98044 Information Overload

Information Overload
Report No. 98044

A warning of a pirate attack was received from the Regional Piracy Centre by Inmarsat C. However, it was not plotted and the warning went unheeded. We were aware, in a general sense, of trouble in this area from MARAD advisory 97 - 3. Consequently I had made a note to the watch officers in my night orders that night. I did not however order our standard pirate attack precautions to be put into force, although this would have been done if the RPC report had been brought to my attention. The watch officer admits that he only "scanned" the message and then clipped it to the bulkhead without plotting the position. By chance, I spotted the message the next day and plotted the position. Everyone, including myself, was a bit shocked at how close this reported attack was to our track the previous evening.

While one might just dismiss this as being inattentive, I think that the larger issue may be the amount of information now coming on to the bridge with the implementation of GMDSS. Weather and NAVAREA warnings are being received automatically. Many of these are repeat messages or are far away from our operating area. It is easy to see how the watch officer can get into the habit of just "scanning" messages. Add to this the many false and repeated DSC distress messages we get and the Mates are required to analyse a far larger amount of information than we had to deal with just a year ago. The short term solution to this is better management of the information aboard and not to be complacent. I think the longer term solution has to be recognition of the amount of information people are dealing with and trying to be certain that false alarms and redundant messages are minimised.