On The Road

I’m on the road this week until the 31st.
I have the laptop with me and most of the files I need. And I get email.
After I get back I can catch everybody up, and go point by point with Mark Ganulin.
As though I have nothing better to do.

7 thoughts on “On The Road”

  1. That’s it? Where’s the MSC letter in which I supposedly required you to do a hydrostatic study at every 6 inches, which I deny? Where is the MSC letter that supposedly refused to accept your draft readings, which I also deny? Where is the MSC letter that refused to accept your 170.173 equivalency calculation (after I retired)? Anything that you were required to do verbally was ALWAYS followed up with an actual letter specifying the requirements. Can you produce any of those letters?

    It’s easy to play the victim against the big bad Coast Guard-MSC juggernaut but, when challenged by me, you obfuscate, change the subject, and refuse to provide any evidence other than your unquestionable word.

    For the 25 years that I dealt with you at MSC, you were treated more than fairly and you were never required to do anything that wasn’t required for everyone. Every one of your submitted vessels was eventually approved.

    Why don’t you try being honest with your readers, for a change, and provide some actual evidence for the accusations you constantly make against me personally and MSC in general?

    By the way, your claim that the Coast Guard never asked your opinion on various policies is also bogus. Any new policies implemented by any federal agency (including the Coast Guard) appear in the Federal Register (available for free to anyone) and are subject to public comment before implementation. The public comments are always addressed in writing, whether accepted or rejected, at the end of the public comment time period.

    In addition, the Coast Guard inspection program has an appeal process which you can follow if you dispute a policy application or if something isn’t accepted by MSC.

    Mark Ganulin
    Staff Engineer (Retired)
    U. S. Coast Guard Marine Safety Center

    1. these were all done on phonecom and you know it. the results of those demands were all emailed or posted to you as required. you never followed these up with a letter. and any letters you did send on anything, I still have.

      1. Upon reflection, I stand by everything I wrote. The hydrostatics every 6 inches would have been email from you as there probably 6 or 7 hydrostatic items that you wanted declared at each location. If I had nothing better to do, I could search back in the archives and probably find them. One of the items was not covered in my Vacanti software, so I retained a GHS consultant for that. He would also remember.
        Don’t forget that we are not retired. We don’t have time to go back and review events of long ago.
        all the best.

        Kurt

  2. I don’t have any recollection of requiring you to do any such hydrostatic study. Can you link a scan of the letter which required it or email it to me?

    Also, I don’t see how I could have disputed the accuracy of your draft readings since my job was to accept what was submitted, as confirmed by the Coast Guard witness, unless the readings didn’t form a straight waterline. Do you have any documentation that I refused to accept your readings on ANY project?

    On May 21, 2018, I submitted a comment to your August 30, 2016 post, where I requested a scan of the letter that refused to accept your 170.173 equivalence calculation or the exact wording that was used for not accepting it. It is still in moderation.

    1. I found this in my 2013 certification guide.
      “MSC has begun to hire civilian professionals in addition to the military people. This is a very important improvement. The civilians stay on post longer than the two years that is common. I see MSC actively working to eliminate the collective Coast Guard amnesia for the first time ever. I’ve been dealing with Mark Ganulin there. Mark is very professional and seems to be working hard to keep up with multihull and new materials information. I also find Mark working hard to keep red tape to a minimum.
      We can never be complacent however. I got a letter from MSC last year wondering if epoxy bonds can be trusted. I got a call last month wondering if epoxy can be used without fire retardant additives. No one in the Coast Guard asked themselves why so many wood/epoxy or glass/epoxy multis are already certified and out working.”

  3. Kurt, it’s your blog; you don’t have respond to anything I post , if you have something better to do. But as long as you continue to mis-characterize the Coast Guard, MSC, and me personally as nothing but ignorant, power-hungry bureaucrats whose only purpose is to force you to do meaningless work and make your life miserable, I will attempt to correct your plethora of misstated facts and interpretations for the benefit of your readers.

    1. no mischaracterizing. until the last year or two, you were exceptional. my favorite example is when the pontoon boat flipped. I was sure we would not suffer because our cats get more buoyancy as a hull is immersed, unlike a round pontoon, which continuously loses buoyancy. nope. you saw no difference between a pontoon boat and an ocean catamaran. you demanded that I provide full hydrostatic data for every 6″ of immersion, no matter how ridiculous it was. on both hulls. at my own expense. it provided absolutely no useful information. you approached it with the force of law behind it, just like if being pulled over by the police. not once did you assume that we knew anything about buoyancy and catamarans. you never once asked us what we would recommend. you went thug and there was no reason for that. and I doubt if MSC ever realized that the pontoon boat trick of putting another pontoon in the middle made them even less stable with a large shifting load. again, nobody ever asked.

      when guys are taking draft readings for deadweight survey, even calm water has ripples. the depths could be a fraction of an inch varying. on narrow catamaran hulls, that affects displacement about as much as a mouthful of water. you must have had a monohull mindset where that might be important.
      You told me that if I couldn’t get draft measurements at an 1/8″ or so I should find a new line of work.
      MSC uses an ancient DOS hydrostatics program that has been ported to windows. It is the only program I know of that uses something other than waterline as a reference point.
      at one point MSC suddenly changed the required freeing port size by a factor of ten. nobody asked us if it was needed. I told you that I was sure no green wave had ever washed aboard one of mine or Roger’s cats. You told me the catamarans could also be hit by a meteor also, and assumed that put me in my place. Again, with the force of law.
      I don’t what pressure you were under but this is how it was.

      I could go on and on if I had the time to go back and find each incident.

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