Harbour Master
Harbour Masters
Worldwide there are approximately 3,000 merchant ports and the work of the Harbour Master can vary widely from country to country and from port to port even within the same country.

OMC International (OMC) is a specialist company providing consulting services and operational systems to the international maritime industry.
OMC has developed award-winning e-Navigation technology to improve transit for large commercial ships in draft restricted entrance channels and waterways, the Dynamic Under-keel Clearance System. DUKC® determines and manages a ship’s Under Keel Clearance dynamically and in real-time, and is the only independently validated and widely operational real-time under keel clearance management technology.
DUKC® has assisted more than 120 port facilities, terminals, and waterways safely and efficiently conduct more than 160,000 deep draft transits. Utilising state of the art modelling, forecasting, and data assimilation techniques that have been proven against more than 550 full scale vessel measurements, DUKC® is the world’s most comprehensive and extensively validated UKC management system.
DUKC® is also used extensively for channel design and dredge optimisation. Integrated port planning, real-time operations, and dredge optimisation through DUKC® has allowed ports to realise dredging cost savings of up to 90%. Overall dredge volume requirements, and the associated environmental impacts, are also minimised. A recent example combining an operational DUKC® with DUKC® optimised channel design allowed a client to reduce their dredged area by 90,000m2, and the channel depth by 0.6m to 1.4m.
In addition to DUKC®, the services and systems provided by OMC to our clients include:
In November 2021, the UK will host COP26, the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate…
CHIRP Maritime
There is an introduction to Maritime Confidential Incident Reporting to be found here: www.chirpmaritime.org otherwise known as CHIRP.
Each quarter CHIRP publishes a journal Maritime FEEDBACK, and edition No 64 was issued in August 2021. See here: https://www.chirpmaritime.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/MFB-64-August-2021-72dpi-RGB-for-online.pdf
At the same time CHIRP issued its106-page Annual Digest of Reports and Insight Articles 2020.
This is available for download here: https://www.chirpmaritime.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Annual-digest-2020-72dpi-RGB-online-edition-v4-2.pdf
MAIB
On 1 October the (UK) Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) safety digest 2/2021 was published. This provides a collection of lessons learned from marine accidents and their investigation. This latest collection of cases (volume 2 of 2021) details accidents involving vessels from the merchant, fishing and recreational sectors.