Letter No. 6 · Letters to Mariners
From: Captain Wayne Eric Henry
North 37 Maritime Academy · Lexington, Virginia
27 October 2026

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To the Mariners,

Fellow mariners,

Picture a quiet morning at anchorage outside a busy harbor. A dozen ships ride to their hooks, waiting on a berth. On one of them, the mate keys the radio and puts out a notice any seafarer could issue: Sécurité, Sécurité, Sécurité — all stations. This vessel is deploying a soon-to-expire life raft and conducting a crew drill in the vicinity of latitude and longitude as given. No distress. Mariners are requested to give the area a wide berth. Then the crew goes to work. The raft hits the water and inflates. People board it, right it, work the sea anchor and the painter, and recover it — on their own deck, under their own officers, in water anybody can see.

That picture is the whole letter. The rest is the argument.

The raft is going ashore anyway. Every life raft carries a service date and, eventually, an end of life. When a raft is due to be retired, it usually leaves the ship in a truck. Most crews will go a whole career without ever seeing one inflate outside a video. A raft that is honestly near the end of its service is still a teacher. Used in a planned drill, with a recovery plan and the master’s judgment on weather and traffic, it can teach a crew more in one hour than a stack of slides. Expired gear should never be trusted to save a life. It can still be trusted to teach one.

The notice is part of the record. A Notice to Mariners — a Sécurité broadcast on the working channel, a call to the port’s vessel traffic service, a note to the Coast Guard sector, and, where the district allows it, a submission to the Local Notice to Mariners — does two jobs at once. It keeps an inflated raft from being mistaken for a real distress, and it puts a time, a place, and a purpose on the public record before the drill begins. The latitude and longitude go out over the air. AIS already shows where the ship is lying. Commercial satellite imagery passes over busy anchorages regularly, and the Coast Guard watches those same waters. The crew’s own phones and the bridge log can add the rest. Nobody has to build a shore recording studio to show that the drill happened.

The crew can assess itself. The officers aboard already know who handled the painter, who checked the canopy, who counted heads, and who froze. Peer assessment by a master and mates who sail with those people every day is not a lesser standard; it is the standard the sea has always kept. Write down what was done. Note who did it. Have the officer sign. The notice, the position, and the visible water make that signature hard to fake and easy to check.

So here is the question, put plainly: shouldn’t that be enough? If the drill is announced in advance, located by latitude and longitude, assessed by the crew’s own officers, and visible to anyone — including the Coast Guard — who cares to look, why must so much of the proof still travel ashore? Can’t we do this among ourselves, when the work is already in plain sight?

I want to be careful about what this letter is and is not. It is a proposal and an open question — to fellow mariners and to the regulators who set the rules. It is not a claim that this practice replaces any Coast Guard drill requirement, assessment procedure, or servicing rule today. No one should read it as permission to credit a raft drill as an official assessment. The Coast Guard sets the credential rules, and the servicing station still services the raft. North 37 is actively becoming Coast Guard–approved, in process through National Maritime Center pathways, and we would rather earn that approval by bringing good ideas to the table openly than by pretending we already have it.

What we are asking is for the conversation to start. Quality assessment and safety culture belong at sea. Transparency — a notice on the air, a position on the chart, a raft on visible water — can be part of how the record is kept. If a crew is willing to show its work to the whole harbor, that willingness itself says something about the standard aboard.

At North 37, Hitch, our Seafaring Intelligence, keeps the record of the questions mariners ask and the assessments that were properly assessed. A drill like this is exactly the kind of work worth writing down well: who, where, when, and what was learned.

Education is free. The tools to get the credential often are not. If you have deployed a raft in drill, if you have run a drill at anchor, if you sit on the regulatory side and see a problem we have missed — write back. Tell us what would make this safe, honest, and checkable. Bring your questions. Keep your standards high. Keep the proof where the work is done.

Fair winds,

Wayne
Founder, North 37 Maritime Academy
Lexington, Virginia · north37.academy