SOLOMON Islands Maritime Safety Administration has called on every ship owner to each establish an office.

This is an outstanding call, one that has been ignored over the last years.

Officer in charge of Operation Safe Boat – 2016 from SIMSA office, Mr Derek Saru told this paper yesterday that this issue is now becoming a concern for SIMSA, as it makes it harder for them to do their work effectively.

He said SIMSA is responsible to check all loadings and passengers going onboard from standard information of paper work from the ship’s offices.

Hence, ship-owners need to be established in offices so that their work are documented and liaison with marine authority is made easier.

He said currently the situation experienced with most ship-owners is comparable to “operating their ships like taxi service”.

“The owners just out there made their vessels to be manned by somebody else or the charterer who’s the ship never registered under their name.

“And since no offices, buying of tickets and freighting usually did at the wharf area, where it is not the right place to conduct those activities,” Mr Saru said.

He said that it makes it difficult for SIMSA to monitor the number of passengers and number of tonnes of cargos going onboard the vessels.

Mr Saru said that sometimes with no documented information received by SIMSA on loading activities or numbers of passengers, SIMSA totally knew nothing about whether the ship is going out to sea safely or not.

He stressed that this is very important to the ship-owners to ensure they make the work easy for SIMSA, and work with them for the safety of domestic passengers and cargos boats.

Mr Saru stressed that all ship-owners must have their own offices, so that passengers can go to do bookings and cargos are to be monitored before going onboard.