Women’s Safety at Sea: Ann Pletschke on Command, Culture and Change
Master mariner Ann Pletschke has built a career across offshore operations, command, vessel inspection and autonomous shipping. That breadth of experience now informs a mission grounded in safety, professional equality and the voices of seafarers themselves.
At four years old, Ann Pletschke had already decided that she would one day command a ship. By sixteen, she was at sea, beginning a career that would cross deep-sea cargo, North Sea offshore operations, passenger ferries, polar waters, vessel inspection, marine consultancy and autonomous shipping. More than twenty-five years later, women’s safety at sea sits at the centre of a mission shaped not by slogans, but by command, difficult ships, honest failure and what she has witnessed when people are isolated from the systems intended to protect them.
Ann’s authority does not rest upon one title. She is a master mariner, Master SDPO, OVID and eCMID AVI inspector, Chartered Master Mariner and Chartered Marine Technologist, with an MEng and MSc behind her. Yet the thread connecting those qualifications is less about collecting letters than refusing to believe that experience ever makes further learning unnecessary.
The Captain She Had Always Intended to Become
The sea ran through Ann’s family, although its history had been written almost entirely by men. Her father had gone to sea, as had his father and the generations before him. As an only child, Ann inherited that maritime instinct without inheriting an obvious female path to follow.
At fourteen, she was told that her eyesight might prevent her from pursuing the only career she had ever wanted. She considered oceanography, ship agency and other work connected to the water, but none of it answered the same need. When the medical position changed and the route reopened, she left school at sixteen and began her cadetship with the determination of someone who had already experienced how quickly a future could be taken away.
Her qualifications came in stages, but learning soon became both an ambition and an insurance policy. Conscious that changing medical standards might one day bring her seagoing career to an end, she completed an early distance-learning diploma in port management and continued building knowledge alongside sea time. During the pandemic, uncertainty about autonomous shipping prompted an unusually practical response: she took a job in the field because she wanted to understand whether the technology was safe, how it worked and what it would mean for mariners. That decision eventually led to a Master of Engineering in Autonomous Maritime Operations.
The pattern is characteristic of Ann’s career. When confronted by something unfamiliar, she moves closer to it.
She began on traditional deep-sea vessels, carrying general cargo out and palletised bananas back, convinced that offshore work in the North Sea held little appeal. When she eventually entered the offshore sector, the physicality, deck operations and demanding ship handling suited her far better than expected. Passenger ferries brought another form of intensity, navigating the Dover Strait repeatedly through dense traffic, while time among the ice off Greenland gave her one of the defining experiences of her cadetship.
Those contrasts taught her that a master mariner’s licence may be broad, but maritime careers can narrow quickly. Dynamic positioning, tanker endorsements, polar certification and vessel-specific experience can open one sector while quietly closing another. For women who may plan to leave the sea temporarily, raise children and later return, the consequences of early specialisation can be particularly significant.
That understanding informs Ann’s work as a trustee of the Maritime London Officer Cadet Scholarship, helping young people access training, meaningful sea time and an understanding of the wider maritime profession. She wants cadets to see possibilities early, before one decision restricts the shape of an entire career.
A Wider View from Every Gangway
Since establishing her own business in 2013, Ann has conducted offshore vetting inspections, navigation assessments, sailing audits and marine consultancy across very different vessels and working environments. Inspection offers a rare view of the industry because it reveals exceptional practice and serious weakness with equal clarity. It also places her aboard ships she might never otherwise encounter, speaking directly with the people who live and work within them.
On some vessels in Kuwait, crew members may remain onboard for two years or longer with little or no shore leave. Ann can be the only woman they see during an entire year, arriving to inspect a working environment almost entirely separated from the professional networks, conferences and online conversations through which the industry often imagines change is being communicated.
That experience has widened her understanding of inequality. Gender has shaped her career and exposed her to serious harm, but it is not the only source of vulnerability at sea. Nationality, rank, race, culture, contractual conditions, connectivity and access to information can all determine whose voice is heard and whose welfare remains invisible.
For Ann, improving women’s safety at sea therefore belongs within a larger obligation to make life better for seafarers. Progress cannot be designed solely for the people already connected to professional bodies, social media and shore-based support. It must reach the crew member working six hours on and six hours off, prioritising a short conversation with family and a few hours of sleep over searching the internet for industry guidance.
Women’s Safety at Sea Depends on Culture, Not Numbers
Ann speaks about sexual assault, harassment and gender discrimination without collapsing them into a single experience. Physical or sexual violence may occur privately and leave the person targeted profoundly isolated, while persistent misogyny and lower-level harassment can spread through a vessel, weakening authority, crew cohesion and the atmosphere in which everyone is expected to work safely.
When a crew member refuses to respect a senior officer or master because she is a woman, the consequences do not remain confined to that relationship. The behaviour reaches into decision-making, communication and trust. It can affect the operational culture of the entire ship.
That is why Ann challenges the widely repeated idea that women will automatically be safer when more women are placed onboard. Through her volunteering with Safer Waves, she has seen people seek support from sectors where women already serve in significant numbers. Cruise ships and yachts may carry mixed-gender crews, yet cases of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination still occur.
Representation matters, particularly in an industry where women were invisible for generations, but representation cannot serve as a substitute for evidence, accountability or leadership. A vessel can improve its demographic balance and still fail to create a safe working environment. Numbers may show who was recruited; they do not reveal who feels able to report misconduct, challenge a senior colleague or ask for help without fearing professional consequences.
“Safety. Always comes back to safety for me.”
Ann is equally clear that men cannot be treated as peripheral to this work. Most of her colleagues, mentors and strongest professional allies have been men because most of the people with whom she has sailed have been men. Change becomes harder when the language surrounding equality alienates those capable of challenging poor behaviour and setting better standards onboard.
The ISWAN Safe at Sea campaign reflects that practical approach by placing allyship within the creation of safer and more inclusive working cultures. The message is not that men must speak for women, but that every crew member has a role when inappropriate behaviour is normalised, dismissed or allowed to escalate.
The greater challenge is ensuring that useful guidance reaches the people who need it. Maritime welfare information is dispersed across charities, flag states, companies, professional bodies and industry campaigns. Much of it is thoughtful and potentially transformative, but even excellent guidance has little value if it remains within the same familiar professional circles.
Connectivity has improved the possibilities. Messaging platforms, eSIMs and peer-support groups allow seafarers to communicate in ways that were impossible when contact with home depended upon an expensive calling card and a cold telephone on the quay. Yet connectivity remains uneven, and seafarers on demanding rotations are understandably more interested in family, rest and escaping work than reading another industry document.
Ann’s mission is therefore as concerned with delivery as it is with policy. Safer Waves provides confidential emotional support and signposting for seafarers and former seafarers affected by sexual violence, harassment or gender discrimination. ISWAN operates SeafarerHelp and YachtCrewHelp, while Sailors’ Society provides peer networks and trauma therapy grants designed to reduce the barriers between seafarers and professional support.
Her work as Project Manager for The Nautical Institute’s STEER Project, delivered in collaboration with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, carries the same insistence that the people using new systems must remain central to decisions about technology. Innovation cannot be assessed only by what a system is capable of doing. Its effect on human performance, workload, safety and wellbeing must be understood through the experiences of seafarers themselves.
Authority Without Pretence
Ann remembers the first time she heard someone refer to her as “the captain.” The words were not spoken to her. They came from elsewhere in the ship, an ordinary reference to where the captain could be found, but they marked the arrival of something she had wanted since childhood.
Command, however, did not bring an end to uncertainty. One of the most revealing episodes of her career occurred while taking a vessel out of Grimsby. Tired and dealing with the effects of interaction from a nearby tug, she felt the ship being drawn towards the quay and describes the manoeuvre as though she had bounced through the lock. There was no damage, but the lack of elegance shook her confidence badly enough that she considered finishing the trip and abandoning command.
Instead, she booked an azimuth propulsion ship-handling course, learned from the experience and returned better equipped. The value of the story lies not in turning failure into a polished motivational anecdote, but in Ann’s refusal to conceal how devastating professional doubt can feel when responsibility ultimately rests with you.
That honesty is also central to her understanding of leadership. The traditional image of the captain as an unchallengeable source of knowledge may project authority, but it can create the conditions in which warning signs are missed. Maritime casualty investigations repeatedly demonstrate what can happen when someone on the bridge or in the engine room notices that something is wrong but does not feel safe enough to say it.
“None of us have a monopoly on knowledge.”
A captain may have decades of experience and still be entering a port for the first time. A newly delivered vessel may be unfamiliar to every person onboard. Junior crew may understand a new piece of technology better than the senior officer responsible for the operation. Effective command depends upon recognising those realities and creating sufficient psychological safety for the team to question, correct and contribute.
Authenticity carries risk. Ann acknowledges that openness can be exploited by difficult people and that vulnerability does not always receive a generous response. Even so, she believes the wider result is worth the personal cost if it creates a culture in which somebody will speak before a mistake becomes an accident.
A Professional Before a Category
Women in maritime have fought for visibility because, for much of the industry’s history, they were expected to adapt quietly to systems, equipment and cultures designed around men. Female-cut personal protective equipment remains inconsistent, and even basic facilities such as sanitary bins are still absent from many vessels. Visibility has been necessary because invisibility allowed practical failures to remain unchallenged.
Ann also recognises the paradox created when gender becomes the first and most persistent fact noticed about a professional. Many women do not walk up a gangway thinking of themselves as women entering maritime. They arrive as masters, engineers, cadets, cooks and seafarers reporting for work.
Equality does not mean pretending gender never affects life onboard. It means understanding the specific risks a person may face without allowing those risks to eclipse their competence, rank or professional identity. Ann wants a woman joining a ship to be seen first for the job she has come to do, while remaining confident that the systems around her will respond properly if she needs protection or support.
Women’s safety at sea and professional equality are inseparable. A person cannot be equal within a workplace where reporting harm risks isolation, retaliation or the loss of a career. Nor can safety be established through policy alone if everyday conduct continues to undermine the authority and belonging of the people those policies claim to protect.
Ann still describes maritime as a remarkable career. The difficult voyages, destructive personalities and moments of profound doubt have not erased the satisfaction of completing a challenging manoeuvre, bringing a vessel safely alongside or watching a cadet encounter opportunities once beyond her own imagination. Her argument is not that the industry is irredeemably hostile, but that its value makes the work of improving it worth continuing.
The four-year-old who wanted to drive ships eventually heard herself called captain. The mission that followed is larger than the achievement of command. It is to ensure that the next generation does not enter a lion’s den disguised as an opportunity, and that every seafarer can be recognised for their professionalism, heard when they speak and supported when something goes wrong.
That is not special treatment. It is the minimum standard of a safe and credible maritime industry.
SUPPORT FOR SEAFARERS
This article includes discussion of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination at sea. Confidential support and information are available through:
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