Passage Planning

Passage planning is the discipline of thinking a voyage through in full before it begins, so that the ship follows a route that has been checked for safety rather than one improvised underway. It is a requirement under SOLAS and a fundamental skill of the navigating officer, and it must cover the whole journey from berth to berth — including the pilotage waters and confined channels at each end, not just the open-sea passage. A good plan anticipates the hazards, sets safe limits, and gives the bridge team a shared, documented intention to work to.

The process is conventionally divided into four stages. Appraisal is the gathering and assessment of all relevant information, charts and publications, tides and currents, weather, the ship's own draught and manoeuvring characteristics, and any routing or reporting requirements — to understand the risks of the intended voyage. Planning is the laying-off of the actual route on the charts, now usually in ECDIS, marking courses, no-go areas, safe water, wheel-over points, abort positions and contingency anchorages, together with the safety margins the ship must keep. Execution is carrying out the plan, taking account of the conditions on the day, such as adjusting timing to catch a favourable tide. Monitoring is the continuous checking, throughout the passage, of the ship's position against the plan using every available means, so that any deviation is caught early.

Effective passage planning ties together many other navigational tools and rules: the chart and ECDIS, tidal calculations, the COLREGs in traffic, VTS and pilotage requirements, and bridge resource management so the whole team understands and can question the plan. It is one of the clearest examples of how proactive preparation prevents accidents, since a large share of groundings and collisions can be traced to an inadequate or poorly monitored passage plan.