How To Avoid Huge Ships
5 Star Review from DC
As a recently retired Captain of a Huge Ship I’d just like to say how devastating this book was to my everyday life.
Haulage on the open seas used to be a pretty lonely and boring job but I always managed to amuse myself by crashing into significantly smaller vessels than my own… Sadly however, since this book was first published, I only ever managed to crash into one or two small boats per year… catalysing my retirement from the industry.
5 Star Review from Gordon Hawk
Trimmer’s book is deceptively simple, take his opening passage for example:
“when walking down a local thoroughfare, or perhaps on a day out to your local dock, and suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, a 40ft metallic compound hull emerges in your line of sight, it is most likely, if not definitely, going to be – a huge ship”
It’s theoretical groundwork like this which lacks from today’s ‘pick and choose’ postmodern discourse. Trimmer unleashes this devastating examination with relative ease; most interestingly with chapters such as “Avoiding the ship itself: Moving Left or Right?” which comes up with a flurried and meticulous deconstruction of ethics and theoretical obstacles, for instance “is there anything on either side of the huge ship? – if so, and there is, it is probably, if not definitely, going to be – difficult to move round to that side of the huge ship”.
A must for those with an eye for Naval pragmatism and/or a small ship.
