Monday 13 December 2021
Regulation is in place to improve passenger safety on domestic commercial vessels. These measures were made in response to fatal and serious non-fatal incidents involving passengers falling overboard.
If you operate a vessel that carries passengers, you must:
- Include a procedure in your safety management system to ensure passengers are monitored and accounted for during a voyage. The procedure must allow the master to be able to identify how many passengers are on board at any time.
- Include an emergency procedure in your safety management system that deals with a missing passenger.
- Some operators will need to ensure that their procedures include a count of all passengers on board the vessel where one or more passengers embark on, or disembark from, the vessel—including when the vessel departs a landing point along the way or departs a site where passengers may have left the vessel to undertake a water activity.
- You must also keep a record of the results of any passenger counts in the vessel’s logbook.
If you have a question about how this applies to your operation, you can complete our online form. Read more about Marine order 504.
