Not every repair justifies taking a ship out of service. A wasted bracket flagged at survey, a corroded length of ballast pipe, a stiffener that needs cropping and renewing - individually, none of these is worth the cost and lost days of an unscheduled dock. Yet left unattended they accumulate into a class problem, and a class problem eventually does force the vessel off-hire.
Riding squads exist to close that gap. A small, qualified team joins the vessel in port or sails with her, carries out structural steel renewal, welding, pipe and fabrication work as she trades, and leaves the repairs documented against survey requirements. The ship keeps earning while the steel gets fixed.
What a riding squad actually does
A riding squad is not a generic labour gang. It is built around certified welders and fitters working to approved procedures, carrying the consumables and portable plant needed to deliver class-standard work at sea or alongside. The typical scope covers:
- Hull, tank and structural steel renewal to class-approved drawings and procedures.
- Crop-and-renew of wasted plating, stiffeners, brackets and internals identified at survey.
- Certified welding (SMAW, FCAW, GTAW) to an approved WPS, with welder qualification records kept for the file.
- Pipework renewal, bespoke fabrication and on-board machining support for the jobs that cannot wait for a yard.
The output is the same steel work a yard would deliver, but completed on the vessel’s own schedule instead of against a dock booking.
Why it protects the trading schedule
The commercial case is straightforward. A dry-docking has a fixed floor of cost that has nothing to do with the steel itself - towage or repositioning, yard entry, the off-hire days, the mobilisation of trades to a single window. When the actual defect is a few hundred kilos of renewal, that overhead dwarfs the job.
A riding squad inverts the equation. The team comes to the steel rather than the steel coming to the yard, and the work happens in parallel with cargo operations and passage time rather than instead of them. The vessel stays on-hire, the survey item gets closed, and the next scheduled dock is reserved for work that genuinely needs a dock.
It also breaks the habit of deferral. Items that get pushed to “next dock” because stopping the ship is too expensive are exactly the items that grow. Addressing them underway keeps the structural condition ahead of the wastage curve.
How the work is planned and verified
Doing steel renewal on a live vessel demands more discipline, not less. The work is sequenced around the vessel’s operation and signed off to the same standard a surveyor would expect in a yard.
Survey and plan
The starting point is hard data: thickness reports and survey findings define the renewal scope, the materials and the sequence. Arriving with a current ultrasonic thickness measurement campaign turns the steel question from a guess into a quantified, pre-priced line item - the squad knows exactly what to cut, profile and stage before it embarks.
Mobilise the squad
A qualified team, approved consumables and portable plant join the vessel at the agreed port. Because the team is sized to the scope and the access is planned in advance, the squad starts producing on day one rather than spending the first days working out where it can safely cut.
Renew and verify
Wasted steel is cropped and renewed to procedure, NDT-checked, and presented to the attending surveyor. Class attendance and survey close-out are coordinated as the repairs complete, so the work is not just done but accepted - the credit only counts once the surveyor signs it off.
Where riding squads fit, and where they do not
Riding squads are the right tool when the scope is defined, the steel is accessible without docking the vessel, and the work can be staged around the trading pattern. They are not a replacement for a dock when the job needs the hull out of the water, when underwater areas are involved, or when the volume of steel is large enough that a yard’s fixed infrastructure becomes the cheaper route.
The judgement call is what makes the difference. A good repair partner will tell you honestly when an item belongs in the next dock and when it can be handled underway - and will scope the riding-squad work so it reduces the dock list rather than duplicating it. Used well, riding squads and planned dry-docking are complementary: the squad keeps the structure healthy between docks, and the dock handles what only a dock can.
The takeaway
The point of a riding squad is not to avoid maintenance - it is to decouple necessary steel work from the ship’s earning days. With the scope quantified from thickness data, a certified team mobilised to the right port, and class close-out coordinated as the work completes, structural renewal stops being a reason to stop the ship.
If you have survey items stacking up against a dock you would rather not bring forward, riding squads and steel renewal are the way to clear them while the vessel keeps trading. To scope a campaign or talk through what belongs underway versus in dock, get in touch through the ShipSmith Group team.