The calculation of sea days is going to be a nightmare plain and simple. The problem is that there is no means to calculate this figure with any degree of accuracy. Your MPRR will tell you when you were posted to a ship. It MIGHT tell you if you were attach posted to a ship. It won't tell you how much time the ship spent at sea, nor will it say whether you were onboard when it did go to sea. Divisional notes may or may not mention specifics, but since they were never intended for this purpose, I wouldn't count on it. Furthermore, Div notes aren't kept forever. They are culled and destroyed periodically. There is no way Div Notes could be used to track someone's sea days.
It is possible to compare posting history to operational schedules, but again, that won't say who was onboard at the time. Annual Historical Reports only list officers by name, but again, they don't say who made what trip. This information is NOT in the Ship's Log. I thought the Op Tempo screen in EMAA might be able to do this, but I just checked mine and noticed that it only seems to track information for the previous two years or so. I can already see a few holes in my own records. Things that I did, that are not mentioned: 1) several weeks of sailing in gate vessels of while in the Naval Reserve, 2) at least one week of sailing with the Naval Reserve after transferring to the Regular Force (with permission to play with my old Reserve Unit - never did get the sea pay though), 3) four months in YUKON for MARS IV where we were very much at sea, 4) two days in a submarine while doing a study, 5) several weeks in ORIOLE when I was actually posted to VENTURE, and there are other holes I'm sure. In each of these cases, my record of sea pay is the only indication that I did these things.
I suspect that we went down this road because there is a mortal fear that we just might give someone some credit where it may not be due. My fear with the SSI is that with this method of calculation, we will deny this award to far more people who truly deserve it than we will to those who don't. The end result of that scenario is division and that's never a good thing. We went through a similar exercise years ago when we were reviewing entitlement to Sea Duty Allowance (SDA) and we came to accept that there were people drawing SDA who didn't really deserve it, but the problem was not nearly as pervasive as some would believe and trying to clamp down on it too hard would have done more damage than good.
In the area of sea duty, SDA is the most accurate measure we have. It's not perfect, but it seems silly to ignore it.
