Peter’s September 2026 Blog

The sky is grey today, and rain is falling steadily as I look out across the port town of Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada. I am here to visit several Mission to Seafarers port teams before travelling on to the Canada Regional Conference.

For much of the visit I have been blessed with clear skies and the bright, cool generosity of a Canadian autumn. Canada is breathtakingly beautiful. Yet I often find it is not the grand view that catches me most powerfully, but the small, overlooked thing: the detail half-hidden at the edge of the road, easy to miss unless something in it quietly asks to be noticed.

Dropping into a neighbourhood ice hockey game and watching a local community simply go about being itself was one such moment. So too was a 15-minute walk between appointments in the port of Hamilton, where I found a grapevine growing wild beside a busy road.

Imagine a service road running close to a congested route into a port. Beside it stands an industrial site, enclosed by severe steel railings: tall, vertical, spiked, uncompromising. They mark out a purposeful commercial space, probably filled with valuable materials or dangerous machinery, perhaps both. They speak a blunt language. This is not your space. You do not belong here. Keep out.

It was around these very railings that I came across the vine. Somehow it had taken root in the unpromising ground, then found its way upwards and across the metalwork. In the late sun, it had dressed the railings with clusters of dark grapes.

In my own culture, grapes carry a symbolism larger than themselves. They draw the mind towards wine, and wine towards celebration, life, abundance and fertility. To see the hard refusal of spiked steel and the riotous promise of fruit side by side made me stop. For a moment, even the rumble of lorries heading to and from the port seemed to fall away.

My thoughts went to the ship visits I am able to make. They are not as frequent as I would like, which may be why they stay with me so vividly. Time alongside in port is usually busy for seafarers. A visit often happens amid demanding work, movement and noise. There is steel everywhere, the smell of fuel, the thrum of engines and machinery. It can feel like an unyielding world.

And yet, when I think of those visits, what comes back most readily is not hardness but warmth. I remember smiles, shared food and drink, conversation offered across the boundaries of language, nationality, rank and fatigue. In an environment not obviously ordered around ordinary human tenderness, there is often a striking generosity. The meeting between ship visitor and seafarer may be brief, but it can carry a weight far beyond its length.

Published this year, the latest Seafarer Workforce Report 2026 from BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping makes sobering reading for anyone who cares about seafarers and their welfare. It points to a further worsening of the seafarer shortages already causing strain across the industry. The current shortfall is estimated at around 40,000. Within five years, the report suggests, this could rise beyond 100,000. More striking still is the finding that about half of the thousands of seafarers who completed the survey indicated a wish to leave the industry within that same period.

The reasons are complex. No single statistic can tell the whole story of a life at sea. But it seems highly likely that the struggle to provide a life at genuinely human scale plays its part. Seafarers need more than efficient systems of human resource management. They need to be seen, remembered and valued as people: as sons and daughters, partners and parents, neighbours and friends, each carrying a private world of hopes, anxieties, duties and loves.

That is one of the reasons why the work of the Mission matters so much. At its best, it helps make space for life and mutual care at human scale within a steel-forged world. And often, seafarers themselves do the same for one another, creating fellowship and kindness in places where both might seem unlikely to flourish. There is, in that, a surprising beauty. Not unlike the winding grapevine I found here in Canada: fruit and colour growing against the railings, abundance beside exclusion, life insisting quietly that it belongs.