US MLA MEETING

Fall in

THERE are meetings, and there are meetings. If somebody can show me a better get-together than the MLA Fall Meeting, I will make a genuine effort to appreciate rap music.

Shipping has too many conferences, seminars, and meetings which are attended by a handful of people, and which don't do anybody any good. And - here is something that not all of you may know - many more prospective meetings are cancelled before the wannabe organisers, like the great salvage arbitrators of yore, get to dreaming up the grossly inflated registration fee, because only one man and his dog are prepared to attend. I even know of one meeting where the dog failed to promise to show up.

The Maritime Law Association of the United States has got it dead right with its fall meetings. Held every two years, in a resort location, they make no pretence at what they are trying to achieve. A whole slew of committee meetings are held throughout the week, and any delegate can attend any meeting. For the sake of good order, you should let the chairman know if you are attending the meeting of a committee of which you are not a member. But you will find plenty of delegates who never attend a single meeting and - here's the good bit - they don't feel in the least embarrassed about it.

Meeting organisers always tell you that one of the real benefits of attending an event is the people you meet, the contacts you make. They are running for office on the dreaded networking vote. Well, at the MLA fall meetings, that is the primary reason for going. And it works.

Last month, in an Orlando hotel complex the size of New Zealand, I met more old and new friends than I knew I had. We played tennis and golf and pitch-and-putt, we did the two-mile fun run, we took over Jurassic Park for the night, we sang along in the bar with Clay Rankin from Mobile, we were charmed anew, as if for the first time, by Bill O'Neil's Mr Bojangles routine, we ate rich food and we drank the sort of drinks that Hemingway would doubtless be surprised to find that he had given his name to.

And we shopped. Oh, how we shopped. I met one English lawyer coming back from the mall, soaked in sweat, clutching a designer-name tank-top he had bought for a bargain $31. He didn't seem to mind that it had cost him $60 in cab fares to get to and from the mall.

The meeting was great fun, good for the soul, and good for business. We were told that numbers at the Orlando meeting were slightly down on previous years, but that it was probably all the more enjoyable for that. More opportunity for networking, you see.

In between the CMI meetings, and the committee on transportation of hazardous substances meetings, the Americans won the golf, Tim Taylor was almost eaten by a crocodile, or an alligator, or both, and a great time was had by all.

We paused long enough to hear that there are 3,618 members of the US MLA, and 33 applications to be co considered from prospective new associate members.

The next MLA Fall Meeting is in San Diego in October 2001. The rest is detail.
CH

A whale of a read

BY their very nature, popular books about the sea tend to be concerned with disaster, catastrophe, and general misery. Nobody ever wrote a book about how they navigated the Polar Sea and what a great time they had, weather fine, wish you were here, missing you already. Plenty have written books about being cast adrift without hope in a little boat tossed by mountainous seas the size of the Himalayas. None, I suggest, has ever done it better than Owen Chase.

Chase was first mate on the Essex, which in 1819 set sail from Nantucket for the South Pacific to hunt and kill grey-headed whales. The journey was to end in disaster. It was also destined to become the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The Essex was sunk, rammed with frightening accuracy by an enraged sperm whale, a thousand miles from the nearest land. Twenty sailors managed to scramble into three small boats and took to the open sea. Only eight survived what turned out to be three months of terror, exhaustion and crippling starvation.

Some months later, off the coast of South America, a brig came across three emaciated men in a small boat. They had been at sea for ninety days, and had been forced to eat the flesh of one of their shipmates in order to survive. One of the survivors was Owen Chase . He had kept a journal throughout the vigil, and this was first published in 1821. It has been republished now, and it is one of the finest pieces of writing you will ever come across. Lean, atmospheric and guaranteed to break your heart a million ways.