The crewmembers of the m/v Sapsan went home

The seafarers from Sevastopol turned to the ITF inspector in Novorossiysk, Olga Ananina, for help in the repatriation of the crew of the tanker Sapsan (IMO 9311713, flag of the Marshall Islands), consisting of Russians and Ukrainians. As per information from the seafarers, the maximum contract terms of the half of the crew exceeded, but the Greek company Roswell Tankers Corp couldn’t sign them off. Problems arose in connection with the area of operation of the ship – between Alaska and South Korea. In particular, in Korea today it’s quite a difficult to arrange the discharging due to constantly changing requirements for the change of crewmembers. Among them, according to the Wilhelmsen interactive map on Covid-19 is mandatory PCR testing of seafarers on board, but even they get a negative result, they will still have to spend 14 days in isolation on shore. When Olga Ananina contacted the company, it turned out that the shipowner had put a lot of effort into solving the problems and had already reached an agreement on repatriation in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where the tanker was delivered specifically to change the crewmembers stuck on board. On March, 14, the Russian seafarers were already at the hotel, and the next day they went home. As stated on the shipowner's website, Roswell Tankers Corp. provides commercial and technical management of a diversified fleet of oil tankers, food carriers and chemical carriers. In total, it has six vessels in its fleet, two of which are under the Russian flag. «I am glad that the shipowner made changes to the route for the sake of signing off the seafarers as it usually involves a lot of additional expenses, and companies try to avoid this, » Olga Ananina said.