They do indeed, and they're very proud of what they do. And from what I could see, they do it very well—although I felt sorry for the captain, because pretty well anything that could go wrong did go wrong, and that was all part of the experience.
The chair anticipated my question regarding the conversations I had on the ship about the frustrations about personnel and trying to.... So I won't go there, because I thought you gave a good answer to the chair.
There's an article in this morning's paper about charting, saying that the Soviets have far superior charts of the Arctic than we do. From what little I know about sailing, you live and die by your charts. Apparently in the Arctic we had three groundings, or some sort of accident, over the course of the summer, which arguably could be blamed on the inadequacy of our charts, both at surface and I guess at depth. The article says it would take us 300 years to catch up in hydrological charting and that there may be a buying opportunity from the Soviets with respect to the quality of the charts.
I'd be interested in your views with respect to the quality of our charting knowledge in the Arctic.