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15,000' of water, the upper decks of the house torn off in the sinking, and finally the VDR itself. Retrieved in a third sortie by the Apache, the VDR was brought ashore and 26 hours of conversations analyzed — the key evidence for an investigation that brought 53 safety recommendations. Those are becoming part of the biggest reforms of maritime safety in decades with legislation recently passed by Congress. The undertaking with Woods Hole made big strides in the NTSB’s ability to find and retrieve debris from deep underwater, and “we’ll continue that partnership going forward,” said Curtis. The agency’s complete report on the El Faro can be accessed online at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/MAR1701.aspx.
Brian Curtis, director of the NTSB’s marine safety office.
in deep ocean exploration, said Brian Curtis, director of the agency’s marine safety office. “We never found any personal items from the crew,” Curtis said of the Oct. 1, 2015 sinking of the 790' ro/ro containership in Hurricane Joaquin. “We had no vessel, we had no survivors.” Curtis spoke at a Think Tank session held on the first day of the WorkBoat Show. All that the NTSB and Coast Guard had in those first days was a recorded phone call from El Faro captain Michael Davidson to ship operators TOTE Maritime in Florida, telling them the vessel was in imminent danger. But investigators knew that the El Faro carried a voyage data recorder (VDR), a capsule mounted atop the main house that contained a digital memory stick that would have held at least 12 hours of crew conversations on the bridge. “Now, we’re looking for something the size of two basketballs in the ocean, and we don’t even know where the ship went down,” Curtis recalled. The deep-sea collaboration that followed brought the Coast Guard and NTSB into close partnership with the Coast Guard and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute based on Cape Cod, Mass. Two missions to the area of the sinking east of the Bahamas by the Navy salvage ship Apache and the Woods Hole research vessel Atlantis located the wreck of the El Faro in
— K. Moore
*** AUTONOMOUS VESSEL MARKETS AND TECHNOLOGY CONTINUES TO DEVELOP Still-developing technology and markets for autonomous vessels could take the infant sector in unexpected directions, two leading-edge providers said at a Think Tank session at the WorkBoat Show. Thinking about mating solar energy panels and electric drives to autonomous patrol boats raises the prospect of picket vessels with ultra-long endurance, said Chris Allard, CEO of Metal
Doug Stewart
*** EL FARO INVESTIGATION MADE PARTNERS OF NTSB, DEEP OCEAN SCIENTISTS The National Transportation Safety Board could not have determined what sank the El Faro with her crew of 33 had it not been for help from experts
Doug Stewart
With the cost of intermediate drydocking around $750,000 and special drydocking twice that, operators need to raise rates to get their assets back on better maintenance tracks, said Rigdon. In Rigdon’s analysis, “recovery of drydock costs over two or three years is just not possible for owners at $15,000 a day.” The industry would need to get back over $30,000 a day to finance a newbuild phase, so in the near-term, owners need prices to move upward just to meet drydock needs, he said. After the oil market collapse some companies had been operating below cost for several years just to maintain position, he noted. “If rationality can continue to prevail, we will see more vessels due for drydock go to stack,” Rigdon added. “It will be the decrease that will drive utilization to 80% … this assumes that we as an industry can act rationally.” In 2016-2017, day rates went as low as $7,000 to $8,000, a big drop from 2008 “when it was probably full utilization of the marketed fleet,” said Richard Sanchez, a senior marine analyst with IHS Markit, Houston. In the deepwater market, “it’s really a soft recovery,” said Sanchez. The large newest PSVs can get $15,000 to $17,000 a day but 3,000-dtw vessels still hover around $5,000 to $6,000, he said. “Five thousand for these boats is not going to pay your debt costs, and probably not your drydock costs,” said Sanchez, adding the situation is “not sustainable yet, but it’s definitely moving upward.” Meanwhile some big boats have gone south. “Guyana’s got at least eight or nine boats down there,” he said. “If you can get a boat down to Guyana, you’ll probably be looking at $18,000 to $20,000.” — K. Moore
Mike Johnson, founder and CEO of Sea Machines.
www.workboat.com • JANUARY 2019 • WorkBoat