Entry & progression
The ISM Code requires the Company to establish procedures to identify, describe and respond to potential emergency situations, and to establish programmes for drills and exercises. The master runs them. The master also decides whether they were any good.
The muster list
The muster list is the single most important piece of paper on the vessel. It states, for every person aboard, what they do when the alarm sounds, and where they go. It specifies the alarm signals, the action to be taken, the duties assigned, and the substitutes for key persons who may become disabled.
- It must be posted where the crew will see it — accommodation, mess, bridge.
- It must be current. Yacht crew rotate constantly, and a muster list naming a stewardess who left in March is not a muster list.
- Every crew member must know their station without reading it.
- It must account for guests, who know nothing and will do the wrong thing.
The drills
Abandon ship. Fire. Man overboard. Damage control and flooding. Enemy of propulsion, steering failure, blackout. Medical emergency. Helicopter operations if you have a deck. Security. Oil spill response.
WARNING — A drill that is logged but not held is a fraud, and it is detectable Port state control officers ask the crew, not the master. They will pick a stewardess and ask her where she musters and what she carries. They will ask a deckhand to don an immersion suit. The log said the drill happened. The crew's answer says whether it did. Falsified drill records are one of the fastest routes to a detention and one of the worst things that can be said about a master.
Making a drill worth holding
The bad drill: everybody knows it is at 1000 on Saturday, everybody drifts to their station, somebody counts heads, the master says well done, it goes in the log.
The good drill costs you something. Vary the scenario. Take a key person out — "the chief engineer is the casualty" — and see whether the substitute in the muster list actually knows. Run it at an inconvenient time. Introduce a complication midway. And then debrief honestly: what did not work, why, and what changes.
Record what went wrong. A drill record that says "all correct, satisfactory" for two years is a record of nothing having been learned.
The master's job in the emergency
In the first ten minutes
- Raise the alarm. Do not wait for certainty. An alarm you cancel costs nothing.
- Account for people. Muster, and count. Everything else waits on this.
- Contain. Boundary the fire, isolate the flooding, stop the source.
- Assess. Now — not before — decide what you are actually dealing with.
- Communicate. Distress or urgency as appropriate, and tell the Company.
- Decide. Fight it, or leave. Deciding late is the classic yacht failure.
And then the part nobody teaches: stay off the deck. Your job is not to fight the fire. Your job is to see the whole vessel, and nobody else can. The master who picks up a hose has just removed the only person with the full picture.
You are not there to be brave. You are there to be right.