The Skipper Was Fined $9,000. The Company Was Fined $180,000. Here's Why.
- Hannah M
- May 14
- 7 min read
A Story Worth Sitting With
A skipper turned up to work, took a vessel out, and had an accident. He was tested afterwards and failed a drug and alcohol test.
He was fined $9,000.
His company was fined $180,000.
Not because the company had done the drinking. Not because they'd directly caused the accident. They were fined twenty times more than the man at the wheel because they had no process in place to confirm he was fit for work before he left the dock.
This is a true case from the maritime industry, and it's one we've shared directly with several operators because it makes a point that's easy to underestimate: in a regulated commercial maritime environment, the company's exposure isn't limited to what happens on the water. It extends to whether you can prove you had a system to prevent it.
It's Not Always the Obvious Cases Either
The drug and alcohol scenario above is the clearest version of this risk. But it's not the only one, and some of the others are easy to miss entirely.
A master fell asleep at the wheel and collided with another vessel. The investigation found he'd taken over-the-counter cold and flu medication and hay fever tablets — both of which carried drowsiness warnings. He hadn't been drinking. He wasn't being reckless. He was sick, took medication that's sold without any restriction, and it impaired him enough to cause a collision.
A master was called in on a day off because the team was short-staffed. Short notice, no time to properly prepare, raced down to help out — and had an accident. He failed a drug and alcohol test afterwards, despite being called in as a favour to cover a gap.
A vessel wasn't even involved in an incident — but still came under investigation. One operator's diving boat was first on the scene of an emergency involving another vessel, helping locate someone who'd gone missing in the water. Because the mayday call had come through their boat, police began asking detailed questions about the company's own record-keeping — even though they weren't party to the original incident at all. As the operations manager put it afterward: "It just goes to show that even when it wasn't us directly involved in the accident... they actually dig into your stuff as well."
That last one is the detail most operators don't think about. You don't need to be at fault to have your records scrutinised. You just need to be nearby.
Why This Keeps Happening
None of these situations involve a company knowingly sending someone out unfit for duty. That's exactly the point.
Fitness for duty isn't usually a dramatic, obvious failure. It's a tired crew member who didn't think a hangover from the night before was a big deal. It's someone who took a perfectly legal medication without realising — or without anyone asking — whether it would affect their alertness. It's someone covering a shift on short notice, under pressure, without anyone checking in on how they were actually doing.
Maritime research consistently identifies human factors as the leading cause of commercial maritime accidents — ahead of weather, ahead of mechanical failure. And a significant portion of those human factors trace back to exactly this: fatigue, illness, medication, stress, or substance use that nobody formally checked for before departure.
The legal exposure isn't really about whether an individual crew member made a poor choice. It's about whether the company can demonstrate it had a process to catch that before the vessel left the dock.
What a Fit-for-Duty Process Actually Looks Like
This doesn't need to be invasive, time-consuming, or treated as an accusation. In aviation, a similar concept is widely used and crew don't experience it as distrust — they experience it as a normal part of a professional safety culture. The same approach works on the water.
A practical crew welfare check, completed at the start of each voyage, typically covers:
Illness — confirming the crew member isn't currently unwell
Medication — checking whether they're on anything that could cause drowsiness or impairment, including common over-the-counter medications
Alcohol — confirming they're free of alcohol, particularly relevant after time off or social events the night before
Fatigue — a genuine check on whether they're rested enough to safely operate
Stress — acknowledging that personal or work-related stress affects judgement and reaction time too
Nutrition and hydration — confirming they're fuelled and ready, which sounds minor but genuinely affects alertness over a long shift
This is sometimes referred to using the acronym I'M SAFE (Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Eating/drinking) — a framework borrowed directly from aviation, where this kind of pre-flight crew check has been standard practice for decades.
The point isn't to create an environment of suspicion. It's to build a simple, repeatable habit: before anyone takes a vessel out, there's a moment where the team confirms — to themselves and to management — that everyone on board is actually fit to be there.
Why Documentation Matters as Much as the Check Itself
Here's the part that's easy to overlook: doing the check matters, but being able to prove you did it is what actually protects the company.
A verbal "you all good?" before departure, with no record of it, doesn't hold up in an investigation. If an incident happens and there's no documented evidence that a fitness-for-duty check occurred, you're in exactly the same legal position as if you'd never asked at all.
This is where a digital, tamper-evident logbook makes a structural difference. When the crew welfare check is built into the same legally binding logbook entry that records the voyage itself — timestamped, attributed to each crew member, unable to be altered after the fact — you have something fundamentally different from a verbal check-in. You have evidence.
In the case of the master who fell asleep after taking cold and flu medication, the operator we discussed this with made the point directly: having crew training and crew welfare checks properly on file, and being able to prove nothing was added or changed after the incident, materially helps in exactly the kind of investigation that follows.
What This Means for How You Run Departures
If you're rethinking how fitness-for-duty fits into your existing pre-departure process, here's what tends to work well in practice.
Make it part of the same record as everything else. A separate form that lives apart from your main logbook is more likely to be skipped, lost, or forgotten. Built into the same departure checklist your crew already complete, it becomes one more box in a process they're doing anyway — not an extra task competing for attention.
Keep it brief, but make it genuinely answerable. A two-minute check that crew actually engage with honestly is worth more than an exhaustive form that gets rubber-stamped without thought.
Give crew a way to flag a concern without making it a confrontation. Some operators include a simple prompt — something like "any concerns, please refer to management" — so a crew member who's genuinely not feeling right has a clear, low-friction way to raise it, rather than feeling pressure to push through and say they're fine.
Treat it as protecting your crew, not just the company. The framing matters. This isn't about catching people out. It's about making sure nobody goes out on the water under-rested, unwell, or impaired — for their own safety as much as anyone else's.
Frequently Asked Questions
Won't crew see this as the company not trusting them?
Framed well, it tends to land the opposite way. Most crew understand that fatigue, illness, and medication genuinely affect performance on the water, and a quick, consistent check normalises raising a concern rather than pushing through and hoping nothing goes wrong. The aviation industry has run an equivalent process for decades without it being seen as adversarial.
Does this need to involve an actual drug and alcohol test, or is it a self-assessment?
That depends on your regulatory environment and internal policy — some operations run formal testing programs, others rely on a self-assessment combined with a clear escalation path if a crew member or colleague has a concern. The documentation principle is the same either way: whatever check you run, it needs to be recorded as part of the legal record, not just verbally confirmed.
Can this be turned off or customised if it doesn't suit our operation?
Yes. A welfare or fitness-for-duty check should be configurable — some operators want a detailed version, others want a lighter touch, and some choose not to include it at all depending on their crew structure and risk profile.
What if a crew member raises a genuine concern right before departure — what's the actual process from there?
That's a decision for your own management and safety procedures, not something software dictates. What the system should support is making sure that when a concern is raised, there's a clear, documented trail of it — who flagged it, when, and what action was taken — rather than it being an informal conversation nobody recorded.
Is this kind of record actually useful in an investigation, or is it just for show?
Based on real cases, it's directly useful. Investigators look specifically for evidence of a functioning safety management system — not just whether an incident happened, but whether the company had reasonable processes in place to prevent it. A documented, tamper-evident fitness-for-duty record is exactly the kind of evidence that demonstrates due diligence.
The Real Lesson From the $180,000 Fine
The skipper made a choice that night. The company's failure was different — and arguably more consequential. They had no system to catch it before he took the vessel out.
That's the gap a proper fit-for-duty process closes. Not by guaranteeing nobody ever makes a poor choice — that's not realistic, and no software promises it. But by making sure that when someone is unwell, impaired, exhausted, or simply not okay that day, there's a structured, documented moment where that has a chance to surface before the vessel leaves the dock.
And if the worst still happens, you're not left explaining why you had no process at all. You're showing exactly what process you had, and that it was followed.
Want to See How This Fits Into Your Existing Departure Process?
We'll walk you through exactly how a crew welfare check integrates into your logbook, how it's customised to your operation, and how the documentation holds up if it's ever needed.
SeaLogs is purpose-built maritime operations software used by commercial operators across Australia, New Zealand, North America, and beyond. Built by people who've worked on the water — for the people who run the boats.
