This is the second in a three-part series on building a stronger maritime operation. Part one, “Navigating U.S. Coast Guard Inspection Prep as a Daily Operational Habit, Not a Once-a-Year Scramble,” appeared in the June issue of Foghorn.
I want to tell you about a conversation I had with an operator a while back. Good guy. Ran a tight charter operation, decent-sized fleet, had been in the business for years. We were talking about a near-miss his vessel had—nothing catastrophic, but the kind of thing that could have gone very differently.
I asked him what happened.
He said: “One of my crew noticed something felt off before we left the dock. But they didn’t say anything.”
I asked why.
He looked at me and said, “Honestly? I don’t think they thought it was their place.”
That right there. That’s the whole conversation I want to have with you today.
Your Equipment Didn’t Cause That. Your Culture Did.
Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night when I think about maritime safety: most serious incidents aren’t caused by missing equipment or ignored checklists. They’re caused by a crew member who saw something, felt something, knew something, but said nothing.
Not because they didn’t care. Because the culture around them hadn’t made it safe to speak up.
That’s a safety problem no inspection prep solves. No binder fixes it. No certification covers it. It lives entirely in the space between your people, in what they believe is expected of them, what they’ve seen rewarded, and what they’ve learned to keep to themselves.
And here’s what makes it so dangerous: you can’t see it. You can walk your vessel stem to stern and find nothing wrong. Your paperwork can be spotless. Your equipment can be current and properly stowed. And you can still have a crew that, in a critical moment, doesn’t feel empowered to make the call that matters.
That’s what safety culture actually is. Not a policy. Not a drill schedule. The invisible set of rules your crew operates by when no one’s watching—and when everything is on the line.
Let’s Talk About What This Costs You
I come at everything from a business lens—that’s my job, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. So, before I get into the how, let me make the case for the why in terms that hit the balance sheet.
A serious onboard incident doesn’t just hurt people. It can end your business.
Here’s the cascade, and it moves fast: U.S. Coast Guard investigation. Operations suspended. Certificate of Inspection potentially pulled. Your insurance carrier is on the phone before the day is out. Premiums that won’t recover for years. Civil liability that follows you long after the headlines stop. And the headlines—during peak season, with your name attached, in the local market you’ve spent years building a reputation in.
That’s the business version. The human version is worse, and it’s the one that actually matters most. But I find that operators who haven’t lived through an incident sometimes need to see the business version first before the full weight of it lands.
What I’ve seen, over and over, is that the operators who’ve been through something serious didn’t lack equipment. They lacked a crew culture that caught the problem before it became one.
That should stop you cold. Because the equipment is the easy part. You can buy equipment. You can’t buy a crew that speaks up at the right moment, you have to build that. And building it costs a fraction of what losing it costs.
So, What Does A Real Safety Culture Actually Look Like?
Let me get practical, because “build a safety culture” can sound like something that belongs in a corporate training seminar, not on a working vessel. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be intentional.
The most important thing you can do is make speaking up completely normal. Not encouraged. Not tolerated. Normal. There’s a difference. Encouraged means someone gets a pat on the back when they raise a concern. Normal means nobody thinks twice about it—it’s just what people do here, at every level, in every direction.
The most important thing you can do is make speaking up completely normal. Not encouraged. Not tolerated. Normal.
If a deckhand on their third week notices something that doesn’t look right and their first instinct is to wonder whether it’s their place to say something—you have a problem. That silence is more dangerous than any equipment failure you’ll ever face. Fix the culture, or the culture will cost you.
Most operators run safety drills, but what separates the ones that actually build capability from the ones that just satisfy a requirement is whether they’re treated like the real thing. There’s a massive difference between a crew that has run a man-overboard drill under time pressure, in conditions that weren’t perfect, with a debrief afterward, and a crew that walked through the motions on a calm Tuesday morning at the dock. I’ll be direct: if your crew knows exactly what’s coming and nobody breaks a sweat, you ran a performance, not a drill.
When something happens at sea, your crew defaults to their training. Make sure their training is worth defaulting to. Run drills when it’s inconvenient. Debrief hard. Ask what would have gone wrong if conditions were worse. That’s where the real learning lives.
Every new crew member is either absorbed into your culture, or they dilute it. Turnover is a reality in this industry, and this is the part most operators underestimate. Every time someone new comes aboard, the culture either pulls them in, or they bring something else with them. A first-day walkthrough of the safety equipment locations is not an onboarding program—it’s a tour. What new crew members actually need is to understand the why behind the standards, to shadow people who genuinely operate by them, and to have enough time before they’re put in a position where their instincts need to be right.
Your pre-departure safety briefing is not a formality, and honestly, the ones that sound like one probably aren’t working. For charter and passenger vessel operators, that briefing is the only safety training your passengers will ever get. The operators who treat it like it matters—who deliver it with presence, make sure people are actually listening, and cover it like they mean it—have passengers who behave differently in an emergency. That’s not a small thing.
The Question Nobody Wants Me to Ask
Alright. Here’s the one that makes people uncomfortable, and I’m going to ask it anyway because I think it’s the most important one:
What does your crew see you do?
Not what you say. Not what the policy document says. What they actually watch you do when you’re running late, when the weather is borderline, when a charter group is waiting at the dock, and the conditions aren’t quite right. When a crew member raises a concern, that’s going to cost you time.
Safety culture doesn’t travel through memos. It travels through behavior. Your behavior, specifically—because you set the standard whether you mean to or not.
Safety culture doesn’t travel through memos. It travels through behavior. Your behavior, specifically—because you set the standard whether you mean to or not.
If you push out when you know you probably shouldn’t, your crew files that away. If you wave off a concern because you’re in a hurry, your crew files that away too. You’re teaching them what the real rules are, not the written ones.
But here’s the flip side, and it’s just as true: when they watch you make a hard call to stay at the dock because something doesn’t feel right—when they see you take a crew member’s concern seriously even when it costs you—that travels through the organization faster than any training program you’ll ever run. You’re building the culture either way. Might as well build it on purpose.
Where Vessel Vanguard Fits In
In the June issue of Foghorn, I talked about how we built Vessel Vanguard to take the administrative weight out of compliance. The same principle applies to safety management.
The documentation side of safety culture—tracking crew certifications, logging drills, maintaining training records, capturing safety briefings—all of it matters. And all of it is easier to do consistently when it lives in a system that doesn’t compete with the fifteen other things on your plate. Get the record-keeping handled so your actual attention can stay on the people and the culture. That’s where it belongs.
The Bottom Line
Safety culture isn’t a program you implement. It’s a standard you set, every departure, every drill, every moment someone almost said something and didn’t.
The operations that consistently outperform in this industry—lower incident rates, cleaner inspections, stronger crew retention, better reputations—share one thing that doesn’t show up on a spec sheet. Their people know what’s expected, trust that speaking up is safe, and have seen their leadership back that up when it was inconvenient.
That’s not soft leadership. That’s the most operationally sound decision you can make. Because the cost of a strong safety culture is time and intention. The cost of a weak one is everything else.
The operations that get it right are the ones whose crew, from the most experienced mate down to the newest deckhand, would tell you without hesitation that they know what to do, they know they can speak up, and they know the person running the operation means it.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone decided it mattered and showed up that way every single day.
And document it. A culture this strong deserves a record—and when an inspector or an insurance carrier comes calling, that record speaks for itself.
Be that operator. Your crew is watching.
Vessel Vanguard provides fleet maintenance and safety management for commercial, passenger, charter and military vessels. Learn more at VesselVanguard.com.
Senior Director of Sales, Vessel Vanguard
With extensive experience across the marine and aviation industries, Silvashy has built her career at the intersection of advanced technology and critical operations, helping organizations modernize and scale through innovative solutions. At Vessel Vanguard, Silvashy leads sales strategy and customer growth, guiding vessel owners, operators, and fleet managers in adopting smarter maintenance systems. Her work emphasizes safety initiatives, safety management systems (SMS), and regulatory compliance, ensuring clients not only achieve greater efficiency but also uphold the highest standards of safety and accountability. By delivering solutions that enhance reliability, reduce downtime, and simplify oversight, she helps the industry navigate evolving regulatory frameworks with confidence.