Worrying about alarms

ON THE elderly small training vessel which I skipper frequently there are very few alarms. The set-up is still very similar to bridges of the typical merchant ships in the seventies, before the electronic revolution.

So when an alarm does sound, it gets everybody's full attention. Most often it is the VHF radio picking up a distant mayday alert.

On most modern commercial vessels today the situation is very different. The bridges are full of electronic equipment, including the remote control and monitoring of the machinery.