Seamanship: Navigating an Elusive Cornerstone of Safety-Critical Maritime Operations

Seamanship lies at the core of maritime practice, shaping how professionals navigate, make decisions, and ensure safety at sea. Yet despite its central importance, the concept remains elusive-frequently invoked in legislation, training, and daily operations, but rarely defined with precision. It carries strong cultural meaning, reflecting values, experience, and professional identity, particularly within an international and diverse industry. At the same time, this flexibility can generate ambiguity, especially in safety-critical situations such as onboard decision-making or accident investigations, where references to "poor seamanship" are common but often vague. This pilot study provides an initial exploration of how maritime professionals interpret seamanship. Using a questionnaire with openended questions, data were collected from a small group of experienced maritime professionals and analyzed qualitatively to identify shared understandings and areas of divergence. Findings indicate considerable variation in how seamanship is understood, influenced by professional background, organizational culture, and operational context. Core elements-such as practical skill, sound judgment, and responsibility-are widely recognized, but other dimensions are interpreted inconsistently, creating potential for differing expectations and miscommunication in practice. While based on a limited sample and therefore exploratory in nature, the study highlights the value of clarifying what seamanship entails, particularly as the maritime sector increasingly incorporates automation and autonomous systems. Understanding how human expertise, judgment, and cultural knowledge intersect with technological developments is essential to sustaining safe and resilient operations. By mapping these preliminary perspectives, the study lays groundwork for future research and discussion on the evolving role of seamanship in modern maritime practice.

Keywords: seamanship, maritime safety, safety concepts