Pre-season checklist for CTV and workboat operators

Industry News

Christian Adams
Christian Adams
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Workboat Lifting Crane

March is when the phone starts ringing. Charters firm up, crews are confirmed and the vessels that have been alongside since November need to be ready to work five, six, seven days a week. The operators who have a quiet April are the ones who spent a couple of days in March on the list below.

Crew

  1. Certificates that expire during the season. Not the ones that have already lapsed, which you know about, but the ENG1s, STCW refreshers and GWO modules that run out in July. Book the courses now while there are places.
  2. Minimum requirements per vessel and contract. A crew member who is fully qualified for one client's turbines may be missing something for another's. Check the matrix against the contracts you have actually won, not last year's.
  3. Seafarer Employment Agreements and job descriptions. New joiners need both before they sail; returning seasonal crew need theirs checked for changes in role or rate.
  4. Hours of rest baseline. Make sure everyone knows how rest is logged this season and that the office can see it. The first MLC question in an inspection is rarely about the hours themselves; it is about whether you are recording them.

Vessels

  1. Vessel certification. Workboat certificates, radio licences, insurance and any class or flag surveys falling due before October. Put the expiry dates somewhere that reminds you, not somewhere you have to remember to look.
  2. Planned maintenance catch-up. Winter lay-up jobs that were deferred need closing out or re-dating. A deferred task that is still showing as deferred in June is a finding waiting to happen.
  3. Critical spares on board. Agree what each vessel must carry, check it is actually there, and record it. Impellers, belts, filters and fuses stop more charter days than engines do.

Procedures and records

  1. Pre-departure and daily checks. Review the checklist against the vessel as it is now, not as it was when the list was written. Then make sure the crew are signing them off in a way that leaves a record.
  2. Open actions and defects. Anything raised last season and still open either gets closed or gets a reason and a new date. An action register full of six-month-old items undermines everything else.
  3. Document reads. If procedures changed over the winter, every crew member assigned to the vessel should have read and acknowledged the current version before the first transit, with a record that says so.

The questions a charterer will ask

Vetting questionnaires vary, but the substance is consistent: show us your crew are qualified for this work, show us the vessel is maintained and certificated, show us your procedures and show us they are followed. The operators who answer quickly are the ones whose records are generated by doing the work, not compiled for the questionnaire.

Everything above is routine inside CrewSmart: expiry tracking for crew and vessel certificates, minimum requirements by vessel and contract, planned maintenance with deferral control, critical spares, digital checks, an actions register and read-and-acknowledge on documents. If you would like to see how the list looks when the system is doing the remembering, book a twenty-minute walkthrough.

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