Drill on board Far Swift

Hi there my best wishes from this sailor, trading at the Mexican Gulf, Bay of Campeche, more precisely at MAY-A oil field, this time I want to show a photo taken during the weekly safety drill on board Far Swift at the moment under my command, the objective of this muster drill was to improve the response from crew and passengers to the general alarm and all should attend at the reunion point with at least the life jacket on and used properly, we manage this time to have all involved at the reunion point in 8 minutes after I rang the ship’s bell, during the previous drills we never manage to do better than 15 minutes, I must remind that the vessel Far Swift is on a floatel charter for “Blue Marine” a Mexican charter and we have on board 87 persons without any “sea” knowledge mainly welders, plumbers, oil engineers, etc, coordinate this amount of people without proper training is quite difficult, maybe you found strange that all persons on the picture were at the main deck aft, I explain, the muster point is near the accommodation, where the life jackets were passed to all but because the small space available at the moment due to operational constrains the safety officer took all the persons involved to the main deck aft end and gave some explanations and corrections related with the procedures.

As part of this drill we had a MOB exercise consisting in launching the FRC and recover a life buoy thrown overboard to simulate the recovering of a person (MOB) from the water, no technical problems were found on the FRC and the time passed since the buoy was thrown overboard and recovered back on board was 5 minutes, the mother vessel was stopped on DP, I must say that was a good performance but also I must admit that all on board were prepared for the launch and recover of FRC, in a real situation the vessel wouldn’t be stopped and obviously the recovering time would be longer for sure.

These drills are very important and must be done in regular basis because is the training and the errors found during these drills that make the crew and passengers on board understand that in a real accident situation a lot of things can go wrong, training and training I must say is the answer to minimize the dangers.

In the picture you can see in the back ground the MAY-A platform with some boats working alongside.

All the best and take care out there.

POSTED ON BOARD BY JOSÉ SARAIVA