Accept you were not blaming the Master.
We do have a raft of rules and regulations we need to adhere to (and the shed load of associated paperwork), but it all tends to be guidance rather than prescriptive.
There has always been the argument in the marine industry that there are too many variables to come up with tight prescriptive rules.
There are prescriptive rules, you can only discharge raw sewage over 12 miles from the coast and must be steaming at greater than 4 knots, which in this case the Master may have been in breach of !
I will stop now as this deviates from the thread