Surveys of offshore ships from abroad

From 1 August, the BG Verkehr will survey ships under a foreign flag requiring a Certificate of Equivalence in German ports only. One reason being that the amount of surveys has escalated, another is the large expenditure of travel time to and from ports abroad.

Every ship without SOLAS certificates for international voyages only operating in German coastal waters requires a Certificate of Equivalence of BG Verkehr. This is supposed to ensure a comparable safety standard to German-flagged ships in coastal shipping. In practice, mostly offshore transfer vessels need a Certificate of Equivalence. The legal basis for the certificate is the Ship Safety Ordinance section 9 paragraph 6.

The BG Verkehr only issues Certicates of Equivalence after a survey on board the respective ship. The amount of surveys has escalated in recent years. In 2015/2016 the surveyors of the BG Verkehr left from Hamburg to 47 equivalence surveys – from January 2017 until June 2019 this number has risen to ten-times as many to 433 surveys.

In view of the unchanged number of surveyors as well as expenditure of travel time to ports abroad, the BG Verkehr will offer equivalence surveys in German ports only from 1 August. This change of survey practice regards both initial as well as renewal surveys.