On the Approach Maneuvering Booklet for Small Domestic Cargo Ships

Abstract

Ship owners/builders provide domestic cargo ship seafarers with little maneuverability data necessary for handling a ship in port. Thus, ship handlers maneuver the ship based on their ship handling experiences referring to the limited maneuvering data obtained at the sea trial and/or from their predecessors. The number of seafarers employed by the domestic shipping companies continues to decline and this leads to fewer opportunities of onboard OJT (On the Job Training) to master the advanced ship handling techniques such as docking. Therefore, the development of a practical maneuvering booklet for docking is desired. From this point of view, the authors conducted a simulation study to investigate the effect of wind on the stopping maneuver and accelerating turn for docking. Based on the results of the study, a method is proposed to estimate the critical range of the stopping maneuver and accelerating turn under windy condition. This paper summarizes the simulation study and proposes a practical maneuvering booklet for small domestic cargo ships.