Entry & progression
No CFR citation on this page. The regulation stops at ensuring that all functions within the designated area of responsibility are properly performed (10.107). This lesson is what that sentence costs in practice.
CAUTION — Class, flag and survey requirements are outside this course Survey cycles, class notations, and the specific inspection regime that applies to your vessel come from the classification society and the flag state, not from 46 CFR Part 11. This lesson deliberately teaches the management habit, not a schedule.
Get the actual requirements from class, from flag, and — for a US-flagged inspected vessel — from the OCMI and the Certificate of Inspection.
The planned maintenance system is a promise, not a record
Every PMS on every yacht drifts. Jobs get signed off that were half done, intervals get extended for a charter, and the person who knew why a particular pump gets serviced early left two seasons ago. The system tells you what you promised. Only the plant tells you what is true.
The management-level habit is a periodic, deliberate reconciliation between the two. Walk the space with the PMS open. Every discrepancy is either an error in the record or a fault you have not found yet, and you do not get to guess which.
The budget is a technical document
Owners' representatives do not read engineering. They read numbers. If you want the spares, the overhaul, the upgrade — the argument has to be made in the language the decision is taken in, which is money and downtime.
- Cost of the work. Honestly, including the labour and the lift.
- Cost of not doing it, expressed as the probability and consequence of the failure — including the charter you lose when it happens in August.
- When it must happen, and what changes if it slips a season.
- What you will not do instead, because a budget with no trade-offs in it is a wish list, and it gets read as one.
Dry dock
The yard period is where a year of quiet observation gets spent. The list is built all year, not in the month before. Keep it running: every deferred job, every 'we'll-get-that-in-the-yard', every noise you did not like. Written down, dated, with the reason.
- The list, prioritised into must / should / could — and defended in those terms.
- The specification, precise enough that a yard cannot honestly misread it. Ambiguity in a spec is a variation order with a delay attached.
- Attendance. The work you do not watch is the work that comes back.
- The handover. Commissioning, testing, and the documents. A job with no test record is a job you will do again.
The long view
The plant you inherit is the sum of every decision your predecessors took, and the plant you leave is the sum of yours. Most of it will be invisible to everyone above you. The generator that never failed does not appear on any report.
Do it anyway. That is what ensuring means, and it is the part of the job the certificate cannot examine and the sea always will.