Pilot Ladder Safety Under SOLAS V/23: Building a Deficiency Log Your Association Can Escalate

Ask any working pilot which part of the job is most likely to kill them, and almost none will name the close-quarters meeting, the bar, or the berthing. They will name the ladder. The transfer — stepping off a moving pilot boat onto a rope ladder rigged against the side of a ship that is still making way — is the most dangerous ninety seconds of the trade, and it has been for as long as the trade has existed. Pilots are still dying and being maimed in it, almost always because the ladder was rigged wrong and nobody ashore had a record that it was rigged wrong the last six times that ship called.

That last clause is the part an association can actually fix. The hazard at the rail is physics. The hazard that the same operator rigs the same defective ladder month after month is an information problem — and information problems are solvable with a board.

What SOLAS V/23 and IMO A.1045 actually require

The rigging requirements are not vague. SOLAS Regulation V/23 is the binding international rule for pilot transfer arrangements, and IMO Resolution A.1045(27) is the implementing detail every pilot should be able to recite from the deck of a pilot boat:

• The ladder must be secured to the ship's side at a point free of any overboard discharges, clear of fine lines, and positioned within the parallel body of the hull.
• Steps must be hardwood or equivalent, equally spaced, level, not painted over, and free of any that are split, cracked, or replaced with a non-standard step.
• The two manropes (side ropes) must be not less than 28 mm to 32 mm in diameter, secured at the rail, and reaching the height required — not knotted into uselessness, not absent.
• Spreaders at the prescribed intervals to keep the ladder from twisting, with the lowest spreader correctly placed.
• A single length of ladder reaching from the deck to the point of access — no shackled-together sections, the failure that has killed pilots when the shackle let go.
• Where a combination arrangement is used, the accommodation ladder leading down to a platform must be rigged so the trim and list of the ship do not present the pilot with a gap or an overhang.
• Two manropes, a lifebuoy with self-igniting light, a heaving line, and a responsible officer in attendance — a deck watch that can actually respond if a pilot goes in the water.

None of this is exotic. A pilot can verify most of it from the boat in the seconds of approach. The problem has never been knowing the standard. The problem is what happens when the ladder in front of you fails the standard and the ship is on a schedule.

A tap-through checklist at the rail

The decision at the side of the ship has to be fast and it has to be the same every time, because pilots make it tired, in the dark, in a seaway, with a master on the bridge who wants to make his tide. A consistent checklist removes the judgment-under-pressure problem and replaces it with a sequence. On a dispatch board that the pilot can reach from a phone on the pilot boat, the boarding check is a handful of taps:

1. Securing point — ladder secured at the rail, clear of discharges, within the parallel body? Pass / fail.
2. Steps — all present, level, hardwood, none cracked or improvised? Pass / fail.
3. Manropes — two, correct diameter, properly secured, full height? Pass / fail.
4. Spreaders — present and correctly placed, ladder not twisting? Pass / fail.
5. Single length — no shackles, no sections joined? Pass / fail.
6. Attendance — officer present, lifebuoy and heaving line ready? Pass / fail.
7. Combination rig (if used) — accommodation ladder angle and platform safe for the trim/list? Pass / fail / not applicable.

Any fail is a deficiency. The pilot photographs it before boarding — or, if the rig is unsafe enough that they will not board, before the boat pulls off. The photo is the whole game, and we will come back to why.

This is the same philosophy behind every good piece of pilot tooling: turn a decision the human makes under load into a structured, repeatable record. It is why we build free calculators like the under-keel clearance squat calculator — not because pilots can't do the math, but because a structured tool removes the chance of getting it wrong in the one moment it matters.

Turning a deficiency into a record

A deficiency that lives only in the pilot's memory changes nothing. The operator rigs the same ladder the same way next call because, from their seat, nothing happened. What changes operator behavior is a record — and a record has three parts:

The photograph. A timestamped, geotagged image of the actual defect, captured at the rail. A cracked step, a single manrope, a ladder shackled together from two sections — the photo turns "the pilot complained" into "here is the unsafe arrangement, on this vessel, on this date." Memory is arguable. A photo is not.

The structured entry. Vessel name and IMO number, operator, date and time, the specific checklist item that failed, the pilot's name, and whether boarding was refused. Tied to the transit record so it is not a loose note but part of the job's permanent file — the same record that carries the assignment, the transit, and eventually the per-GT tariff line for the invoice.

The escalation path. This is where the record earns its keep. Under the Port State Control regime, a pilot transfer arrangement that does not meet SOLAS V/23 is a reportable deficiency. Many districts and pilot organizations have a standing arrangement to feed pilot-observed ladder deficiencies to the regional PSC authority — in US waters, to the Coast Guard Captain of the Port — for follow-up inspection and, where warranted, detention. A photographed, structured deficiency is exactly the evidence that escalation needs. One pilot's bad night becomes a documented finding that follows the vessel to its next port of call.

Refuse-boarding as a defensible button

Every pilot has the right to refuse an unsafe ladder. In practice, that right is harder to exercise than it should be, because refusing means delaying the ship, and delaying the ship means a phone call to the office and a master who is unhappy and a schedule that slips. The pilot is alone with that pressure on a pitching boat at 0300.

A deficiency log changes the economics of that decision. When refuse-boarding is a button on the board — one that captures the reason, the photo, the timestamp, and the responsible officer in attendance — the pilot is no longer making a lonely, contestable call. They are executing a documented association policy. The record protects the pilot, protects the association from the liability of having put a pilot onto an unsafe arrangement, and gives the managing pilot the paper to back the refusal when the operator's agent calls to argue.

This is the same defensibility principle that matters everywhere on the dispatch desk. The reason a board tracks duty time and proposes only a rested, legal pilot is the same reason it should make refuse-boarding a clean, recorded action: the decisions that protect people should be the easy, documented default, not the hard, arguable exception. A refusal that is logged is a refusal that holds up.

Why a fleet-wide deficiency log changes operator behavior

A single deficiency report is a complaint. A fleet-wide deficiency log — every ladder check, every operator, accumulating across hundreds of transits — is leverage, and it works on three levels.

It reveals the repeat offenders. One bad ladder is an accident. The same operator failing the manrope check on five of its last eight calls is a pattern, and a pattern is what moves a port authority, a terminal, or a charterer to act. The log makes the pattern visible. No individual pilot, working their own rotation, can see that one operator is systematically cutting corners — the board sees it across every pilot and every call.

It gives the association a number. "We're seeing a lot of bad ladders" loses every meeting. "Forty-one SOLAS V/23 deficiencies in Q2, sixty percent concentrated in four operators, here are the photos" wins the meeting. Aggregate data is what turns a safety concern into a policy change at the port level — and it is the same aggregate-data argument that makes the case for the district's whole dispatch picture, where seeing the fleet rather than the single ship is the entire point.

It closes the loop with the operator. When an operator knows that every transfer arrangement is photographed and logged and that the record follows the ship, the next ladder gets rigged correctly. The mechanism is not punishment; it is visibility. Operators rig bad ladders because the cost has historically been zero — the pilot grumbles, boards anyway, and the file forgets. A deficiency log makes the cost real and persistent, and behavior follows cost.

The bottom line

The transfer will always be dangerous, because the physics of stepping off a boat onto a rope ladder against a moving hull cannot be engineered away. What can be engineered is everything around it: a consistent tap-through check at the rail, a photographed and structured record of every deficiency, a refuse-boarding button that turns a lonely call into documented policy, and a fleet-wide log that makes operator behavior visible and therefore changeable. SOLAS V/23 already tells everyone what a safe ladder looks like. The job of the association is to make the gap between the standard and the rigging impossible to ignore — call after call, ship after ship, until the operators rig it right because the record will not let them do otherwise.

That is dispatch software doing the part of safety it can actually do. [Binnacle Passage](/passage) carries the ladder check as part of each transit record — checklist, photo, refuse-boarding action, and a deficiency log that aggregates across your whole fleet and feeds your Port State Control escalation path. Want to see how a pilot-ladder deficiency lives inside a live transit on the board? See a live pilot board, or look at Binnacle Passage for the full picture of how the deficiency log, the duty clock, and the billing run off one continuous record.

This article is general information about SOLAS V/23 and IMO A.1045(27). Pilot transfer arrangements and any escalation to Port State Control are governed by the applicable international conventions, US Coast Guard authority, and the policies of the licensed pilot organization.