1 minute read
Crewing
By Shashank Jahagirdar
Crew operations – An update from the E2E team
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We are facing a lot of challenges these days due to the current Covid 19 pandemic. Many countries have imposed a lot of restrictions while some have completely banned the crew change activities. Despite these challenges at hand, we have managed the situation quite well so far and our efforts have been recognized both by our seafarers and Maersk tankers’ management.
We do have many overdue reliefs at hand now when compared to previous year. We are also facing a lot of availability issues from our seafarers due to sudden change in given readiness for various reasons such as someone is not well at home, documents renewals are getting delayed, courses not readily available or they have done prolong contract onboard so need to utilize full leave. Even with such challenges, we can maintain a healthy crew change numbers week on week basis.
Another issue what we are recently facing is pertaining to issuance of visas from embassies, especially US and Schengen visas for many seafarers from different countries.
Some achievements that we can name is - taking deliveries of the LR2 from Dalian shipyard China despite visa challenges and travel ban in China. We still worked out our way to take delivery with Chinese seafarers and get the vessels to Korea and put regular Maersk Tankers complement there. It’s worth highlighting that we are following a high level Covid protocol for all our joiners and keeping them all in quarantine in advance and monitoring them until joining.
We are also tackling the high airfare and crew change cost but that we need to do as we do not want our seafarers to be stuck on board only due to the cost factor. We are trying to do everything possible including diverting vessels and taking off-hire- if required so that we do not have long overdue crew on-board.
Lastly, we are also very thankful to our seafarers who have supported us throughout this current situation. Look forward to your continued support. Stay safe, stay healthy.
