lifeboat to the shout.
• Richard Morgans from Clyde Coastguard who coordinated the rescue of the Wanderer and his father, who was one of the last ring-netting fishermen, a highly dangerous but skilled practice now long gone.
• Donald Gibson, skipper of the Westwinds that had brought us to the raft and a lively spirit never short of breath. Last heard, he was offering his services as an actor to Stephen Burt – introduced below – forgetting the crew on hand as ready extras.

These guys were able to engage in conversation while the rest of us turned our faces to the wall for a while.

The Maersk team on the day

Captain Johnstone (left above) is a long-time Maersk skipper. With his current Chief Engineer, Richard Ellet (right above), he is responsible for the entire raft. David Johnstone has, in his career with the company, brought no fewer than 4 Maersk ships out of their yards. (One of these, Maersk Boston, is in the raft.) A skipper in such circumstances is responsible for what is, in effect, a year of in-service sea trials and snagging, to identify and have put right any faults while the ship is within guarantee.

The complex demands of such a responsibility make it a signal honour to be charged with doing it. It is also recognised as creating a special bond between man and ship that’s a cross between mother and midwife. Through its career with you, if, as a skipper you get to stay with it, it will grow through the flighty teenage years to become a familiar operational  partner. The Loch Striven ships are deliberately disabled and hospitalised, which must feel oddly sadistic. And it’s easy to see why it must be an emotional rip when your ship is decommissioned and sent to the breakers yard.

One of Captain Johnstone’s birthings was his own current ship, Maersk Kelso, brought from the Pusan Yard in South Korea. She is currently in the Bay of Bengal under another Skipper’s command while David Johnstone does duty on the raft. His frustration at being parted from her is obvious.

This however is not only a man of the sea, more a man of extremes. Spending his professional life at sea level, he compensates in what he does in his leisure time. Just over a year ago, on 9th November 2008, he fulfilled a lifelong ambition by summiting the 19,341 ft Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest in Africa and one of the legendary ’7 summits’ of the world.

He also did it for charity, simultaneously raising awareness and funds for a charity based in Dublin, near where he has has put down his roots, training for Kilimanjaro on Lugnaquilla mountain in the Wicklow Hills, pretty well in his back garden.

The charity was Aspire, the Asperger’s Syndrome Association of Ireland. He has a personal drive to support this charity since his partner Rene’s academically gifted son has been diagnosed with the syndrome. His description of the Kilimanjaro challenge in the Maersk magazine, Starsight, is powerfully evocative – and he raised 11,000 Euros for Aspire.

Now hungry for more, he has set himself the challenge of taking 3 years to prepare to summit Everest, aiming for May 2012. We’re asking him to keep us in touch with his progress on this and suggest that Argyll folk donate to it when the time comes. We’ll let you know.

On Friday, along with Captain Johnstone, Chief Engineer Richard Ellet and the crew of 9 Engineers were AP Moller Maersk staff flown in for the occasion:

• Stewart Kerr, (second right above) is Superintendant of the 7 B-class ships, all built in Stralsund in Germany and 5 of which are in Loch Striven: Boston, Beaumont, Baltimore,Bentonville and Brooklyn. They are keeping company with the6th ship, the black hulled old lady, Sealand Performance. Stewart is described as: ‘the boss, basically. He looks after all 7 B’s from the shore side, making sure we buy stores, keep within budget etc. He’s also the ‘goto’ guy when we break down – and an all round good egg’. Not a bad testimonial from colleagues. Stewart is a former Maersk Chief Engineer and brought Maersk Baltimore out of the Stralsund yard. He has been at Loch Striven recently, taking noise measurements at sea-level and up the hill, working to reduce as far as possible the harmonics that cause the most harmful disruption to local residents.
• Helene Regnell, (second left above) is Corporate Social Responsibilty Director, based in Copenhagen, on her first experience of Loch Striven and struck by its beauty. She is taking photographs and talking to people in the visiting group, discussing issues and ideas, providing insights into the company’s operations (Maersk is the only company capable of shipping foods frozen to -60C)  and about the company itself – and preparing to report back to HQ.
• Kate Sanderson is the London-based Public Relations Officer for the company. She has arranged the event, invited and liaised with the local community and, from our perspective, has been a very effective, discreet, watchful and open ambassador for Maersk. She and Helena Regnell arrived on Thursday and spent the night on the raft.

The Mission link – Mission 2110, that is

And there is another person present – not from Maersk nor from the community but present as an unusual link between them. He is Stephen Burt, Location Manager for the BBC’s forthcoming new sci-fi television series for children – Mission 2110, described as marriage of The Crystal Maze and Doctor Who. (Stand by for the scoop. This is news. We will shortly be publishing a companion piece to this feature – linked from here – focusing on Mission 21 and the Loch Striven raft.)

Mission 2110 is to be filmed on the ships, and Maersk gave permission for this sort of activity for the first time, motivated by the thought that there could be additional community benefit arising from it.

So, Stephen Burt got his permission; and the condition Maersk attached to it – that there must be community involvement. This will see parties of school children from around the area brought out to the ships twice a week during the three week shooting period for each of he two series to be filmed there. Schoolchildren from nearby are also being brought out in January to test and feedback on the games at the heart of the plot. Their cool is about to hit -60C.

The results of the game tests will be of specific interest to one of the engineers who came up with ideas for some of them. This enterprise is becoming a team effort.

During the various conversations between visitors, crew and company staff, Stephen Burt peels individuals away to show on his laptop a few clips of what is to come in Mission 2110. Having seen these, got a sense of the scenario and explored the area of the ship to be used for the action, this, potentially, has the capacity to be a very big show indeed.

Maersk is donating the facilitation fee the BBC will pay to use the ships, with the addition of a further sum of its own, to local charities nominated by the Loch Striven community.

The B Class ships

5 of the 6 ships in the raft are from the 7-strong B-class, leaving the Stralsund yard in Germany over 2006 and 2007.

They were built for another time, when the heavy fuel oil they burn (and which, from our research, is highly polluting) was, appropriately, dirt cheap. They were built for speed and their undeclared purpose was to run a fast service from the Far East into New York, delivering time-critical cargo at a pace their competitiors could not match.

In trials, fully laden, Beaumont did 32 knots – and 19 knots in reverse. The B-class’s formal service speed is 29.2 knots. At a rating of 4,170 TEU (Twenty foot Equivalent Units), the B’s full load is around 40,000 tonnes of cargo.

The B-class ships whose space age prop shaft (left above) is powered by monster 12-cylinder Watsila-Sulzer 12RTflex96-C engines (right above), normally used to drive ships twice their size at lower speeds (25 knots) than they can do.

But here comes the problem. At full service speed they use around 300 tons of bunker fuel per day. The reality of the waiting list-driven schedule in the shipping world is a 7 year gap between order and delivery. So the B-class speed merchants, conceived of, designed and ordered when fuel oil was cheap, emerged from the Stralsund yard in 2006-2007, into a world where the price of oil was going through the roof.

Heavy fuel oil now costs about  £450 a ton. The Bs use 300 tons a day at full speed – their purpose in life. That’s £135,000 a day when they’re at work at sea and tramping on the power. Such running costs are not commercially viable. It means that they have had to be run at slower speeds to save on fuel costs, immediately losing their planned competitive advantage.  This is why Stewart Kerr describes them as ‘inefficient’.  It is also why he says that, in his view, when the market starts to return to normal, these ships wil be the last to come out of cold lay-up.

They have 4 generators and a standby 5th deck generator), largely to be able to deliver on any heavy-duty refrigeration needed. The 12 cylinder engines, in banks of 6, drive an impossibly long prop shaft (left above). The engine room (above right) was where all the blokes wanted to go and when you see it, words leave you. The engine control room (seen below) is pretty much the width of the ship. The sheer power of these young but already outdated ships is visually magnificent.

And here’s a bizarre insight discovered in discussion on refrigerated cargo. Today, prawns fished in Scotland are frozen immediately and shipped to Thailand for hand-peeling. (This is preferable because in the UK we machine-peel, which leaves the prawns in a less attractive state.) After peeling in the Far East, the prawns are refrozen and shipped back to Scotland. This madness is, of course, undertaken to improve profit margins and is only possible because Thailand is a very low-wage economy.

Life on the raft

As they used to say in Star Trek, ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’ – and not as the crew know it either. Living and working on a silent, cold and still ship is as close to surreal as it gets for a seafarer.

Each of the ships in the raft would normally carry a crew averaging at around 20. Here the entire raft of 6 ships is in the care of 12 people: the Captain; 10 engineers, including the Chief Engineer, the no 2 in rank on a ship; and the single cook.

Here the engineers must do everything, including the cleaning. They put housewives to shame. Every millimetre of he ships is so spick and span they look like the museum exhibits they have effectively become for the duration of the recession.

Order and methodical routine rule. They have to. These ships have to be maintained in a condition where reactivation, when the time comes, will be short and as cheap as possible. Chief Engineer Richard Ellet reckons the engines can be ready to go in a week and a half. This estimate means that the state of suspended animation they are in is a sort of semi-cold lay-up and some of the ships are colder than others.

The second ship inside each side of the raft is warm – that’s Bentonville and Beaumont. Their systems power the 4 cold ships whose needs are modest. This system reduces fuel costs and noise pollution in a rafted lay-up. It also means that, with some crew living on each of the two warm ships, should an emergency arise on any of the 6 ships, crew will, at worst, have to go no further than the next ship.

The crew breakfast daily at 7.00am and meet at 8.00am to decide on the duty allocations for the day.

Every ship is thoroughly checked each day for signs of any changes and the core equipment and systems are maintained on a set schedule. Dehumidification is vital to prevent rusting in the engines and other critical machinery and dehumidifier units run constantly. They feed also to the accommodation deck corridors where cabins are left with open doors so that dry air circulates. With many such decks unlived in, the absence of warm bodies means less humidity. (A dehumidifier unit in action in the engine room can be seen in the right hand photograph above under ‘The B-Class ships’. Look for the yellow flexible pipe snaking downwards from the upper level towards the engine cylinders,)

The crew on Bentonville look after the three outside ships – Brooklyn, Bentonville herself and Baltimore. The crew on Beaumont look after the elderly Sealand Performance (about which they know nothing, including why on earth she is there), Beaumont herself and Boston, the nearest shoreside ship. (In fairness to Sealand Performance – and we know that this is a happy accident, following the Coastguard’s Search & Rescue assessment of the raft, Performance’s flush decks will enable a helicopter to be landed on the raft in any emergency.)

The crew work a 12 hour day and by 8.00pm they have dressed for dinner. At sea their dress would be full uniform. On the raft, with some crew stationed on Bentonville and having to cross 2 ships, often in foul weather, to get to the dining room on Beaumont, this would be impractical. So ‘smart casual’ is the order of the day and nothing less will do.

A young engineer says he welcomes the discipline and the sense of occasion that shapes the day. He says that maintaining standards is critical and that is a formative example for young recruits when they join a ship.

For leisure time, there is satellite television; a phone enabling affordable calls home; and barely adequate dial up Internet access, with shared dongles they buy themselves. The one thing the crew say would make a real difference to their lives on the raft would be broadband. How effective would wifi be in such circumstances?

Then there is a gym and table tennis table. Keeping fit is an imperative to meet the demands of jobs like these with the bewildering series of steep companionway ladders to be climbed through innumerable floors. To make it fun they make it competitive.

Good food is a bright point of a routine day, deprived of a sense of purpose and the adrenaline of movement, arrival and departure. Good food is also why keeping fit is crucial.

The crew do 3 months on and 2 months off. Some may return to the raft after leave. Some may get back to sea. That’s the dream. This is a fluid community. Its relatively fixed link is the one cook, a Filipino who is on a 6 month contract which will see a few sets of crew through duty and leave cycles.

The human cost of cold lay-up

We can imagine most of the business of life on a raft like this from the outside. But there are practical consequences of being assigned to maintain cold lay-ups that those of us outside the shipping industry could not guess at.

On the raft, the non-UK nationals must pay National Insurance where, at sea, they do not. So Lithuanian, Romanian, Filipino and Polish crew members are out of pocket. Maersk know that these men will have significant family responsibilities at home and that this loss of take-home pay can hit hard. The company makes a priority effort to get these crew members back to sea as soon as possible.

The UK nationals on the raft have income tax deducted where, at sea and out of territorial waters, they are paid tax free. This too is a serious financial hit but they say, realistically, that at least they have their jobs.

Allocation to cold lay-up maintenance also means that some careers go into cold storage as well. A young Fourth Engineer needs sea time he cannot get on the raft in order to sit for his Second Engineer’s ticket.

In this situation ships and men alike simply wait and stay in readiness to return to a productive life.

The crew perform their ‘tour guide’ duty impeccably, with consideration, forethought and with obvious passion for their work. Although spending a day on this takes them away from their maintenance routines, we will have been a reasonably welcome diversion.

And afterwards

In our time aboard we have become absorbed in a very specific world, breeding a fast familiarity with crew of whom we knew nothing a couple of hours ago.

They look at the few houses that seem only arms-length away on the shore and they understand the impact on these quiet lives made by their ships.

We look to their coming experience at Christmas and Hogmanay – where those periods for them will be little different from any other (and at Maersk, ships are necessarily dry). This routine mundanity will feel even thinner by their knowledge that ashore and at home, things will be different.

We have come quickly to respect and like these professional and articulate people whose experiences feed our own imaginations. We leave thinking about what we can do to help.

As Westwinds carries us away, the Captain, on his way over to Rothesay to pick up some more visitors, cuts a ceremonial curve of farewell ahead of and across Westwinds.

Ashore again, looking out to the raft, it is already estranged from us, lying there, still, self-contained, ordered. We see, as we did before, two very different worlds keeping close company. But now we’ve been in the ‘other’ one, we know something of it. Yet we belong elsewhere and so, patently, does it. It’s very scale and self-containedness keeps it alien, literally repelling boarders, even of the mind. This is going to be a strange, complex and fascinating relationship, so near and yet so far.

The photographs of the visit to the Maersk raft in Loch Striven are by copyright holder Rebecca Martin. Copyright to the Mission 21 image is owned by the BBC.

Read the developing story of the Loch Striven community, Clydeport and the Maersk raft.

Related Posts

• Loch Striven ship layups: rolling story (217)
• Maersk Mission Loch Striven 2010 meets CBBC Mission 2110 (2)
• Mission 2110 in progress in Loch Striven (2)
• Mission 2110: can young adventurers on Loch Striven save the world (3)
• Loch Striven, Maersk and the media (0)

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