Maersk Mission Loch Striven 2010 meets CBBC Mission 2110

Driving down the east side of a largely frozen Loch Eck, the mooring buoys at Coylet – normally living things in a tug-of-war with the surface water, lie like litter on the ice – more jetsam than flotsam.

The journey back to the laid-up ships in the Maersk raft on Cowal’s secluded Loch Striven is very different from the one we reported at the end of November 2009. Then it was bright sunshine, now it’s grey skies with a bitter driving wind carrying wet sleet.

Last time we were going to cover the first community engagement Maersk had ever held on board one of its ships. This time we’re there to check out how the raft of ships and their small maintenance crew of 12, under Raft Skipper, Captain David Johnstone, are living with a resident 60-strong film crew aboard.

Co-existence

The BBC is making two series of Mission 2110 (twenty-one ten), a new sci-fi series for CBBC, due to air in April 2010. Maersk is to donate to local charities the facilitation fee it will receive from the BBC.

We’re publishing a separate story on what we discovered about the filming of the series on the ships and the current state of play – but this is about the ships and about Maersk finding itself and its ships involved in – starring in – a world different from continually developing its business of shipping cargo to all points of the globe.

What is happening on the raft is the co-existence of parallel universes – three of them.

There is the disciplined, professional daily maintenance work of the raft’s engineering crew – the core activity for the company which must go on uninterrupted, in its normal steady, methodical rhythms.

There is the work of the film crew with logistics you could hardly grasp. It took six trips of the MV Lyrawa Bay, with a 40 tonnes load each time, to get the equipment, props and costumes out to the raft. There are the children, sixteen of them in each of two series. And there are 12 more members of the crew, living ashore in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, a boat journey across from the entrance to Loch Striven. Quartering the full film unit party on the raft would have meant warming up a third ship and the cost would have been prohibitive.

Then there is the fantasy world of Mission 2110, with terror, fear, challenges and a shrinking deadline to save the planet.

The three worlds merge from time to time – obviously in the practicalities of living side-by-side but also because off duty crew can watch the filming and some will even appear it – albeit unrecognisably.

With Maersk’s permission, the ships themselves have been amended to accommodate the needs of the film crew, with holes cut in the steel hatch covers to allow set and other large items to be lowered direct to the cargo holds of the ships where recurring scenes are shot.

Up on the bridge of Maersk Beaumont, the newest of the  5 B-class container ships on the raft and the main ‘warm ship’ maintaining the vital systems of the ‘cold’ ships alive, all is calm and ordered. There is no evidence at all of that exotic and manic other life going on – other than occasional bursts of internal radio traffic asking for the Captain’s permission for this and that.

For the skipper, a key arrangement is the protection of crew meal times. These are the periods of sanctuary and comfort in the normal working day on the raft and nothing must disrupt that ritual.

So the ‘sittings’ put the crew’s normal schedule first and the film unit personnel work around that.

The BBC have two cooks on board, adding to the one cook employed by Maersk for the crew’s needs. This makes his life less solitary and the three work together, with the BBC feeding the entire combined company on the raft.

A crew mess is assigned to the young actors as recreational space for the evenings. There’s a flat screen TV there and they have their Play Stations and a Nintendo Wii. According to Captain Johnstone, though, with a 6.15am call each morning and a busy day running between tutoring and filming, by the time they’ve eaten their evening’s dinner, they tend to opt for a prompt ‘lights out’. And segregation rules, with the boys quartered on Bentonville and the girls on Beaumont – two  ships between them.

The film unit takes power from the ship’s generators, which is, of course, measured for accounting purposes.Both sides have been surprised by how little they actually use. The Maersk engineers, used to seeing the huge power needs required to support the internal systems on these ships and their refrigerated cargo quotients (this is where the money in shipping is today) see the film unit’s needs as tiny.

The life of the ships and the engineers on the raft, the very alien world of these floating warehouse villages, feeds the experience of the young actors and the entire film crew alike.

The exoticism of the film world, its ways of working and its own creative achievements coming to life before their eyes, enriches the routine experience of the engineering crew on the raft.

There is a synergy in this relationship that each partner in it will carry with them from now on. Each has lived alongside and grown to know something of a world that would never normally be open to them.

The day party

Aboard for the day’s recce, guided by Kate Sanderson (above, extreme left with Captain David Johnstone next left)) from the Maersk media team, are two groups of people.

There is a local media cabal of ourselves and The Buteman, the often innovative weekly newspaper for the Isle of Bute. Editor Craig Borland is accompanied by Neil Hendry, a student from Rothesay Academy on a week’s work experience with the paper. (We hope he realises how hugely he lucked out on this assignment.)

Keeping us company – and adding a new strand of insights to the experience – is a team of three young Maersk business personnel based in Liverpool but dealing with ports all around the UK. Together they have just won the Blue Riband award for outstanding achievement. Their innovative and energetic business development work has brought new trade to the company and identified future targets.

• Sarah (second from right, above)works with ‘onboarding’ – familiarising new clients with the world of cargo shipping
• Joe (centre, above) focuses on ‘recoverable materials’ – raw materials for recycling which are pulverised and literally poured into containers for transport.
• Sean (right, above) is concerned with ‘general forwarding’, his area of experience with a previous company, Delmas. A General Forwarder is a middle man, matching producers to clients and arranging transport from supply to demand.

Their team ethic is powerful. Together and individually these guys are the sort of staff any company would be lucky to have – alert, interested, driven, competitive, engaged and fired with loyalty to a company they deeply respect. Sarah says: ‘Maersk will always be the biggest carrier in the world (it does about 70% of the business) because that’s what it is and it will work to stay there’.

Certainly, the focus of this young team speaks for a company that understands the need for continual strategic change if it is to live and succeed in an organic relationship with the fast-changing world around it.

Shore-based staff rarely get anywhere near a ship so this is a rare privilege for Sean, Sarah and Joe and one which they wholeheartedly throw themselves into, hungry for the experience.

When we have coffee, the Blue Riband team are presented with a single Blue Riband biscuit – the last one aboard and rescued from the ravenous hordes by Captain Johnstone, specially for the occasion. None of them quite like to eat it. It may have been a lighthearted moment but it is already more than a biscuit.

The Argyll mole

There is a surprise in store for us. The current Chief Engineer on the raft, following Mike Hudson and Richard Ellet, is a Dalmally man.

Stuart Underwood is not only a marine engineer at this level, he is a passionate crofter during leave (teased incessantly by Captain Johnstone for being obsessed with cattle)  and is also the father of Iona Underwood who plays the tenor drum and of Cameron, a piper in the Novice Band of Inveraray & District Pipe Band’s (IDPB) two bands. He is also uncle to two more Underwoods who play in the IDPB’s  Grade 1 Band, Grade 2 World Champions last season. These nieces are piper Laura Underwood and snare drummer, Amy Underwood.

He didn’t opt for the posting to the raft – sailors normally pay no tax as their lives are peripatetic but when they are on the static raft they must pay UK tax – a big hit on their normal take-home salary.

He’s happy enough though, as the upside is that he sees more of his family than he would normally do on a tour of duty. After his next leave, however, he’ll be back off to the wide blue yonder.

He takes us on a tour of Beaumont – except for the cargo hold which we will see later when we watch the BBC unit film in the hold of sister ship, Maersk Boston, the nearest ship to the east shore of Loch Striven, looming above the scattered houses of the little community.

This, of course, is what brought us here in the first place, supporting this tiny community which was simply rolled-over by the brutish corporate social irresponsibility of Clydeport, who have never consulted them in placing the raft in the one place in the loch where it utterly dominates their lives. (There were 4-5 other possible locations where the Maersk ships could have been instructed to lay up but this was the one that would least discommode the business interests of the absentee landlord of the Loch Striven estate, Peter Blacker – so what do the lives of a few residents matter? They did to us and they should to everyone.)

Anyway, Stewart Underwood leads an awestruck audience through the giant mysteries of the ship.

• He talks us through the engine room – an industrial cathedral if ever there was one;
• skirts the great tanks of compressed air that are used in pre-ignition of the engines;
• zips around the boilers;
• points up the de-salination plant that allows the ship to produce its own drinking water (sampled by choice by us at lunch – and as good as any filtered water available at home);
• opens the door on a meticulously coded spares store (Maersk are evidently famous for coding);
• plunges into the workshop – any ship must be able to do its own running repairs at sea;
• and remarks that the sewage system and the oil and water separators are the first focus of any inspection team coming onboard ship.

A question from us on whether engine modifications would be needed (they would) if the major powers acted together to outlaw the use of bunker fuel as the massively polluting propellant of choice for commercial cargo shipping – brought a new insight. These ships carry a variety of fuels to enable them to meet the requirements of different shipping zones they sail through. California is, typically, unlike any other.

Stewart casually throws in some numbing statistics – like the length of the propellor shaft serving the mid-ship engine (100 metres – one section pictured left) and the diameter of the single screw (8.5 metres) driven by the B-class ships’ unusually powerful engines (they were built for a speed the have never been able to use because the price of oil rose astronomically between their design and their coming into service over 7 years later).

He mentions the 5 onboard generators – necessary to provide the degree of refrigeration services Maersk can offer.

Eyes spanning the width of our faces and eyebrows under our hairlines by this stage, we stagger off for lunch.

Stagger is the word. Every step down in these floating sky-scrapers has to be climbed again afterwards. Ignoring the additional depth of the cavernous cargo hold which, by then, we hadn’t been exposed to, you’re looking at the equivalent of a 14 floor building. Conversation died away as we climbed.

Before we leave Stewart, we discover one more thing. Unsurprisingly, the most dangerous cargo carried is munitions. Unlike other containerised cargo which is stored on the quayside awaiting shipment, munitions containers are brought direct to the ship and lifted aboard immediately They are then stored separately in a part of the ship – forward – where, should an inadvertent fireworks display of a particularly devastating kind take place, it will impact least on the ship’s ability to maintain way.

This is the Captain of your ship

Those of a certain generation or two will remember the hit track of this name by Reparata and the Delrons. The opening lyrics are:

This is the captain of your ship
Your heart speaking
We’ve run into a little storm
The boat’s leaking
And if you haven’t guessed
This is an SOS…

Well, David Johnstone (left)  is the Captain, not only – temporarily – of the raft on Loch Striven but of Maersk Kelso to which he will return after his next period of leave.

Looking at an unusual display screen on the bridge – alongside the GPS and radar display – and having its purpose explained to us, creates the connection between any one of these B-class boxships, Captain Johnstone (and any other Captain of a B class ship) and the possibility of a very particular kind of nightmare sea scenario.

If a certain set of conditions happen to come together, they set in motion an uncontrollable  parametric roll that will see a massive ship like this  flipped over like a playing card in a poker game – and it’s not going to be rightable.

The conditions that bring this endgame about include:

• the distance between waves equating to the length of the ship
• a large and steep wave height
• a small heading angle to the prevailing wave direction – in either a heading or a stern sea
• low roll damping characteristics
• volume of water on the deck. (We all learned about the impact of this factor when The Herald of Free Enterprise so disastrously rolled over off Zeebrugge on 6th March 1987, with the loss of 193 passengers.)

Normally, where such circumstances coincide, the Captain would have almost no warning and the resulting parametric roll could see the swift end of the ship.

With the B-class ships, Maersk designed an early warning system for parametric roll conditions which is unique to the company and to these ships.

The display screen we were looking at is divided into four sectors – ahead, astern, port and starboard. Colour coding – triggered in the ‘ahead’ section by changing circumstances – cues the Captain to alter course sharply and quickly away from the predominant wave direction and towards a beam sea.

Captain Johnstone says that using the equipment has given him a particularly live feel for the way the ship is and that, if he senses that she’s ‘unhappy’, he’ll alter course.

Generally speaking, experienced master mariners will take steps to give their ships as easy a passage as possible. Captain Johnstone speaks of once taking a 600 mile detour to avoid a hurricane.

He speaks too of an occasion when the sea area he was in did not give him that latitude and he had no choice bu to take the ship under a typhoon. He describes the huge ship being tossed around like driftwood,

Putting this picture aside, we asked him what it’s like to return to command of a ship after leave and particularly after a prolonged period of static duty like this one.

He says that, on the journey back to a ship, he works on visualisation: there’s the lift, up to x level; turn left; up to the bridge – and then talks his visual memory through every successive piece of equipment on the bridge controls. Then, on his first night back he takes a torch up to the bridge and checks ever single thing there, intensifying the process of re-engagement with control.

The departing Skipper will have given him a single page with a note on the important things needing to be looked after in the next 24 hours – along with a full set of notes he can read at greater leisure.

The final part of the Maersk comfort zone is the system of establishing stable duplicate teams for a ship – two Captains, two First Engineers, and two Second, Third and Fourth Engineers. At any one time, depending on who’s on leave, these officers will find themselves in any permutation of the two teams but they will always be working with people familiar to them.

Next?

Life on the raft will carry on through the end of the BBC filming of the two Mission 2110 series and then return to normal – which won’t feel normal by then.

The ships will be here in Loch Striven for another year. They will be the last Maersk ships to be brought back into service when the recession is over

This is because they are economically highly inefficient. Designed and built for speed, to corner the market in fast cargo delivery from the Far East straight into the east coast of America, they were born into a world where the price of oil was somewhere north of Jupiter. So ships rated at 28 knots (and Beaumont did 32 knots forward and 19 knots astern in her sea trials) have not once been run at that speed but at an average of 18 knots. This is like doping a greyhound to stagger around a dog track.

What life holds for these elegant ships when they emerge from limbo is the possibility of extreme cosmetic surgery. Their hull form may be remodelled. Their length may be cut – and the raft’s engineeers are interested in and a little sceptical about how and where that could be done – with the mighty 100 metre prop shaft running from midships to stern.

So the ships we see today on this raft in the remote and majestic Loch Striven may not be seen again as they are after they leave.

Captains and engineers will come and go, losing money to the Government during their duty periods on the ships and getting back to sea as fast as they can. Captain Johnstone will get back to the Kelso.

And in 2013 he will climb Everest for charity. He has Kilmanjaro conquered already – and lives with the entrance to his quarters virtually papered with contour maps of a series of major mountains and mountain ranges. He has spent some of his downtime here in Munro-bagging, with the Arrochar Alps not too far up the road. He may make Glencoe before he goes.

An unusually stable feature of raft personnel – the BBC asked for him to stay for the duration of the filming (for continuity of communications) he has become widely known and liked locally. So – in 2013 we will follow his ascent of Everest and give everyone here who has got to know him, the chance to sponsor his footsteps.

And when this unexpected invasion is all over, the residents of the little shoreside community will heave a ritual sigh of relief and then, perhaps, feel a little bereft – like the strange marriage of freedom and vulnerability felt in an injured limb when a plaster-cast comes off.

Click to access all our stories on the Loch Striven situation or click on the Maersk ship image in the right hand column of this screen.

The ships in lay up on the raft in Loch Striven are 5 of the 7 B-class ships: in east to west order, Boston, Beaumont, Baltimore, Bentonville and Brooklyn. Between Beaumont and Baltimore is the black-hulled and elderly Sealand Performance, owned by Maersk through a subsidiary and American flagged.

The photograph above – of Maersk Boston, on the eastern extreme of the raft in Loch Striven and whose cargo hold sees a of action in the BBCs Mission 2110 – is by copyright holder Rebecca Martin.