Better Ships With Wives Aboard

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31042, 23 April 1966, Page 3

Better Ships With Wives Aboard

Veteran seafarers may boggle but Captain A. Michalsen, of the Israeli freighter Har Ramon, which is due at Lyttelton tomorrow with a cargo of bananas from Ecuador, thinks wives should sail with their husbands.

If the 38-year-old Norwegian had his way the playpen and child’s swing on the bridge of the Har Ramon would become standard equipment for tramp ships. Captain Michalsen has his wife Ellen and daughter Birgit, aged 2, as passengers in the Har Ramon. They have been with him for two months. 8

Captain Michalsen believes a taste of family life afloat is the answer to the serious shortage of trained seamen throughout the world. Officers and seamen were content to go to sea while they were young, but once they married they wanted a better-paid job ashore with their wives, he said. The Har Ramon is an example of this reluctance of young men to make seafaring a career. The ship carries no cadets because a scheme to train Israeli Merchant Navy officers failed through lack of applicants. There is only one Israeli-born officer in the crew.

The deckhands are Spanish, South American, Germans, Danes, a Russian, an Egyptian, a Pole, a Rumanian and Norwegians. The Har Ramon was built in Germany in 1961 for the refrigerated carriage of

bananas between the West Indies and the United States, but is now under charter to a Swedish company for two years.

Captain Michalsen said in Auckland this week that she was an excellent ship. “They are building them right today, but there’s one thing they need,” he said with a grin.

What was that? “More and better facilities for wives and families.”