Risk Assessment

A structured way of thinking a job through before it starts. The library offers prompts — jobs, conditions, hazards and controls that come up at sea. What applies, how likely it is, how bad it would be and whether the work goes ahead are all yours.

This tool decides nothing. Nothing is ever ticked for you.

Kept in this browser

Assessments you have saved on this device. They are not uploaded anywhere.

    This browser only. These live in this browser’s own storage, on this device. They are not on a server and nobody else can see them. Clearing site data, using a private window, or picking up a different computer will lose them — so if an assessment matters, save it as a file. That file opens here again, and it is the copy you can send to anyone.

    How the method works, and what this tool will not do
    Two levels, and the first one already counts your controls. The assessed risk is judged with the ship’s ordinary practice happening — not in some imaginary state before anyone did anything. If that still lands at Medium or High, the method asks for additional measures, things you would not otherwise be doing, and then a second judgement of what is left. Both are kept and both appear side by side, so a reader can see whether anything actually moved.
    A level appears only when both answers are given. A half-answered hazard shows nothing. A “Very low” that only means “you have not said how bad it would be” is worse than a blank, and it never reaches an export either.
    Conditions prompt, they never recalculate. Selecting darkness will say that darkness bears on a fall hazard. It will not move a likelihood, because it cannot know by how much. That judgement is the officer’s and the tool does not have the standing to make it.
    What the library is. Common seamanship in ordinary words, written from scratch. It carries no company names, no form numbers and nothing copied from anyone’s procedures. It is a memory jog and it is not a complete list for any real job on any real ship.
    This is not a permit to work. It does not replace the vessel’s safety management system, its procedures or its own forms, and it authorises nothing. The tool supplies prompts and arithmetic; which hazards apply, how likely they are, how bad they would be, what controls go in and whether the job goes ahead are judgements made by the people who sign it. The Master remains responsible for the work and for the safety of the people doing it.

    A web version of a tool from DeckWatch, the work planner for ship’s deck officers.

    The risk library — its choice of jobs, conditions, hazards and controls, how they are linked and how they are worded — is compiled by Mariner’s Hand App from widely published maritime safety guidance, which remains its publishers’. The compilation is © 2026 Mariner’s Hand App. Use it freely for assessments on board; please do not republish, sell or build it into another product without permission.