SeaTab is a portable ECS providing instant situational awareness of the vessel’s location. With navigational visibility in real time, crew can confidently continue navigating on official electronic charts even away from the bridge or when using smaller vessels.
SeaTab is a standalone solution provided by OneOcean to facilitate agile and flexible navigation onboard, providing peace of mind and confidence that crew have continued access to official ENCs no matter what scenario arises.
Below are some examples of how different users use SeaTab to mitigate risk and improve manoeuvrability.
Scenario 1: An ECDIS Malfunction
The concern among captains and navigation officers is the loss of accurate movements of vessels on official charts should the ECDIS fail, as it will leave them blind and susceptible to collisions. The situation becomes critical when failures of the ECDIS systems happen in restricted navigable waters, such as in the approaches to ports, canal or river passages.
Emergency measures would need to be executed to avoid potentially disastrous consequences. Such measures being expensive and time consuming to resolve, resulting in a delay to the voyage and vessels ability to discharge or reload cargo in a timely manner.
The Solution
In the event of an ECDIS failure, SeaTab eliminates this concern, acting as a portable ECS back-up to ensure continued situational awareness of the vessels movements. The captain and navigational officers can continue to perform their operational duties unimpeded until the ECDIS breakdown is resolved. SeaTab ensures for seamless operational effectiveness and avoids potentially costly delays in case of an ECDIS failure. Captains, navigation officers, vessel owners and operators can be assured that even in an emergency, the vessel remains equipped with sufficient navigational tools to perform effectively, in an otherwise stressful scenario.
Scenario 2: Ensuring smaller vessel safety
Smaller vessels, including Tenders, Rescue Boats and Pilots do not benefit from the full visibility given by an ECDIS, making the task of manouvering vessels safely within the port or at sea a challenge for the mariner.
The Solution
SeaTab, as a portable ECS solution, is an ideal tool for tendering groups of passengers, giving the crew instant visibility, situational awareness, and confidence of navigating on official electronic charts even away from the bridge. The user has full, instant access to official Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs). They can plot routes and check the vessel remains on course in real-time.
Scenario 3: Simplifying the transition to digital services
Maintaining corrections to paper charts is a lengthy, manual and an often-complicated task, all of which have a cost implication in terms of financial, resource allocation and time. Manual corrections rely on the crew to stay abreast of changes to a vast folio of charts which inevitably will result in human error.
Whilst the transition to using digital ECDIS has been mandated, many vessels still use paper charts as a back-up in case of an ECDIS failure.
The Solution
Eliminate costs and complicated logistics related to the maintenance of paper charts using SeaTab as an alternative back-up resource. Simultaneously, SeaTab complements the ‘transition to digital’ by saving time through optimized workflows which run alongside the maintenance of existing ECDIS systems. Instead of maintaining paper charts manually, the user can incorporate the task of updating ENCs on SeaTab at the same time as deploying these updates on ECDIS. In addition, SeaTab supports a variety of route formats, making pre-approved routes easily transferrable between ECDIS to SeaTab.
Scenario 4: Port Entry Manoeuvrability
Planning any voyage for a vessel is a significant task conducted by navigational officers. Using the vessels parameters and handling characteristics, the passage plan will highlight any areas which will cause risk to the vessel and any manoeuvrability concerns, including turning points, tides, restrictions, windage etc. With such a large number of variables to consider, preparedness is the most important aspect of any port call.
Formulating the passage plan often requires input from ENCs/ECDIS/Charts, Agents, Pilots and supporting publications such as port guides, pitotage books and port reports from previous visits. Fragmented, these sources are not always accessible through a singular platform, making the task of passage planning more cumbersome for the navigation officer.
When manoeuvring in port quick changes often need to be made to the passage plan to account for previously unforeseen or changeable variables.
The Solution
SeaTab, as a portable ECS solution, enables the captain and navigational officer to conduct passage planning from any location on the vessel, with the additional benefit of having a real-time contextual overview of the current vessel’s location for faster decision making. SeaTab’s portability simplifies the decision making process by always being “to hand”, avoiding potential delays. Captains, navigation officers, vessel owners and operators can be assured that even when away from the bridge the crew have access to navigational tools to perform effectively.
Scenario 5: Contextualising historical vessel movements
Following the completion of a voyage, a task required of many desk officers is to file a voyage or port call report. This requires the crew to accurately remember all the navigational information about a port call, which can be remembered incorrectly.
The Solution
Record voyages in SeaTab to review the route log from a historical perspective. Recording the voyage with SeaTab assists with simplifying the task of report writing or filing incident reports. The crew can use the historical route data recorded from SeaTab to detail their reports more accurately. Vessel owners and operators can be assured that even in the event of a major incident, a historical record of the vessels’ movements is available, providing clarity to any voyage undertaken.
