Hervé Baudu

Born in 1963, the Chief Professor of Maritime Education, Hervé BAUDU followed an operational career in the French Navy for 15 years, at the end of which he was in charge. After having been a professor of manoeuvring at the Naval School, he teaches manoeuvring, navigation and the Colregs in the centre of Marseille at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Maritime, which trains officer-engineers in the merchant navy.
His expertise in the field of manoeuvring led him, with the help of marine pilots, to write a 550-page book devoted to this discipline, which won him the Grand Prix de l’Académie de marine in 2012. This book was then translated into English and published in 2014 by Dokmar Dutch Publishing, reissued in 2017 for the Carnival cruise ship manoeuvring training centre and for the CMA-CGM, which made it their course reference. His level of expertise in the field of manoeuvring means that he is regularly consulted, whether by the Bureau d’enquêtes accidents pour la mer (BEAmer), the French Navy or other maritime engineering firms, or as an expert in television documentaries.
The excessive number of accidents at sea caused by the incorrect application of the Steering and Road Rules is a challenge to him and he puts his experience as a sailor and teacher to work on a book dedicated to this discipline. Highly illustrated with screenshots on a simulator, the author gives a very practical dimension to the exercise of applying Colregs. Always with the aim of making the learning of his teachings accessible, he has developed these themes in the form of card games and Smartphone applications in French and English.
Exploring the new maritime routes opening in the far north, he has been leading a training course in ice navigation on a simulator, unique in France since 2013. His involvement in this field has led him to join the IMO’s International HTW Working Group, which has been preparing the training framework for crews under the Polar Code since January 2017 and for which he has become the rapporteur. In this capacity, he is the Ice Navigation referent for the Maritime Affairs Directorate. His expertise on the Polar Code led him to cooperate with the Canadian Coast Guard to establish a reference system for ice navigation training in both French and English. He is responsible for Polar Code certification training, in particular for Bridge Officers of Ponant companies, crews of the Astrolabe icebreaker of the French Navy and Ifremer vessels. He regularly boarded ships in 2013 on board Ponant’s Austral in the Antarctic Peninsula; in June 2015, he accompanied a class of Ensm aboard the tall training ship Kruzenshtern in the Barents Sea and made a stopover in Murmansk and then in Arkhangelsk; in December 2018, he boarded the Astrolabe icebreaker for a rotation in Antarctica which took him to the French scientific base in Dumont D’Urville. His recognized expertise, particularly in relation to the Polar Code, has led him to participate in various conferences and seminars. It regularly collaborates with the Foundation for Strategic Research, the Directorate General for International Relations and Strategy to shed light on the maritimeization of the poles.
The recognition of his work is confirmed by his election to the Académie de Marine in 2013 in the “Navigation and Oceanology” section.