Required reading for all - from board directors to ship operators

A senior pilot I spoke to recently in a major North European port made clear that he thought that ship operating standards, on the bridge and on deck, were in too many cases lamentably low. He backed this up with numerous accounts of bad practice and near-disasters.

Those were, of course, anecdotes that could not be verified. But they rang true, not least because they were strikingly similar in tone to the reports filed regularly to the UK's Confidential Hazardous Inc…