Married: Irina

Age: 40

Family: One teenage son

Education: General and maritime engineering, Novoroyssisk State Maritime Academy

Hobbies: "I just like to relax and in the morning put my son to school. In the afternoon I go shopping with my wife to the market. I also like to work on my house - it's not complete. And in the summer we go to the beach and have a big holiday where we make a barbecue and meet friends."

Despite the tinkering, probing and poking, the cylinder line remained a problem. And despite all efforts at diagnosis, nobody knew why. A sales engineer from the ship yard was called out and he eventually found the problem. The cylinder line was a touch too wide and so there wasn't enough draw for the fluid. It's engineering challenges like this that keep Chief Engineer Andrey Martynenko fascinated with ship machinery.

"When something happens, you must understand what happens, and more importantly, why, so it doesn't repeat. It can be very difficult to figure out, especially with pumps, and when you find the problem, you're a lucky man," Martynenko says.

He's sailed on many different kinds of ship - big oil tankers, chemical tankers and bulkers, for instance. And each presents a different engineering challenge. For the bulkers, it's the hydraulics on those big hatch covers, reefers - the refrigeration plant. And for tankers, like the Front Champion, it's the inert gas and the pump systems.

"I'm an engineer. Any equipment is interesting - what's inside and how it interests me," Martynenko smiles, "and sometimes the equipment on the outside looks the same but, inside, completely different."

He's happy to be on the Front Champion as it doesn't present any tricky surprises, unlike the old ship he served on with the dodgy cylinder line. The Front Champion, Martynenko explains, is very highly automated so his engineering job is much more maintenance than patching up.

"It's a good change - more automatic equipment is installed, so there's more electronics and less supervising of the machinery. We don't have any problems. I see some ships that have problems daily. But here, I can sleep at night," he comments. He adds that, with normal maintenance such as washing, painting and filtering, is very important because big problems crop up without it.

That maintenance and automation leads to another very important improvement - better safety. And that safety is boosted by design. Some of the old dangers have been designed out of the ship.

Martynenko points to the creation of a specialised welding room onboard as one example. Before the inclusion of welding rooms in tankers, if the crew didn't carefully check the parameters of what they were doing, then there was a real risk of explosion. Which is most definitely not good when the ship you're on is carrying about two million barrels of crude oil. "Now our life is much safer," Martynenko comments.