Entry & progression
Entry: L2.1. Progression: the habits here are what separate a DDE who keeps a boat running from one who is permanently reacting. A maintenance system you cannot actually execute alone is not a system. It is a wish list.
Build a schedule you can actually run
Take every manufacturer's service interval on the boat and lay them on one calendar. Add the class or flag survey dates if she has them. Then add up the hours. Almost every yacht produces a total that exceeds the hours you have, because the schedule was written by manufacturers who each assumed their machine was the only one aboard.
That gap is the real job. You cannot do everything on time. So decide, deliberately and in advance, what you will always do on time, what you will let drift, and what you will hand to a contractor in the yard period. Write the decision down. An undocumented deferral is an accident waiting for a lawyer; a documented one is engineering judgement.
Hours or calendar — know which one governs
Most engine servicing is hours-based. Most corrosion, most rubber, most seals and most batteries are calendar-based, and they age just as fast on a boat that never leaves the dock. A yacht that runs 200 hours a year will pass every hours-based interval for a decade while her raw-water hoses quietly turn to biscuit. Track both. The one that comes due first governs.
What never gets deferred
- Anything that stops the boat: fuel filtration, cooling, starting, steering.
- Anything that saves life: fire detection and suppression, bilge alarms and pumping, EPIRB, escape routes and their lighting.
- Anything that, if it fails, fails catastrophically and quickly rather than gradually — hoses below the waterline, hose clamps, seacocks, exhaust hangers, high-pressure fuel lines.
- Anything a surveyor will look at on a date you cannot move.
Record it as you do it, not on Sunday
A maintenance record written from memory at the end of the week is fiction with good intentions. Write it at the machine: date, hours, what you did, what you found, what you used, what you noticed and did not fix. That last column is the most valuable thing in the book, and it is the one nobody keeps.
Records are also evidence. After a casualty, after an insurance claim, at a sale survey, or when a new owner's manager wants to know why the port main is on its second turbo, the book is what speaks for you. A good one is the single best professional insurance an engineer carries.
Build a system that survives you
You will leave this boat. Everything in your head goes with you — the pump that needs a tap, the breaker that trips on a hot day, the sequence that gets the passerelle to home. Get it out of your head and into the book. The measure of a good engineer is not that the boat runs while they are aboard. It is that it still runs three months after they have gone.
TIP — The handover pack Running-hours log. Live PMS with the deferrals marked and dated. Spares inventory with part numbers and locations. Contractor and supplier list with the names of humans who answer. Wiring and piping schematics with your corrections drawn on them in red — because they are always wrong. Known-defects list, honestly written. If you build these while you are aboard they cost you nothing; if you build them in your last week they are worthless.
CAUTION — Survey, class and flag maintenance requirements sit outside this course Whether a given item must be maintained to a documented, approved schedule — and who must sign for it — is set by the vessel's classification society, her flag administration and, on an inspected vessel, the OCMI through the Certificate of Inspection. Verify those requirements against the vessel's own documents and safety management system.