What is the difference between a boat and a ship? I am posing this old question again because, try hard as I may, I cannot find a satisfactory answer that would put the matter to rest. If the conundrum can befuddle seafarers and other maritime professionals, what more...
The establishment, according to the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, is “the people in a society or a profession who have influence and power and who usually do not support change”. The last part of the definition is significant. The establishment is rightly seen as slow...
The way language is used by the maritime community has always been of great interest to me as a writer. I believe I was the first to criticise the buzzword “the human element” to refer to seafarers. Back in 2012 — when the shipping industry had swallowed the phrase...
Never mind the occasional lapses in grammar or the awkward style of writing. What is unforgivable is when maritime journalists and their editors put out articles that contain inaccurate or false statements. For this is a clear sign that they have not bothered to...
Marine Café Blog has always been unorthodox and, in many cases, even irreverent. Its aim is simple and has not changed since its launch in August 2009: to share ideas and information in the hope that readers will see things in a new light. That light could be...
The problem with today's maritime press is not fake news. It is the deluge of press releases churned out almost daily by PR firms. The wave is massive like the tidal surge in Hokusai's iconic woodblock print (pictured above) entitled Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also...
Marine Café Blog has been running for more than nine years now. That is a long time, certainly long enough for me to discover or validate certain truths about the shipping industry and its various players. Not ordinary facts, but fundamental truths — not glossed over...
There is one lesson I've learned after spending years as an international maritime journalist. And that is, one does not need any special talent to be successful in the business. News writing is not like writing a treatise or a serious novel. It does not require a...
Money makes the world go round, the song goes. As far as shipping is concerned, it can make the world go up and down and even sideways. Money or the love of it is what fuels the expansion of shipping fleets and port facilities and the development of new...
Why do officials of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) talk of seafarers being invisible? It's downright silly. How could they be invisible when the English language itself has been enriched because of them? Consider some of the words used to...
The shipping industry is rich in platitudes, buzzwords and rhetoric. They shoot out like water and steam from a geyser on World Maritime Day and the Day of the Seafarer, two annual events during which the organiser, the International Maritime Organization...
For many years, I was contributing to leading international shipping and port journals until I quit in 2009 to become a blogger. You can say I am battle-scarred. I saw the culture in the maritime press up-close and witnessed its sad, downward trajectory...