How to prepare for a Port State Control (PSC) inspection

A Port State Control (PSC) inspection is unannounced by design. The officer arrives, works through a sample of items, and what they find becomes the record. You cannot control when they board. What you can control is the state of the ship and its paperwork when they do, and whether your crew has already looked at the same items the officer will.

This guide covers how PSC targeting works, the items inspectors reach for first, the deficiencies that recur fleet after fleet, and a pre-inspection routine that surfaces them while there is still time to fix them.

PSC is about your risk profile, not one boarding

Port State Control is the inspection of foreign ships in national ports to verify they meet international conventions: SOLAS, MARPOL, MLC, STCW, the Load Line Convention, and others. It is coordinated regionally through Memoranda of Understanding, the Paris MoU and Tokyo MoU among them, with the United States Coast Guard running its own regime.

Under the Paris MoU, every ship carries a Ship Risk Profile, calculated from vessel type, age, flag performance, the recognised organisation behind its certificates, the company's inspection history, and its own record of deficiencies and detentions. The profile decides how often the ship is targeted and how detailed the inspection is. This is the key point for preparation: a clean inspection lowers future exposure, and every deficiency and detention raises it. You are not preparing for one boarding. You are managing a profile that compounds over years.

Know why this ship was targeted

Inspections are selected, not random. The factors that raise targeting are mostly knowable in advance:

• Time since the last inspection in the region.
• The flag's standing and the recognised organisation's record.
• The ship's age and type, with tankers, bulk carriers and older tonnage drawing more attention.
• Recent deficiencies, detentions, or a company performance that has slipped.

Before a port call where an inspection is likely, the office should already know whether this vessel sits high on those factors. That is the difference between a pre-inspection done out of habit and one aimed at the items most likely to be sampled.

The documents officers reach for first

Many deficiencies are not about the condition of equipment at all. They are about certificates that have lapsed, records that were not kept up, or documents the crew cannot produce quickly. The usual first reach:

• Statutory certificates and their validity dates, plus survey endorsements.
• The Oil Record Book and Garbage Record Book, complete and consistent with the logs.
• Ballast water records and the management plan.
• The ISM documentation: the Safety Management Certificate, the Document of Compliance, and evidence that procedures are actually followed.
• MLC documentation: seafarer agreements, hours of rest records, and the certificate.

A document that exists but cannot be found in the moment reads, to an inspector, much like a document that does not exist. Knowing where each one lives, and that it is current, is half the preparation.

The physical items that recur

Year after year, the deficiency categories that top the Paris MoU and Tokyo MoU annual reports are remarkably stable. Fire safety, life-saving appliances, certificates and documentation, safety of navigation, the ISM Code itself, and working and living conditions under MLC. In practice that means checking, well before a likely inspection:

• Fire safety: fire doors and dampers operating, extinguishers in date and in place, fixed systems serviced, escape routes clear.
• Life-saving appliances: lifeboats and davits maintained and tested, immersion suits and lifejackets accounted for, EPIRB and pyrotechnics in date.
• Navigation: charts and publications corrected and current, lights and shapes, the voyage data recorder, the magnetic compass and its deviation card.
• Living and working conditions: accommodation, galley hygiene, and the hours-of-rest records that back the MLC certificate.
• Pollution prevention: the oily water separator and its alarm, sewage and garbage handling matching the records.

The human element is what gets sampled

Inspectors test whether procedures live in practice, not just on paper. A crew that cannot demonstrate a drill, or an officer who cannot operate a piece of safety equipment, points straight to the ISM Code. Run the drills you are required to run, and run them so the crew is genuinely familiar, not so a box is ticked. Familiarity with emergency equipment, muster duties, and the ship's own procedures is sampled as often as the equipment itself.

Run the pre-inspection as a structured walk-through

Most crews already do a pre-inspection roughly a week out, activated by the captain. The weakness is rarely the walk-through. It is everything around it: nothing records which of the several hundred checklist items were checked, by whom, and with what evidence; the office cannot see status; and last cycle's photos are buried in a chat thread, so condition over time is invisible.

A pre-inspection that actually reduces risk does four things:

• Uses the right checklist for this vessel type and the inspection regime it faces, rather than a generic list.
• Captures evidence per item: a photo, a note, who checked it and when, so a record exists and can be compared next cycle.
• Makes the office visible to itself: open items, who owns them, and what is still outstanding across the fleet.
• Closes gaps before the boarding: the point of finding an issue early is to fix it, photograph the fix, and move on while there is still time.

This is the loop Fleetward is built around: the crew documents the walk-through on mobile, the office sees it the moment it lands, and the analysis flags the items most likely to draw a finding so they can be closed first. The aim is simple, to find it before the inspector does.

If a deficiency is found

Some inspections still surface a deficiency, and an honest word matters here: documentation does not argue a finding away. Detention records are permanent and the formal appeal routes are limited. What a documented evidence trail does is speed the rectification and close-out, show the corrective action clearly, and give the office its own record for the follow-up with flag, class, or the company's own review. Address the deficiency, record the fix with evidence, and feed it back into the next cycle so the same item does not return.

The cost of getting this wrong is concrete: a detention takes the ship off-hire for days, raises its risk profile and so its future inspection burden, and a pattern of detentions can lead to a ship being refused access to a region's ports. Prevention is not only safer. It is cheaper than every alternative.