09/046 - Benefits of an extra officer

After the ship received port state remarks during a inspection of high workload on chief officer the company decided to assign the vessel one extra officer. The vessel is trading in a short sea area with hazardous cargo and are doing 100-150 port-calls a year with tank cleaning almost every voyage. The ship had three officer and received a forth officer. Mind that there are ship of similar size and trade with only 2 officers. The benefits of this measure is obvious:

1) chief officer are watch free and are now down to reasonable working hours and can do a better job;

2) Junior officers also have less workload since they don’t need to take on chief officers watches; 

3) Master have less workload since some work have been delegated to junior officers;

4) We now how time to train junior officers in a really good way;

5) The chief officer also has more time for development to taking a master position;

6) The time for maintenance /safety work has increased and this is has really good long term benefits;

7) Less vetting remarks and the inspectors are really happy about the extra officer;

8) The general health of the officers benefits since they now have time to exercise and sleep more regularly;

9) The rotation of personnel is significantly less since people actually have starting to like their jobs and are coming back;

10) We don’t need to overlap when new officers signs on .

In my view the extra cost of the officer is returned very fast especially if you put against fatigue related incidents and the cost of using untrained and unmotivated personnel. I urge all to be honest when they are filling in their rest time and that all companies and authorities start paying more attention to this problem.