Shore leave crisis for seafarers

Shore leave crisis for seafarers
Marcus Hand November 11, 2025 https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/crewing/shore-leave-crisis-for-seafarers

Workload and lack of time in port result in crew spending months on board ship without ever setting foot on land.

A video showed Chief Mark Philip Laurilla (aka Chief MAKOi on YouTube) making snow angels in the snow while on shore leave, and there were other shots of smiling crew members enjoying time away from their vessel in Japan. Unfortunately, scenes like these are becoming all too rare in the shipping industry as short port stays and commercial pressures put shore leave on the endangered species list.

The session featuring Chief MAKOi at Seatrade Maritime Crew Connect Global in Manila was followed by a presentation from Katie Higginbottom, Head, ITF Seafarers’ Trust on a report on shore leave.

Higginbottom kicked off her presentation by quoting a conversation from a seafarer three years earlier asking him about whether he took shore leave and getting the reply that he didn’t take shore leave as he needed the time to sleep. “How can you have any quality of life when you are either working or sleeping?” she mused.

“We have the growing sense that there is a disconnect between the undoubtably genuine concern for seafarers well being and a certain unwillingness to recognise the operational factors that make life at sea more stress and more relentless than it ever used to be,” Higginbottom told the audience.

The ITF has carried out two surveys – one of 6,000 seafarers and one with welfare centres. The seafarer survey, the results of which were released earlier in the year showed that more than a quarter of crew had had no shore leave at all during the duration of their contracts. A further 20% had only been ashore once, and about a quarter had been ashore twice or three times during an entire contract, based on an average period of 6.6 months.

“Whichever way you look at it that is multiple months onboard without stepping foot on dry land.” Even when there was shore leave only 6.5% spent more than six hours ashore.

In the newly released report on the survey of seafarer welfare centres well over half of seafarers visiting said there had been a decline in shore leave since the pandemic. On how long seafarers spent in welfare centres 43% reported stays of one to two hours, and 25% less than one hour.

The primary causes for the reduction in shore were identified as lack of time in port and workload, followed by port state restrictions and lack of facilities in the port visited, as well as company restrictions and visa issues.

“We have a consistent, identified set of issues unfortunately what we don’t have is an easy solution. These barriers are a direct consequence of an industry that has focused on cost efficiencies and gone are the days of days or weeks spent in port and crews of 20 or 30 seafarers,” Higginbottom said. “Instead of factoring in the human impact the industry has avoided discussion of minimum safe manning… let alone humane levels of manning that allows some time off.

“Operational reasons have been allowed to trump seafarers right to a healthy work environment and if we don’t address this, we will have more seafarers suffering from work related illnesses and fewer young people wanting to become seafarers.”

Coming back to Chief MAKOi what did shore leave mean to him and the crew that worked for in engineering. He described it “as one of the perks advertised” of the job a seafarer and it was “like going home” putting a smile on crew’s faces. He said you see a big effect when to the came back to the ship. Not providing shore leave as promised is going to cause a dip in crew morale, he said.