Seafarers Awareness Week

AqualisBraemar’s Mark McGurran, group managing director of Marine, discusses the importance of our seafarers, especially at this time, looks back on his seafaring career and reflects on the challenge of looking for a career ashore, and how we at AqualisBraemar strive to be that second career for seafarers.

This Seafarers Awareness Week, we are reminded of the sacrifice seafarers make on a daily basis to keep our economies and supply chains going; these sacrifices are especially acute during these Covid impacted times. 

The sea, and seafarers, are at the very core of what we do every day in the marine team at AqualisBraemar. We rely on our seafarers to provide their experience, knowledge and opinion to our clients in our daily surveying, consultancy and expert opinion work.

We are therefore in the very fortunate position to count many seafarers amongst our team; I have stopped using the term ‘ex seafarer’ here as we believe you that once you are a seafarer, the sea and seafaring never really leaves you.

This privilege does come with its challenges, however, not least as we are in a strange position in business in that we cannot train our own staff from scratch as we do not own or operate any vessels. We therefore rely on recruiting our surveyors from the sea, directly from the maritime community.

At AqualisBraemar we are always looking for seafarers to join our team who have a positive and flexible, problem-solving attitude; something with which many seafarers are blessed. Whether these seafarers have spent decades at sea or left the sea long ago to pursue careers in other sectors of the maritime industry or have 5 to 10 years’ recent seagoing experience, we offer a place for the right candidates to grow and develop their careers further.

I myself am a seafarer and come from a seafaring family; both my parents and both my grandfathers were seafarers. I went to sea immediately after completing my GSCEs with P&O Containers as an Engineering Cadet. I always knew engineering was for me as I have a love of the poetry in motion of all things mechanical, so combining that with my family tradition and the opportunity to travel the world was perfect for me.

This picture is me at 16 years old, being forced to do his bridge watchkeeping time while transiting the Suez Canal. I think it was around then that I confirmed to myself I had made the right choice to be an engineering cadet instead of a deck cadet!

I travelled the world on containerships such as the one pictured below, the MV ENCOUNTER BAY, one I have particularly fond memories of. Built in 1969 and having a container capacity of 1,578 TEU, she seemed enormous to me at the time, but compared to the modern, almost 24,000 TEU vessels around today she was tiny! 

I made some lifelong friends during my seagoing career, some of which are my teammates at AqualisBraemar today. 

As I progressed my seagoing career, gaining first my Second Engineers, then my Chief Engineers Certificate of Competency, sailing on various vessel types from cruise ships to offshore survey vessels, I continued to build experience and great memories, meeting some wonderful seafarers along the way.

After reaching the rank of Chief Engineer I ‘came ashore’, as it is put, in 2005 and started my career as a marine surveyor in Singapore. My background as a seafarer has been instrumental in the past 15 years of marine surveying and consulting and I have been honoured to have been able to pass those experiences on to both my clients and my teammates. In 2018 I moved to the UK to take up my role at AqualisBraemar in London.

At AqualisBraemar, we celebrate the many diverse paths that people take through their seagoing careers and are always keen on hearing from seafarers looking for their next challenge.