Controlling Ship Operations
The officer has special responsibilities to keep the ship, the people on board, and the environment safe. This includes keeping the ship seaworthy during fire and loss of stability, providing aid and maintaining safety during man overboard, abandoning ship, and medical emergencies.
Understanding ship's stability, trim, stress, and the basics of ship's construction is a key to keeping a ship seaworthy. The mate must know what to do in cases of flooding and loss of buoyancy. Fire is also a constant concern. Knowing the classes and chemistry of fire, fire-fighting appliances, and systems prepares the officer to act fast in case of fire.
An officer must be expert in the use of survival craft and rescue boats. Expertise includes the vessels' launching appliances and arrangements, and their equipment including radio life-saving appliances, satellite EPIRBs, SARTs, immersion suits and thermal protective aids. It's important to be expert in the techniques for survival at sea techniques in case it's necessary to abandon ship.
Officers are trained to perform medical tasks, and follow instructions given by radio or obtained from guides. This training includes what to do in case of common shipboard accidents and illnesses.
Read more about this topic: Chief Mate
Famous quotes containing the words controlling, ship and/or operations:
“In controlling men:
If at first you don’t succeed,
Why, cry, cry, again.”
—Unknown. A Maxim Revised (l. 3–4)
“We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture of a house founded on the sea.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)