jjb1970

For a change it looks like the MoD are moving pretty quickly after years of will they - won't they on the AS90 gun replacement. Using a Boxer based platform seems surprisingly sensible given it'll be the backbone of the Army's vehicle fleet going forward and seems to be a good one. The war in Ukraine seems to have provided a good proving ground for wheeled artillery platforms which have performed well. I guess this means they'll probably sell the Archer systems they bought as a stop gap.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-golden-age-of-shipbuilding-as-new-uk-built-warships-boost-navy-building-programme-to-up-to-28-ships-and-submarines While it's good that the government is going ahead with new amphibious warfare vessels to replace Albion & Bulwark and the Bay class I think calling is a golden age of shipbuilding is a bit of a stretch.

I was a bit disappointed to see that it looks like they are making two more seasons of 'Shogun'. But, I hear you ask, didn't you give it a very positive review and recommend it? Yes, largely because it followed James Clavell's book reasonably closely and had a beginning, a body story and an ending. As with the book the 'big reveal' for those who hadn't figured it out was how far ahead of the game Toranaga was and how he had been manipulating everything and several of the characters found nice conclusions to their parts. Now someone is going to pad it out, stretch it and write new stories piggy backing off the original. To be fair it might work, but even if it works I can't see why they insist on doing it when the original story was so well done.

We came out to Singapore during the pandemic, that was a strange experience. We had to do two weeks quarantine which we knew about so couldn't complain, however every day we had calls from the Ministry of Manpower checking up on us (all four of us had calls, not just a call for the family). The strange bit was the journey out, the Singapore Airlines A350 had just over 40 passengers, of who 7 (including the four of us) entered Singapore. Changi airport looked like a zombie apocalypse zone, deserted, everything closed and the handful of workers were fully suited ready for an NBC attack or something, phones and tablets were in sealed wallets. It was eerie, walking through an empty airport which in normal times is one of the worlds great hubs being observed by a handful of people ready for a biological warfare attack. I had a 70 page document package with the entry permits, authorisations from the ministry of health, from the ministry of manpower etc and every page was checked. After we cleared quarantine things were surprisingly open. We had to use the track and trace app, tap in/out of shops, restaurants etc and restaurant tables were double spaced to maintain distance but everything was open and people. The big thing was masks, that was rigid, and in a climate like Singapore it's not much fun wearing a mask everywhere. Strange times.

This is an interesting change from the usual box boats, offshore vessels, dry and wet bulk ships and vehicle carriers that anchor off Marina South Pier. The Chinese deep sea research ship Shen Hai Yi Hao, built to operate large submersible craft.

Class surveys are no better, the surveyors have so much paperwork to check and demands to complete surveys that by the time they've finished in the Chief Engineers office there's not much time to do real survey stuff.

Spain is notorious for stuff like that. One of the problems with PSC is that the various MoUs have requirements for minimum number of inspections in each reporting period and in most cases have number of inspections as an internal KPI. In many cases resources are pretty thin so the natural result is that despite the theory of targeted inspections they go for easy jobs where they can be in, out and on to the next one. They will go for the really bad ones but try and avoid those that are bad but unlikely to be an immediate disaster risk (well, not until they're someone else's problem) as they don't want to get bogged down in lengthy inspections. Which is back to front really. In fairness the PSC people hate it but in private they're quite candid about it all. The PSC MoUs are more interested in number of inspections than whether the inspections carried out are useful. Another example of how performance metrics drive behaviour.

What's worse is that once highly respected specialist news services like Lloyd's List are now not much better. Whenever the media reports shipping stories the results tend to be variable. Stories on the human interest side of things can be well done but stuff on the operations and regulatory side of things are often terrible. That's disappointing when it's the BBC or a newspaper, but when a publication like Lloyd's List makes the same howlers when their reason to exist is as a specialised maritime news service it's much worse IMO as they really should know what they're talking about. I remember when Lloyd's List was a broadsheet and had the status of 'paper of record' for shipping, now it's a blog.

Deleted, realised I said the same thing on page 1.

Unfortunately it'd be more surprising if this wasn't the case. Blame the crew is the standard response. To be clear, in some cases it is a fair assignment of responsibility, but there's plenty of cases where it is unwarranted. However, the crew generally make good scapegoats. Take a look at the Prestige, ABS classed her despite structural issues and Spain denied the ship safe refuge and pushed her out to sea where she broke up and promptly caused a horrific oil spill. So naturally the Spanish blamed the master and convicted him. Then the EU went to IMO to lecture the rest of the world on why they needed to offer safe refuge to ships in distress. As clown shows go that one was right up there.

A DF4, one of my favourite locomotives, pretty much the Chinese class 47 (I.e. they were ubiquitous and everywhere).

A few years ago the government demanded a merger of BAE and VT to create a national 'shipbuilding champion' and quickly started whinging about BAE being a monopoly supplier after the merger. I am not sure why the Mail thinks building the new RFA ships overseas would be unprecedented when the latest RFA tankers were built by DSME in the Republic of Korea.

I have seen some beautifully done waterline ship models with heavy weathering.

Good to see the Mail knows the difference between the RN and RFA and an auxiliary on the ship registry and a warship (in fairness the rest of the media and government themselves are just as bad). Good to see joined up thinking and foresight in the government, up there with contracting Ferguson to build LNG ferries.

Apologies, indeed, my scatter brain strikes again🤪 One of the things that I had to laugh at because it was the only reaction was more than one IMO member State ranting that their own seafarers were denied access to healthcare, could not crew change etc whilst simultaneously rationalizing why they denied seafarers access to the same things in their own ports. Another thing I observed which was frankly disgusting was abuse of diplomatic status, perhaps the exemplar of the rules for thee but not for me approach to life.

Endo make an excellent product. Until recently Japnese HO (especially brass such and Endo, Katsumi, Tenshodo etc) was crazy expensive but the soft yen has been a boon for people like me. And if you are OK to use Japanese auction sites there are some lovely models for reasonable prices at the moment. I find Japanese sellers pretty straight and I've not yet had a bad experience using Yahoo Japan auctions. I also picked up a very nice Endo EF64-1000, that design amuses me as it highlights that Japan plays the same bureaucratic games as others. For those not familiar with Japanese trains the EF64 was a successful design of the 1960's. In the early 80's they took delivery of the EF64-1000 which had different bogies, a completely redesigned electrical arrangement in a longer, redesigned body. Originally it was considered a new type but to avoid having to go through apparently onerous labour processes it was classified as EF64-1000 and an additional sub-class of an existing design.

The Spliethoff general cargo ship Merwedegracht, I will give it to Spliethoff that any of their ships which pass through Singapore are well kept and look very clean. This design is unusual as the rear of the accommodation superstructure is flush with the transom stern.

I love mala. The mala stalls here are tremendous. You choose your vegetables, meat or fish (unless you ant vegetarian mala obviously), tell them whether you want it dry or soup style and the heat level you want then they go and cook it. Even the mild stuff is hot, at the hotter end of the spectrum it is hotter than the inside of the sun and can be brutal. In all seriousness unless you are used to very hot food don't even try the hot end of the scale as I suspect it would be genuinely physically painful and extremely unpleasant. Mala is made from pepper and chilli, it's not for the feint hearted but for those who like a good vindaloo or phal it's terrific.

I think Chinese food was devalued by take aways. In the UK the traditional carry out seemed to be in decline, but better Chinese restaurants still seemed to be doing well. Chinese food is so diverse that in a sense it's a bit of a meaningless concept, it's like talking about European food (only Chinese cuisine is probably more diverse). Contrary to most assumptions the humble potato is hugely important in Chinese cuisine and it's not all rice or noodles. A lot of Chinese food can seem very bland, just steamed vegetable, at the opposite end of the spectrum it can be borderline ridiculous in the amount of preparation and flavours blended in. It's a bit of a shame it has become associated with Uncle Ben's sweet and sour and carry outs.

At a very personal level, perhaps my benchmark for intolerance is rather different to most. Mrs JJB (not yet Mrs JJB) and I were dating in the late 90's when I was based in Indonesia for a while. When their economy imploded in the 1997 Asian economic crisis there were rampaging mobs hacking Chinese to death (literally, not figuratively). Thankfully we are far from that in Britain (or Singapore), but this is why the issue over thought not mattering is relevant. The reason such behaviour can erupt is because people think in a certain way which allows things to explode under the right circumstances. And anyone who thinks Britain is immune from such savagery is deluded, in the developed European bubble we might like to think such things happen in lesser countries but you don't have to look very hard to find barbarous episodes in Europe (nor is it ancient history).

In an odd way I've have given more thought to these issues over the last three-four years living overseas than before as I have had more interaction with such views. When renting a home in Singapore you are asked to list your race among other questions, several property agents were delighted to receive expressions of interest from us and openly said a white man with your job and a Chinese wife is a dream ticket, any landlord will green light you. Now clearly in this case it benefited me but it is a very revealing question. Something which may seem counter intuitive is that as a white man I am outside the racial divide here, as the racial tension they have is between the three indigenous ethnic groups (Chinese majority, Malay and Indian minorities) where you do hear some nasty comments. I don't want to give the impression that this is a country inhabited by bigots and in many respects relations between the three groups are a model of harmony compared to many places and the idiots are a minority as in Britain. It's a wonderful country but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that certain things have made me think about race issues in a way I hadn't done before.

Unfortunately I think two things have come together for these poor people - the US approach to visa and seafarers which makes life difficult at the best of times, and Asian shipmanagers which are notoriously tight fisted sharks in a market where minimum cost compliance is almost everything. Not a good advert for either party. I have seen similar cases where the employer has provided unrestricted broadband, sent goodies to the ship and made sure families at home don't end up short. Sadly it would appear not to be the case here.

There's something wrong with Chinese food here, none of it comes eith chips and nowhere does chips with curry sauce. It's worse in China, the food there is nothing like proper Chinese food, they need to import a few cooks from blighty so they can learn how to cook.

There were numerous such cases. For a few months my job changed to basically trying to figure out how to cope with government restrictions. Some governments were basically making it impossible to get surveys done then getting heavy handed about deferred surveys. Seafarer welfare received negligible attention from most governments despite a lot of pontificating in public. The various IMO crew change procedures and guidelines were drafted by industry and agreed at IMO then promptly ignored by many member States. The whole saga revealed something rotten. I would like to blame an inability to respond to exceptional circumstances and there was undoubtedly a lot of that but there was also a lot of deliberate decision making to throw seafarers under the bus and rules for thee but not for me. It altered my opinion of quite a few governments for the worse. Others struggled to cope but at least made an effort. Oddly (or perhaps not) the governments that impressed me by at least making an effort in many cases were countries most would give much thought to. Europe was awful.

Indeed, Encounter Bay was the first purpose built fully cellular containership. Encounter was originally the second hull but the first hull which was to have that name was delayed so they swapped the names over as OCL wanted the first one to be Encounter Bay. I think Flinders should have been the Encounter. They were superb ships, built to very high standards. The Flinders went for years with every trip being her last and with minimum spend to keep her going. The Jervis foundered on the way to the breakers yard in the early 80's. The other four were re-engoned to diesel, Encounter and Botany in Japan by Mitsui and Discovery and Moreton on the Clyde. Encounter was considered the best of the Class, the motor conversion of Discovery and Moreton wasn't well done and the Botany always seemed to have more problems than the Encounter.