Most of what a vessel checks week to week is required by a specific regulation — a SOLAS paragraph, a flag code, a manufacturer's manual. Section 10 of the ISM Code is different. It does not tell you what to inspect. It tells you that inspections must happen at sensible intervals, that what you find must be reported and acted on, and that all of it must be recorded. It is the section that turns a pile of completed checklists into a safety management system, and it is where most audit findings against checklists actually land.
What section 10 says
The section is titled Maintenance of the ship and equipment. Paragraph 10.1 requires the Company to establish procedures to ensure the ship is maintained in conformity with the relevant rules and regulations, and with any additional requirements the Company itself sets. Paragraph 10.2 then sets out four things the Company must ensure:
- Inspections are held at appropriate intervals. The Code deliberately does not name the intervals — they come from the conventions, the manufacturer and the vessel's own judgement of risk.
- Any non-conformity is reported, together with its possible cause where that is known.
- Appropriate corrective action is taken.
- Records of these activities are maintained.
Read as a sequence, those four are a loop, not a list: find it, report it with what you think caused it, fix it, keep the evidence. A checklist system that captures only the first and the last is missing the two that an auditor is most interested in.
Critical equipment
Paragraph 10.3 introduces the idea most crews know simply as the critical equipment list. The Company must identify equipment and technical systems whose sudden operational failure may result in a hazardous situation, and the safety management system must provide specific measures aimed at promoting the reliability of those items. The Code names one measure explicitly: the regular testing of stand-by arrangements and of equipment or technical systems that are not in continuous use.
That last clause is the one that catches people out. The riskiest equipment on board is often the equipment nobody touches — the emergency generator, the emergency fire pump, the standby steering, the bilge alarms. Precisely because they are not in daily use, their failure is discovered at the worst moment unless something forces a regular test. Section 10.3 is that something.
Paragraph 10.4 closes the loop by requiring that the inspections in 10.2 and the measures in 10.3 are integrated into the ship's operational maintenance routine — in other words, they belong in the same weekly and monthly plan as everything else, not in a separate compliance exercise that runs once before an audit.
Where it applies to yachts
The ISM Code applies in full to commercially operated yachts of 500 GT and over, alongside SOLAS, ISPS and the MLC. Below that threshold, flag administrations commonly apply an equivalent safety management regime through their own yacht codes, and many management companies impose one regardless. The vocabulary is the same either way: a Designated Person Ashore, a documented system, internal audits, non-conformities and corrective actions.
Why a failed check has to become a job
The practical consequence of 10.2 is that finding a defect creates an obligation. A tick sheet that records "number four extinguisher — fail" and nothing else satisfies the inspection requirement and fails the other three: no cause recorded, no corrective action evidenced, no closing record. At an audit that reads as a system which detects problems and then loses them.
What closes it properly is an item with an owner, a date, and a signature at the end, traceable back to the check that raised it. That is the difference between a log and a system, and it is the reason the follow-up matters more than the tick.
How the app handles the loop
Checklists are built in the admin with the intervals the vessel needs, and completed by crew on their phones in the space being checked or on the iPad. Items that would qualify as critical under 10.3 can be flagged critical, and when a check is submitted the notification names which critical items failed, so a standby-equipment failure surfaces immediately rather than at the end of the month.
A failed or flagged item does not stay in the log. It becomes a Worklist item carrying the check it came from, which can be assigned an owner and a due date and then closed off — the report, the corrective action and the record that 10.2 asks for, held together rather than in three places. Every submitted check keeps the name and rank of whoever completed it, and exports to PDF a check per page. The checklists page shows the whole flow, and LSA and FFE checklists covers the specific weekly and monthly rounds that feed it.
What to read next
The superyacht safety checklist sets out the full recurring set a 24m+ yacht keeps. On the drill side, ISM drill records covers the same evidence question for musters and drills.