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Day 1

SNAME Annual Meeting 2011 - Day One: Wednesday 16 November


A key element of SNAME's Annual Meeting (AM) has been the offering of several one-day courses on various marine industry related topics. These courses enable marine professionals to enhance their knowledge and skills in specific areas of their vocation and interests. Additionally, continuing education credit is available, with licensed Professional Engineers able to earn 7 hours of credit, and all participants receiving a certificate for presentation to employers or others demonstrating their course completion.

The three courses offered today were:
  • Shipbuilding Best Practices, instructed by Thomas Lamb
  • Practical Seakeeping, with Edward Lewandowski
  • Floating Offshore Engineering Facilities and Mooring Systems, Robert E. Randall and Evan H. Zimmerman
In Shipbuilding Best Practices today, I learned the value of proactive yard planning for both new shipyards and those undergoing addition or upgrade. Moreover, we were exposed to popular metrics for and drivers of shipyard productivity. Finally, our class was offered several small-group interaction exercises, based on course content, whereby we determined such values as a productivity comparison for a tanker new build between a U.S. yard and the current “best” as well as a scheme for advanced outfitting to improve delivery time for a destroyer. While my office is involved with small shipyards and is owned by one of America’s “Big Two” builders, anyone with interest in national or global shipyard business and productivity would have benefited from Tom Lamb’s course today.

Bill Garzke, naval architect with CSC and active with the SNAME Continuing Education Committee, announced that the three courses offered at next year’s AM will cover topics of:
  • Marine Engineering
  • Ship Arrangements
  • Feasibility and Preliminary Design 
Following class I happily picked up my AM registration package from the SNAME reception kiosk, exchanging greetings with several of our Society’s tireless employees and volunteer servants who I now gladly consider not only colleagues but trusted friends.

Today was also Opening Day for the SNAME AM Expo. All available kiosks have sold out well before the AM in recent years, 2011 included – to the invaluable benefit of those coming to seek new or upgraded products and solutions to the continual new build and refit challenges of vessel design and construction. I was able to scope out further information on ballast treatment systems, including one new such system on the market – evidence of rapid and ongoing growth in vendors’ meeting this crucial environmental and regulatory challenge in the not-so-distant future.

In conjunction with the Expo opening was the Annual President’s Reception, held this evening in the Expo halls and made the more convivial with a variety of delectable hot and cold catered and buffet foods, soft drinks and cash-bar cocktails. This event never fails to avail opportunities to reconnect with colleagues old and new, from near and far, as well as to begin making new contacts within the Society and the industry. Highlighting tonight’s gathering was a greeting to all from Society President Edward Comstock, welcoming us to Houston – and further informing us that the welcome was extended to a total of some 955 registrants thus far! The past two SNAME AMs have seen attendance well in excess of 1,000 souls, so given that this was but the first of three days in Houston, AM ’11 appears well on track to uphold this level. Additionally, Ed updated us on the Society’s mission to support maritime education through scholarships, citing a goal of $1.2 million in contributions to the Scholarship Fund, with an equivalent match by the Society, to extend this fund to $2.4 million in 2012.