Why the Most Experienced Ship Captains Are the Biggest Risk at Sea
A master mariner warns that decades of experience can breed dangerous overconfidence on the bridge.
It allows officers to spot developing risks before they escalate, distinguish between unusual and genuinely dangerous conditions, and act decisively under pressure. Smirnov argues that the same instincts that sharpen a seafarer’s judgment can also dull their caution.
Consider a vessel approaching a berth in strong winds. A cargo operation shows a minor deviation from the expected pattern, nothing alarming, just a slight irregularity. The bridge team, intimately familiar with the route and the vessel, might dismiss it as routine.
Smirnov highlights a critical distinction: recognition is fast, but verification takes discipline. An inexperienced officer might treat an unexpected indication as a reason to pause and investigate. An experienced officer, however, may recognize the pattern immediately, and that recognition can produce confidence before the facts are confirmed. The danger lies not in experience itself, but in allowing past outcomes to serve as proof that the current situation is safe. They are not the same thing.
“A situation can resemble ten previous situations and still contain one important difference,” Smirnov writes. That difference might be the wind, the vessel’s trim, visibility, traffic density, or even the crew’s fatigue level. The experienced officer sees the familiar pattern; the risk may be hiding in the part that is not familiar. Yet the more successful someone has been, the more convincing their assumptions can become.
When Familiarity Becomes a Liability: Experienced
Operational success can be a deceptive metric. If a maneuver has been performed repeatedly without incident, crews naturally grow more comfortable with it. But comfort does not equate to control. A vessel might complete the same maneuver twenty times with a narrow margin of safety, only for a small change on the twenty-first attempt to erase that margin entirely. Nothing suddenly became “unsafe” at that moment; the margin simply ceased to exist.
This phenomenon explains why experienced teams can sometimes normalize small deviations more easily than inexperienced ones. They have a vast library of past outcomes, and they know that many situations which initially appear uncomfortable eventually resolve without incident. The danger arises when that experience is used to answer a question that still requires verification. “It worked before” is evidence of history, not evidence of control.
The dynamics of hierarchy on the bridge amplify this risk. A junior officer might notice something that feels off, while the master, having seen the same situation countless times, dismisses it with a casual “Looks fine.” A short exchange follows: “OK,” the junior officer replies, and the concern vanishes. No one has done anything obviously wrong, but something critical may have been overlooked. The junior officer’s uncertainty is closed by the senior officer’s confidence, not by evidence.
The Trap of Normalized Deviations
“The purpose of challenge is not to defeat authority; it is to protect the operation from assumptions, including the assumptions of experienced people.”
Capt. Volodymyr Smirnov·Master Mariner
This is where Bridge Resource Management (BRM) becomes more than just communication training. A strong bridge team does not require the least experienced person to be correct. It requires that person’s concern to remain visible long enough to be assessed. The goal is not to undermine authority but to ensure that decisions are based on facts, not assumptions, even when those assumptions come from decades of successful outcomes.
Smirnov’s message is clear: experience should increase verification, not reduce it. The greatest value of experience, he argues, is not in recognizing what is familiar, but in identifying what has changed today. A mature safety culture measures its strength by whether the master can be challenged without the bridge team becoming uncomfortable. In an industry where lives and millions of dollars in assets are at stake, that culture could be the difference between a routine voyage and a catastrophe.
The next time a ship’s officer hears themselves thinking “I’ve seen this before,” Smirnov urges them to add a crucial second thought: “I have seen this before, so I know what I need to verify.”
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