Some Thoughts on Sea Sunday by Clark Houltram

This Sunday is Sea Sunday, this Sunday we celebrate those manning ships that bring products to New Zealand and around the world. Since Covid took hold in March last year Seafarers have suffered more than most mainly because they have not generally been able to get shore leave while in port.

Some 50,000 ships and over 200,000 seafarers have been affected. Most New Zealand ports banned seafarers from leaving their ship after they arrived even though they had not been exposed to Covid or in most cases had been at sea longer than the required quarantine period. Even crew changes were banned.

In Tauranga providing services, support and nurture to seafarers is undertaken by the United Seafarers Mission (USM), which comprises three founding mission members: Mission to seafarers (MTS, Anglican), Apostleship of the sea (AoS, Catholic) and the Galilee Mission.

Originally seafarers welfare in Tauranga had three separate organisations providing this support; the Flying Angel (now Mission to Seafarers), Apostleship of the sea and the Seaman’s Society operating under the Galilee Mission. This duplicated the provision of support and didn’t make a whole lot of sense seeing each organisation was trying to engage with the same people. In around 2000 the Seaman’s Society ceased to operate and the AOS and MTS merged their services and joined with the Galilee Mission to form one united organisation, the United Seafarers Mission, focusing on providing support to visiting ships and their crews.

Prior to Covid the United Seafarers Mission had around 1500 seafarers through the door each month, and were constantly voted one of the top 6 missions in the world. Now we are lucky to get 50 seafarers a month and the way we need to operate to support the crews has had to change.

Until late last year, USM was providing free WiFi to every ship that came into the Port of Tauranga so that ship’s crews could be able to contact their families while they were not able to use the free WiFi service in the Mission. This cost approximately $85 for each ship. Up until that point the Port did not provide WiFi for ship use. The Port recognised this was costing the Mission substantial amounts of money and now provides Free WiFi units to each ship on their arrival.

One of the ways we have adapted our service to crews is shopping. The mission developed an application which could be sent to ships prior to their arrival to allow them to list items of shopping that there crew might require and we then do the shopping and provide it to the ship on its arrival in port.