Ship Vetting Inspection Complete Guide 2026

A vetting inspection is not a statutory survey and it does not itself keep a ship legal — it is a commercial gatekeeping exercise that decides whether an oil major or chemical company charterer will put cargo on your ship at all. Where a Port State Control inspection checks whether a vessel meets the minimum standard to sail, a vetting inspection checks whether the charterer’s own risk appetite is satisfied, and the bar is almost always set well above the statutory minimum. For a young officer, understanding this distinction matters, because the questions asked, the tone of the inspection, and the consequences of a poor report are all different from a flag state or PSC visit.

SIRE and the OCIMF Vessel Inspection Questionnaire

The best-known scheme is SIRE (Ship Inspection Report Programme), run by OCIMF (Oil Companies International Marine Forum) for oil tankers and gas carriers. An oil major or trading house that wants to charter a tanker nominates an accredited SIRE inspector, who boards and works through the Vessel Inspection Questionnaire — now in its VIQ7 revision — which runs into several hundred questions spanning certification, bridge and navigation procedures, cargo and ballast operations, mooring, engine room condition, permit-to-work systems, and crew familiarity with the ship’s own Safety Management System. The inspector does not issue a pass or fail; the report is a factual record of observations that any OCIMF member company can then pull from the SIRE database before deciding whether to fix the vessel.

Why the Inspector’s Background Matters

SIRE and CDI inspectors are almost always former seagoing officers — many ex-Master or ex-Chief Engineer — accredited through OCIMF’s or CDI’s own inspector training and accreditation programme. This is deliberate: an inspector who has stood your watch knows exactly where corners get cut, and will ask a second mate to demonstrate a procedure rather than just quote it, or ask an oiler to explain a permit rather than accept a signature. Treating the inspection as a paperwork exercise instead of a genuine demonstration of competence is the single most common reason ships pick up observations.

CDI for Chemical Tankers

Chemical tankers carrying IBC Code cargoes go through an equivalent but separate scheme run by CDI, the Chemical Distribution Institute, using its own inspection report and a chemical-specific questionnaire. CDI inspectors focus more heavily on cargo segregation, tank cleaning and residue handling, cargo pump and line integrity, and the chemical-specific hazards a generic tanker questionnaire would miss. A vessel trading dual oil and chemical cargoes may need to satisfy both SIRE and CDI depending on what she is expected to lift next.

Commercial Consequences of a Poor Report

Because neither SIRE nor CDI membership is a statutory requirement, in principle a shipowner could decline the inspection — but no major charterer will fix a cargo on an uninspected or poorly reported vessel, which makes the schemes commercially mandatory in practice. Observations are graded by severity, and a pattern of repeat observations across successive inspections — the same deficiency showing up voyage after voyage — signals a management failure rather than a one-off lapse, and that pattern is what actually closes charter doors. A single clean SIRE report does not guarantee fixtures, but a bad one, or a pattern of them, reliably loses them.

Getting the Ship and Crew Ready

Preparation starts long before the inspector steps aboard: certificates current and endorsed, previous observations closed out with documented corrective action, crew briefed on the sections of the VIQ relevant to their own duties rather than a generic safety talk, log books and the Oil Record Book maintained without gaps, and a genuine internal audit against the current VIQ revision rather than an outdated one. The officers who do best in vetting inspections are the ones who can explain why a procedure is done a certain way, not just recite that it is done.

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