• Time and again, surveyors are sent to survey ship Hull and/or Machinery damages on behalf of insurance companies, managers or owners based on surveyor cost alone. This type of allocation is insufficient and fraught with issue, least of all that the attending surveyor is unqualified and therefore that the end claim is unrepresentative of the actual damage surveyed.
• A Hull and Machinery Surveyor requires broad skills: no two damage scenarios being alike. The attending surveyor must therefore have an inherent ability to see further than what is put on a plate before he arrives. He must have a nose for sniffing out the root cause, a complete understanding of the foundations of marine engineering and technology and perseverance to find causation despite the initial evidence suggesting otherwise.
• A true ‘hull and machinery’ surveyor comes from a sea background and with management experience. He listens to the events as they are told to him before he starts his real investigation and afterwards he translates his finding into a well-constructed report that is self-explanatory to the end-reader.