The Smart Sailors Blog

On board, maintenance rarely kills through the tool and often through the atmosphere. This guide covers the four permits that frame a job at sea, isolation adapted to a vessel's energy sources, STCW competence requirements, and what resolution MSC.581(110), adopted by the IMO on 27 June 2025, changes for enclosed space entry.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

The NMEA 2000 bus already carries engine temperature, oil pressure, tank levels and running hours. This article sets out which PGNs are genuinely useful for maintenance, how the gateway-to-cloud chain works, and how to set thresholds a crew will actually act on. It is also clear about where NMEA 2000 stops: a commercial ship's engine room.

Ali Messoudi

Maritime Industry Focus

On one vessel a notebook is enough. Across a fleet you need a plan: a removal threshold, intervals matched to how each vessel is worked, potential readings, and the same record kept on every hull. This article covers how to build that plan, what to log at every removal, and how to use the history from several dockings to tune the interval.

Ali Messoudi

Maritime Industry Focus

The engine room logbook is neither the deck log nor a MARPOL record book. It is the only continuous evidence that the machinery was run and maintained as intended. What goes in it, what it does not replace, what auditors and surveyors do with it, and what changes when it goes digital.

Ali Messoudi

Maritime Industry Focus

On board, an identification label has to survive heat, vibration, salt spray and high-pressure washing. This article covers how to choose the label material for each area of the vessel, what to encode in the code itself, how to tag spares and safety equipment with expiry dates, and why offline scanning is what lets a newly joined officer retrieve an item's history without asking anyone.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

Ashore, a breakdown costs hours of downtime. At sea, it costs a port call, a tow, sometimes a detention. This guide gives the equation that decides the move to condition-based maintenance on a vessel: which assets to monitor, with which technologies, what classification societies will credit, and how to put figures on the return across a fleet.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

A preventive maintenance plan that works ashore often fails on board: the crew changes every two months, the part only arrives at the next port call and the ISM auditor asks for proof. Here is the four-step method for building a PMS that is realistic, workable at sea and defensible at a classification society survey.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

Owners do not digitalise maintenance because it is modern, but because ship-by-ship tracking has stopped holding together. This guide covers the decision at fleet level: what the bridge and the office each expect from it, how to keep one data standard across different ship types, how to phase the rollout, and how to measure the result.

Ali Messoudi

Maritime Industry Focus

On a long voyage there is no resupply and no express freight: whatever is not in the store room when you let go the lines will not exist for the whole trip. This article works through the loadout list — criticality, lead times, space and weight, tools, shelf life, stowage — and shows how the post-voyage debrief writes the next list.

Ali Messoudi

Maritime Industry Focus

Oil analysis reveals internal engine wear hundreds of running hours before a failure. It only works if the sample is drawn properly, if wear metals and TBN are read in context, and if every result is tied to the equipment and the hour counter at the time of sampling. The full method, from bottle to work order.

Ali Messoudi

Maritime Industry Focus

Reliability centered maintenance is not a method to apply everywhere: it decides where to concentrate maintenance effort on board. Here are the seven questions of the method applied to the main engine, generator sets, steering gear and sea water systems, together with three points specific to ships: reconciling the analysis with mandated tasks, hidden failures of standby arrangements under chapter 10.3 of the ISM Code, and the fleet effect across sister vessels.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

On board, the person carrying out a maintenance job plan has sometimes never seen the vessel, and the person who wrote it left the ship six months ago. The job plan becomes the only vehicle for transmitting know-how. How to write it for a multilingual crew, build work permits and hold points into it, keep it compliant with the ISM Code and reuse it across a series of sister ships.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

From request to analysis, the full life cycle of a work order on board a ship: why offline capture decides whether your records are reliable, how to hand an open job over at the change of watch, how planning is driven by port call windows, and why the work order is the unit of evidence examined by the ISM auditor and the port State control inspector.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

Ashore, the reorder point is expressed in days of supplier lead time. On board it has to be expressed in port calls, because it is the next call able to receive the goods that sets the real lead time. ABC classification, dual criticality of value and lead time, mandatory spares, the ship-shore split, dormant stock and the dry-docking kit: the full method applied to a ship's store.

Ali Messoudi

Maintenance & Techniques

The decision in principle is made; what remains is writing the document you send to vendors. This guide covers the ten areas of a maritime CMMS requirements specification, with requirement wording you can lift straight into your own document. It also gives a section-by-section template and a weighting grid for evaluating the responses.

Tangi Capitaine