Rajeev Kumar

It sounds like a simple yes-or-no question, but it hides a trap that catches both officers and ship managers: the word certificate is doing double duty. In the world of magnetic compasses there are two completely different certificates, only one of which is about the person — and confusing them leads people to badly wrong conclusions about what expires, when, and what it costs to keep current. This post separates the two, explains what actually expires in each case, and looks honestly at the...

"Train your own officer and cut external compass-adjustment costs" is a tidy slogan — but a fleet manager rightly wants the arithmetic behind it, not the slogan. So this post does the calculation honestly, including the cases where keeping an external adjuster is still the right call. The aim is a model you can run against your own fleet, not a number we have invented for you. If you have read the earlier posts in this series — on when SOLAS requires a compass to be adjusted and who is...

In an earlier post we covered when a ship is legally required to adjust its magnetic compass under SOLAS Chapter V. That raises the obvious next question, and it is one operators get wrong surprisingly often: who is actually allowed to do the adjustment? Can the master simply swing the ship and re-card the compass, or does the law demand a specialist? And if your own officer holds a compass adjuster qualification, does that make them authorised to do it? The answer is more layered than a yes...