The transportations of most of cargoes in world trade have been fulfilled through sea lanes and it seems this trend will not change in near future. Nowadays, inview of the technical aspects of merchant vessels, they are continuously enlarged in hull size and greatly specialized in structure for the cargo spaces and dramatically automatized in navigating, piloting, cargo operating and various other operations, which unavoidably require high technicals in operating the modern merchant vessels. On the contrary to the trend of requiring of operating high technicals, the capabilities of crew on board have been gradually declining in technical competence and their morale for accomplishing their duties on board vessels has greatly falled won compared with that of old days. The above result inevitably brings many problems in operating modern vessels and causes accidents which are avoidable through good competence and high morale of the crew. We intend to analyze the causes of several great sea accident with which it seems some human errors are connected more or less directly or indirectly. We hope that this study could suggest some measures which help to prevent the recurrence of similar accidents by Korean ship's crews.

The disasters of wet bound vessels have been more frequent than those of east bound ones on the sea routes of the North Pacific Ocean in winter season. M/V Hanjin-Inchon was also west bound in her missing voyage. The container vessel of 17, 676 gross tons, M/V Hanjin-Inchon owned by Hanjin Shipping Co.Ltd in Seoul Korea left seattle in west coast of U.S.A for Pusan , Korea on the 5th Feb., 1987 and sailed along the exact courses recommended by Ocean Routes until she reported her position and speed as 49-30N, 158-00E and 8 knots to her head office in Seoul by this ship's time 2200 hours on the 13th Feb., 1987. The above message turned out to be last message from her because she had been missing since then leaving no message but only two life boats of her name, three containers cases, large scale of oil slicks and the corpse of her 3rd mate drifting on the sea near the position reported by her last message.

Nowadays, the transportation of almost all cargoes depends on sea routes in international trade. In the transaction of trade, cargo transportation must be completed on the base of two contrary objectives, one of which is to protect the vessel, cargoes and crew aborad her safely through every step of the transportation and the other is to pursue profits from the transaction of the trade. In spite of the great development of the modern techniques in shipbuilding today, many sea disaters of big merchant vessels have been occurring successively in winter seasons every year on the sea routes of the North Pacific Ocean. Whenever the accident of losing a vessel in rough sea occurred , many experts of the country to which the vessel belonged had tried to take out the reason of the missing without manifesting the exact cause of the unhappy occurrence. In this paper, we calculated ocean wave status along the route of the North Pacific Ocean theoretically concluded by us as optimum on the basis of weather and sea conditions. In the calculation, we used ITTC wave spectrum formula and meteorological data of "Winds '||'&'||' Waves of the north Pacific Ocean" edited by Ship Research Institute of Japan on the basic data assembled by World Meterological Organization through past 10 years. We selected three sample vessels of most common size in the North Pacific Ocean Routes, a container, a log carrier and a bulk carrier and applied tree sample vessels to the calculated sea conditions for getting the rolling angles of the vessels and stress exerting on the hulls. Examining the calculated results, we concluded as follows; 1. Under the condition of these status7 by beaufort scale, "heave to" maneuvering is the best and safest way to steer every vessel. 2. The most dangerous part of sea area along the west bound optimum route of the North Pacific Ocean in winter season, is the southern sea area of the Kamchatka peninsula.a peninsula.

Ship's maneuverability is very important factor in safe ship handling and economical ship operation. Steering characteristics are consisted of course stability and maneuverability. Today in many advanced ship-building countries, they study ship's course stability, using model ship tests, such as straight line tests, rotating arm tests and Planar Motion Mechanism (PMM) etc., in tow in tanks. It is the purpose of this paper to provide ship's handlers with better understanding of steering characteristics and to help them in safe controlling and manevering . In this paper, the author simulated response of various vessels, running straight course with constant speed, and they are disturbed by small external disturbance of one degree yaw angle with no angular velocity . The author used the hydrodynamic derivtives resulted at tests of Davidson's laboratory in Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, U.S.A. Course stability was evaluated and analyzed in various respects, such as block coefficient, ratio of ship's length to beam, draft and rudder area ratio etc. The obtained results are as follows : (1) The ship's course stability is affected by magnitude of block coefficient greatly. In case that the block coefficient is more than 0.7, the deviation varies at nearly same rate but the requistite time to reach the steady course is different. (2) The ship's course stability is affected by magnitude of L/B. When the dimensionless time reaches about 3, the deviation and requisite time to reach the steady course are influenced nearly same. After the dimensionless time is about 3, they change on invariable ratio. (3) The effect to course stability by L/T and RA' can be neglected. (4) The reason why thy VLCC and container feeder vessel are unstable on their course is that their block coefficient is generally more than 0.8 and the ratio of ship's length to beam is about 6.0.