Albert Park Yachting & Angling Club
Extract from the August 2026 editions
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Seafarers
by James Nixon
Seafarers - Part One
They went to the sea in ships, and came here … briefly.
You were from a fishing village and spent your life on the water, fishing every day. It was natural to follow your father and brothers to sea. But this isn’t a boat; it’s a floating factory, and while it’s your home for most of the year, and everything that you do is determined by the sea just outside your cabin window, there’s one thing you can’t do … drop a line over the side and catch a fish.
More than half a million Filipinos are at sea right now —the number one seafaring nation— living and working beside two million others, mainly from India, China, Russia and Indonesia, on 85,148 merchant ships.*
Cruise ships only number around 400 but are crew-heavy, with over 300,000 crew from 150 countries.
Around 90 per cent of the world’s trade, by volume, travels by sea. Almost everything we eat, wear, drive or use has probably been transported by ship.
At APYAC, we are more mindful than most of the huge ships as they enter and leave port just outside the window; or when we are out fishing, as we remember not to stop in the channel … or else. Even if you are not run down, the fine will make it an expensive day’s fishing.
It’s also our heritage. This Club was formed by men from the docks. The shore-based, human part of the equation —who also liked to fish.
We used to see the seafarers around the 50 pubs of Port Melbourne; still do, when there is a cruise ship at Station Pier —a gaggle of smoking, laughing, Filipinos taking selfies at Lagoon Pier, with their ship in the background.
But these days there is no stuffing around. Charged huge sums by the hour for parking next to the hungry robots, the massive container ships can be turned around in less than 24 hours. Only a percentage of the twenty- and forty-foot-long boxes may be offloaded, replaced with outbound containers loaded with our most common export: Melbourne Air.
Then it’s on to the next stop.
In 2024–25 the port handled 3.39 million TEU —twenty-foot equivalent unit— containers (so a 40-foot container equals two of them), including 919,000 TEU of empty containers.** That’s 27% … empty containers urgently needed in Singapore or Shanghai to keep the enterprise moving. Or the whole industry grinds to a stop.
In port is when some of the crew work the hardest, resupplying the vessel before the next voyage. Hundreds of tonnes of food, fuel, gas, engineering tools and supplies have to be brought on board, catalogued and stowed —the normal business of running a ship.
Oh, plus the business of finding the right containers among the 9,000 on board, and getting them off.
Hurry Up … Wait!
Then there are the long hours when the humans can leave the ship, waiting for the right tide, to meet a slot arrival time at the next port —like airliners— or to fit into an invisible schedule known only to someone far away with a monster computer. It can be expensive to be early.
Or when it’s cheaper to stay over the weekend rather than pay excessive tug charges, or in the rare case where a vessel is detained for unpaid maritime charges.
Shore leave, to where?
Real missionaries.
After nearly twenty years ministering to seafarers in the Bristol Channel, the Rev. John Ashley eventually joined with other ministries to form the Mission to Seafarers, providing Christian ministry and practical assistance to sailors —even a floating church. It was 1856.
One year later, the Melbourne chapter was formed, becoming an international success, taking possession of its distinctive domed premises —the last building in Flinders Street before you swing over the Charles Grimes Bridge onto Montague Street— in 1917.
A haven for seafarers on shore.
The ‘missionaries’ work continues to this day, shuttling seafarers to and from their ships, bringing them to the Mission where they can call home, use free wi-fi, phones and computers; buy supplies and chill out.
Providing a safe, welcoming refuge to relax; counselling and practical assistance, chaplaincy, and spiritual support.
This support steps up a notch to real assistance when seafarers face problems such as exploitation, abandonment, illness, or other crises.
When a shipping company goes broke, stranding crews in foreign ports, the Mission helps seafarers survive; in some cases, helping to repatriate them home.
It has four branches in Victoria: Melbourne, Geelong, Hastings, and Portland, open every day, visited by 30,000 seafarers each year, supported by locals donating 15,000 hours of volunteer work.
Next edition of Tight Lines we’ll examine what happens when a war begins, and someone in an insurance office draws a line on a map; stranding seafarers at sea while the shipping company’s money runs out.
* 2,565,580 seafarers in the global merchant fleet in 2026, comprising 1,048,980 officers and 1,516,600 ratings, serving a fleet of 85,148 merchant ships. - 2026 BIMCO/ICS Seafarer Workforce Report.
** Port Of Melbourne Trade Statistics
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Seafarers - Part Two
Pirates, storms, deaths, and being forgotten.
Every two and a half days, pirates attack large ships. 80% of the time, they get on board.
Container ships, bulk carriers, oil/chemical/product tankers, LNG / LPG carriers, general cargo ships, roll-on/roll-off vehicle carriers, heavy-lift / project ships and large passenger/cruise ships; not fishing vessels, fishing boats, yachts or small workboats.
It used to be much more than this, almost double in the early 2000s when the Somali pirates figured out that they could easily hold ships to ransom —and get paid. Tom Hanks' movie, Captain Phillips, is about the 2009 hijacking of the MV Maersk Alabama, and the ensuing five-day siege. The film was named after the ship’s captain, who was rescued by U.S. Navy SEALs.
‘Ship hardening’ refers to the measures undertaken by the shipping companies to dissuade pirates from clambering on board: barbed wire, cyclone fencing, water sprays, blinding lasers, floodlights, CCTV and night vision cameras, close-in radar, and even slippery chemicals that can be poured on decks to defeat the pirates.
Many ships now employ armed security guards.
If all else fails, the crew can now lock themselves in large self-contained safe-rooms called ‘Citadels’ from where they can disconnect the bridge and drive the ship remotely, while waiting for the navy to arrive.
New policies to ‘detect, avoid, deter and delay attacks,’ using safer sea routes, better early-warning systems, close co-ordination with local authorities, and navies, have made it much harder for the bad guys and are the main reason for the 48% drop since 2015.
But that doesn’t stop the ship-robbers, particularly in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, who are mainly just trying to feed their families, plucking money and items to sell, rather than ships, from the seaways.
ChatGPT calls them ‘maritime burglars who board ships, often at night, and steal things such as:
- Engine-room equipment and spare parts
- Ship's stores
- Personal possessions and cash from crew
- Other valuable equipment
- Sometimes they simply rob the crew before escaping overboard.’
The International Maritime Bureau describes many of these attacks as ‘low-level and opportunistic’ incidents. Easy to say from an office on the other side of the planet, but completely terrifying when a gunman wakes you up in your floating cabin in the middle of the night.
The Bureau’s stats for last year show:
- 137 incidents (down from the last decade’s average of 163)
- 121 vessels were successfully boarded
- 10 attempted attacks where the perpetrators did not get aboard
- 4 vessels hijacked
- 2 vessels fired upon
A risky job.
Sometimes just standing up takes nerve.
For each, their average 220 days a year at sea, roughly 5–10% of those days will involve truly ‘horrific’ conditions: very heavy seas, gale/storm force winds, and dangerous motion. That’s about 11–22 days every year.
Another five to ten per cent of the time the seas are ‘hideous’ from a comfort standpoint: moderately rough, but still uncomfortable.
Lost at sea.
Technology, safety regulations, and weather prediction have reduced losses of large ships from over 200 to between 25 and 50 every year. Nowadays, with an emphasis on safety, thankfully crews are usually rescued unharmed.
But about 400 seafarers never come home each year.
Out of a workforce of 2.5 million people, it’s understandable, but still many times more than, for example, the aviation industry.
Of the 449 seafarer deaths in 2024, the 66 reporting countries under the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) showed:
- 245 died from illness/disease,
- 86 from occupational accidents,
- 36 were lost overboard (disappeared at sea),
- 26 died by suicide, and
- 56 deaths were from other causes, or were still under investigation
Only a fraction of seafarer deaths are ‘lost at sea’ in the dramatic sense of a ship sinking or vanishing.
Getting stuck.
A war is declared, maybe even a war against an invisible bug like COVID. Your Captain is given word not to proceed, either into port or to cross an imaginary line, as in the case of the first Gulf War between Kuwait and Iraq. No one has to point a gun at them.
In August 1990, marine underwriters in London demanded an increase in insurance for any ship entering the Strait of Hormuz. A ship worth $50 million was suddenly hit with an extra $100,000 simply for proceeding beyond the line, while cargo insurance costs also rose.
So everyone inbound just parked on the Arabian Sea side of the peninsula, at the anchorage of Fujairah, and waited. Soon it became hundreds of ships.
To get to the port of Dubai, 130 kms away as the crow flies, ships only had to go 170 kms up to the entrance, then 160 kms down inside the Gulf (the same distance from Melbourne to Benalla) —nowhere near the war zone.
Kuwait is 1000 kms inside the Gulf, and away to the north-west (the distance between Melbourne and Port Macquarie), past entire countries of Bahrain and Qatar.
Port Authorities in Dubai and Abu Dhabi screamed loud and long, hoping to get the imaginary line moved closer to the war zone. Many ship owners went broke, or resold their cargo and /or ship, stranding crews at sea; some of them for years.
Nothing’s worse than being stuck at sea, in sight of land, worried that you’ve been forgotten.
Sixteen years after the first Gulf War, when I joined Emirates, you’d always see the lights of at least fifty ships off Fujairah. Some had been abandoned there for years, being sold and resold, and on each one there would be at least one seafarer to keep the lights on. In those days, there was no communication.
The Mission to Seafarers in Dubai raised money to buy a boat and visit the ships, replenishing supplies, especially phone cards, and keeping up the spirits of crew who felt forgotten.
It was the brainchild of Anglican Rev. Stephen Miller, director of the Mission to Seafarers in Dubai, who told the local Khaleej Times that the worst case he had seen involved a crew who had not been paid for four years.
“In cases like those, we provide the crew with food and water every day. However, sometimes we have to get their passports back from their employers and buy them a plane ticket home.” *
Their boat, the MV Flying Angel, operated for ten years before being mothballed in 2017 due to rising costs and the advancement of communications. Thanks to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellite network, everyone has crystal-clear internet for daily FaceTime and voice calls home —as long as the ship-owner continues to pay the subscription.
Never stops.
All over the world, the Mission’s work continues.
Every ship you see heading into the Port of Melbourne holds a crew who’ll soon meet the Mission’s bus at the dockside security gate for the short drive to the Flinders Street West oasis.
On the day I rode shotgun, the volunteer driver, APYACs Peter Taylor, handed around maps of the city and explained how to cross the street to jump on the free tram to explore Melbourne.
One of the Chinese crew spoke in clear American English: “We’re off to Indonesia in seventeen hours.”
Within minutes, some had grabbed a cup of tea and were sitting in the garden, enjoying the greenery and camaraderie of like-minded souls in their home away from home.
* Read more about the work of the Mission in Dubai by clicking this link.
©JamesNixon.com — All rights reserved. No reproduction or republication without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted with accurate attribution to James Nixon / JamesNixon.com.
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Mission To Seafarers Victoria home page
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Melbourne Network Group home Page
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APYAC home Page
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Wednesday 2nd Sept 2026