45 AUGUST 2026 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. 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 prob- lem. 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 condi- tions 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 ex- actly 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 in- dustry, 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. +1.337.364.0777 • sales@metalsharkboats.com Industry leaders in the rapid and repeatable high quality construction of passenger vessels and other commercial craft Built Right. Delivered on Time. Passenger Vessels by Metal Shark crowley.com/engineering • Vessel Design & Engineering • Construction Management • Vessel Conversions & Repower SERVICES THAT CARRY THE WORLD. FORWARD.
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