Safety
Regular maintenance system: workers unload the fishing nets – Supplied by Australian Wildcatch Fishing; Charlie Grech in one of his Blue Riviera boats – Supplied by AMSA.
Making maintenance work for you
Maintenance systems are essential to the safety of a vessel and its operations and make good business sense. By Brad Roberts and Sarah Cameron Reducing the risk of expensive breakdowns or accidents increases productivity by limiting costly downtime. Operators must include a process for managing the maintenance of their vessels within their safety management system. However, operators can adapt their maintenance system to suit their type of operation. Two operators from Victoria’s Lakes Entrance region talked to us about how they make their maintenance systems work for them. David Guillot Co-owner, Australian Wildcatch Fishing Australian Wildcatch Fishing is a multi-species fishery. They own four vessels—two under 20 metres, each crewed by three people, and two larger deep-sea trawlers crewed 24/7 15
Working Boats April 2019
by a rotating crew of five. They fish predominantly for blue grenadier, rock ling, flathead, orange roughy and trevally.
database and see the engineers have fixed that refrigeration problem— that’s good.
David explained they have a system where they log each vessel’s scheduled and non-scheduled maintenance.
‘We keep those records in Excel—it’s that simple. We can look back as far as five years to see when we last worked on the rudder, for example. That’s one side of maintenance.’
They encourage their crewmembers to log every single unscheduled maintenance issue that crops up, no matter how big or small. ‘Maintenance jobs all go into one database that you can go into and create reports on a regular basis. Our admin officer makes sure she gets the information from our staff to present to my brother—who co-owns the business with me—and myself.’ ‘Whether I’m at home or at sea, I watch the lists in the database. I can see what’s getting done and when. For example, I might check in on the
David explained the other side of maintenance is having good systems and procedures in place to be proactive about maintenance. ‘You’ve got your scheduled maintenance, your big things like your docking and your vessel surveys. They are in the schedule religiously and you can see those coming up,’ he said. ‘We also have a weekly checklist. If you work for me as a master, you need to tick the boxes. When the masters send in the checklist on a weekly basis,
