Peter Hamer, Middle East area manager for DNV, has been completely absorbed in seafaring life from his boyhood. Fairplay’s Jim Wilson meets him.
Seafaring Ability
Peter Hamer had spent about 30 days at sea on his first trip when he nearly died. “They sent someone around to my mum’s house at night to say ‘Sorry Mrs Hamer, your son’s lying unconcious in a hold somewhere off Nigeria’...” He was then 16 years old and had fallen into a hold.
It was not the most fortuitous way to begin a life at sea. But for Hamer, now the newly-appointed Middle East area manager for class society DNV, there was only one thing to do. “I went back to sea. What a great life it was,” he enthuses. “There were three weeks in Japan, six weeks in Australia. On the West Africa run, the captain ordered us to all hire a truck and head out into the bush! You’d never do that now,” he laughs.
Hamer was just 13 when he was captivated by the beauty of mountainous Snowdonia in Wales and the training ship HMS Conway. “I was totally inspired. With the Menai Strait, the backdrop of gorgeous Snowdonia and then, being a boy, playing with boats...” He tails off in his recollection. “It was sometimes quite a harsh environment. Boys would be teaching boys and we would be rowing down the river in the ice,” he adds.
When he was little more than a boy, Hamer received an O-level (then a British certification of high school education) in navigation and seamanship, and set out for sea. Hamer’s early seafaring time was a fantastic learning experience. Apart from being a ‘world citizen’ and less of a ‘Brit abroad’ owing to extensive travel, he developed a solid seafaring ability. “You were proud of your apprenticeship. You had a good base of knowledge. You were able to do the right thing,” he says.
The real seafarer life
Then he learned what it really means to be a seafarer. In 1983, he’d just taken his master’s ticket when he was asked to take a 100 year-old Baltic Trader through the Bay of Biscay, off the west coast of France. It was in winter, rough and open to the elements. “It was a life changing experience. It was one of those moments. You felt like you could have been working 400 years ago. It was very testing. It made me realise that, after 10 years at sea, I’d not been at sea. It was a stimulating experience and it opened my mind,” Hamer says.
He began working for Outward Bound, an outdoor education company that aims to inspire personal growth through challenging expeditions. “It was a huge adventure,” Hamer exclaims. He was sailing a square rigger and helping every kind of person from every corner of society, he was based in a beautiful village overlooking the city and sailing all over the Far East. “I loved my time there. It was a very special time,” he says. But it was intense. “The idea was to give people an experience they’d never forget and I was doing it month after month. I was drained,” he says.
An encounter with a surveyor made Hamer realise how much knowledge he had. Desirous of a new direction, he gave up everything and enrolled as a mature student in Newcastle, UK, to study naval architecture. “All of the mature students sat at the front like eager puppies,” he laughs.
DNV
A small-seeming detail changed Hamer’s life following graduation in 1991. DNV offered him expenses to attend their job interview and the other employers didn’t. For a just-married man with a new-born son, money was important. So he met DNV’s Ole Møller. “I thought ‘here’s someone I can learn from’. So I spent eight years in Liverpool, doing everything – engines, certification, propellers, tankers, even wind farms. I got tremendous exposure to all sides of the business,” Hamer says. One of his favourite jobs from his Liverpool days concerned the technical evaluation of a mizzen-mast put into the concrete at Priory Dock. “When I went to see the mast, it was from the HMS Conway, which I’d climbed as a boy. It was brilliant. I loved that day,” he smiles. Time rolled on and, in 1998, he got a call. A return to Africa beckoned.
Hamer became a station manager in Durban with a small team and his responsibilities grew until he was country manager for sub-Saharan Africa. “We opened up Ghana and Nigeria. We helped create a pocket of offshore excellence there,” he says.
It was success after success and, by 2006, DNV wanted to rotate Hamer to the Middle East. He’d never worked in the region before, so he decided to give it a shot and ran a one-man station in Qatar for a time. Now, as an area manager for the Middle East, Hamer hopes to expand the DNV business using the overall framework and value through innovation and change.
And that’s appropriate for a man whose life, to date, is perhaps best summarised in the Goethe quote: “Plunge boldly into the thick of life, seize it where you will, for it is always interesting.”
Text: Jim Wilson
This article has been reproduced with kind permission from Fairplay.