1. The ship and ship’s staff must be prepared for the survey. Shore surveyors must be ready for the

Ship’s arrival.

Prior to arrival

The ship should be asked to prepare for draught survey.

The ballast tanks should be adjusted to a level covered by the sounding tables. It should be remembered that full tanks can be pressed up but still retain air pockets and also it can be difficult to establish that a tank is completely empty without visual inspection. Ballast holds, (main cargo holds used for ballast) should be empty of ballast on arrival at the loading port, if possible.

The vessel should arrive with a safe trim, suitable for the navigation to enter port and within the limits of the trim covered by the trim corrections of the sounding tables. The vessel should arrive in an upright condition.

Staff, documentation and equipment should be ready on the arrival of the ship. There should be no movement of ballast, fresh water, bunkers or cargo and hatches, cranes and moorings until all measurements are taken and agreed by surveyors and ship’s officers. The prudent surveyor will have observed the shore side draughts before boarding as these can be used to indicate any changes.

2. Examine the ship’s documentation and discuss the ship’s present condition.

Documentation and information

Surveyors and ship’s officers should discuss documentation details and location and state of all compartments. The instruction pages of the stability information and calibration tables should be studied and a check made of the tank capacities with the capacity plan. It should be remembered that the port and starboard tanks might not be the same and consequently have separate calibration tables. The base for measurement of vertical heights, the reference point for longitudinal measurements, the units and the sign conventions used in the tables must all be verified. The units used in the correction table should also be carefully noted because there is sometimes a mixture of units and sign conventions contained within the same documentation. The whole survey should be conducted using the units of the ship and the final result changed to a suitable unit, if necessary. When feet and inches are the standard unit, convert to feet and decimals of a foot for the convenience of a calculator. The full sounding depths of tanks, the summer draught and freeboard and the record of recent tank soundings should be noted. If a bunker survey is not to be carried out, the chief engineers bunker figures (fuel oil, diesel oil and lubrication oil) are required, also the daily port consumption quantities. Should any bunker or stores be delivered during the stay then the delivery notes must be sighted for the additional quantities to be included in the final survey. The draught survey is only interested in changes in the bunkers on board, that is consumption and deliveries.

The position of the anchors should be checked, should any alternation be proposed during the stay then the weight of the anchors and cables should be determined.

The ship’s staff and surveyors should work together throughout.