the Boat Building Academy, Lyme Regis. This year’s course was full. Delegates had the opportunity to forensically survey one boat a day (three in total) under the expert guidance of three highly experienced IIMS members. On the final day, I spent some time giving a lecture on how to prepare and present a good quality report before the delegates headed home to complete their writing task. Bridging the gap between theoretical learning and actually doing the job remains one of the key challenges and this course goes a long way in helping to achieve that goal.
We are now doing final testing of our soon-to-be-launched on-demand training portal. This is the modern way for professionals in all industries to learn, gain new knowledge and develop new skills. As they say, “every day is a school day” and continuing professional development should be important for all of us. Very soon marine surveyors will have their own training portal where they can log in at their convenience and choose some training to suit their needs. We are now starting to build the portal content. Watch out for notification of this development and launch.
Certifying A uthorit y
One of the year’s bright spots has been the performance of the IIMS Certifying Authority (CA) as I mentioned earlier. David Parsons does a great job leading the department, ably supported by Erin Kelsey. Further evidence of this came at our recent external audit by the UK MCA, who were only able to unearth just a handful of minor findings.
We remain a small CA by comparison to others, but modest growth is occurring, and we pride ourselves on the quality service and quick turnaround we provide, both to our coding examiners and vessel owners. The same growth cannot be said for tonnages, which has spurted on and we have processed many hundreds during the year.
A number of new coding examiners and tonnage measurers have been assessed and approved, some coming to us from rival CAs. A new MCA contract has been mooted for some considerable time, which will impose a greater expectation on each CA to ensure coding examiners are effectively trained and this will be monitored at external audit. Finally, the contract is available and ready for signing.
We have continued to sit as part of the MCAs technical working group which led to the launch of the Workboat 3 code last December. It has taken time for this regulation to bed in and there have been regular interpretation meetings since with the MCA. Alongside this is the new Sport & Pleasure code which would have been out for consultation earlier this year had it not been for the UK general election. The proposed code is expected for consultation imminently and likely to hit the statute books in mid-2025. It will be a significant change, imposing new regulations and will require us to develop and deliver some quality training to bring code examiners up to speed with the new requirements.
A GM, Conf er enc e & Dinner
This year’s AGM, held at Southampton in June, saw the changing of the guard. After completing his two-year term, Peter Broad stepped down, passing the IIMS Presidency to Capt Ruchin Dayal. Mike Proudlove has moved up to become Vice President with David Pestridge becoming Deputy Vice President.
Most who attended the AGM did so in an online capacity. It is becoming increasingly tough to put on an annual conference and dinner for the very reason mentioned above. Sometimes it is important to accept that things have changed. Therefore, moving ahead, IIMS is unlikely to be holding a
THE REPORT | DEC 2024 | ISSUE 110 | 53
2024
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