DURING the past week or so news has reached me of the launch of new products in the marine insurance market called ProSecure and CrewSecure.

They are offered by the broking firm of Seacurus and they fill a gap in the Kidnap and Ransom market for crews and marine professionals visiting the sorts of places where such risks are a regrettable fact of life.

There is a race of men, especially on the superintendency and surveying side, who know all too well how hard they earn their money in risky destinations where law and order on the waterfront is not guaranteed. Some jobs requiring surveyors are handed around the market like unwanted relatives, and when taken at all they are done on a favours traded basis.

Which of the middle-aged ex master mariners on whom we rely for expertise is anxious to take off to Nigeria these days to attend some marine incident involving the oil industry? Who wants to fly into Somalia to free an arrest? Where is the devil may care ex-mariner, thirsty for adventure in the ports of Columbia?

The people that do such work on a regular basis are few and far between.

Peter Astbury, a former colleague from my days working in P&I, a mild and unassuming man by the look of him, has made a specialty of going to hard places and giving owners and their insurers a result they can live with.

The work seems to require a voice of moderation, considerable guile, an understanding of the mentalities of the bandit and of the banker.

The list of lawless places in the world where ships and cargos get into trouble is possibly longer than it has been in recent times. People on the insurance side of life are generally known for their habitual caution in all things. If a trip which takes in Papua New Guinea comes up, the queue to visit the place is less long than say for Brisbane or Melbourne. One way of dividing up the earth between areas of settled mercantile routine and an atmosphere of barely contained daily crisis is to plot the shipping infrastructure. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a container port is incompatible with civil unrest, poor law and order and uneven governance.

And yet the need to cover the world will not go away. I wonder where the next generation of trouble shooters will come from.

The insurance market still relies on people with a history in the shipping industry, many of them who worked on ships during the pre-containerised era. They may be called marine professionals but many of them earn considerably less per annum than the average high street optician.

And perhaps the new products on the market from Seacurus may help to make the work a little more attractive to people minded to do it. K+R is the insurance that dare not say its name — you are not supposed to mention it in firms, even when you are a named assured. The black arts of K+R claims are the specialist domain of firms like Control Risk and Krolls. When an assured goes missing, a person will present himself to advise on how to proceed.

It must be a strange way to earn a living and not the best peek into the secrets of the blacker kind of human heart.

Something tells me that we will be hearing more about these kinds of products, which are rather new in the marine market and at least at the moment difficult to accommodate in the P&I Clubs which have difficulties seeing this as a family of risks that will commonly arise in the course of ordinary shipping operations.

Whenever a master is taken by ordinary civil authorities in the aftermath of a casualty or problem there are difficulties enough squaring the funds of the Clubs with the demands of the authorities. Let alone with those of cut-throats and bandits.

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