The Fixture We Didn’t Get

The vessel was a mid-sized product tanker running a regional trade we had held for close to three years — same general port rotation, same core engine room team through two of my last three contracts. I heard about the lost fixture secondhand, the way most engineers hear about commercial decisions: after the fact, in a message that was more explanation than apology. The charterer’s vetting process had screened us against a competing vessel and, on CII grounds, chosen the other ship.

Our first reaction was closer to disbelief than concern. Our main engine performance trials that year had come back within the expected band. Nothing had failed. Nothing had been flagged in an inspection. By every measure I was used to checking, we had run a clean year, and yet somewhere a spreadsheet had decided we were the less attractive option. It felt arbitrary in a way that made me want to argue with it, which is a hard instinct to indulge when you do not actually understand the number you are arguing about.

I had heard other Chief Engineers mention CII screening in passing before — a line item in a vetting call, a box on a charterer’s questionnaire — but it had always felt like something that lived in a shore office spreadsheet, adjacent to my job rather than part of it. This was the first time it had reached back and touched something concrete: a fixture that did not happen, a hire rate we did not get, a decision made by people who had read a rating and nothing else about the ship. I did not know enough about the number to know whether that decision was fair. That gap in my own knowledge was the thing that actually pushed me to start digging, more than the lost fixture itself.

Where We Started Looking, and Why It Was the Wrong Place

We did what every engineer does when a performance figure turns against them. We went looking for a mechanical explanation. Specific fuel oil consumption against the shop trial curve sat within the expected range for our load profile. Purifier discharge and separation efficiency were normal across every monthly check that year. The hull inspection footage from our last underwater survey showed fouling consistent with the cleaning interval, nothing accelerated. We checked bunker delivery notes against certificates of quality for every parcel we had taken — viscosity, density, sulphur content, all within specification.

We even had the office pull the CII trend for a sister vessel on a broadly similar trade, half expecting to confirm that something specific to our machinery had gone wrong while the rest of the fleet held steady. It did not confirm that theory. The sister vessel’s rating had held closer to a C, which for a while only deepened my suspicion that we were missing something inside our own engine room. I had checked every instrument and log I knew how to check, and every one of them told me the ship was fine. The number was still sitting there, unexplained.

Looking back, I think the instinct to start with the machinery was not a bad instinct on its own — it is the correct first move for almost every other performance figure a Chief Engineer is handed. Fuel consumption creeping up, exhaust temperatures drifting, scavenge pressure sagging: those are engine room problems with engine room causes, and checking the machinery first has never once wasted my time before. What I had not yet learned was that CII is a different kind of number, built from a different kind of boundary, and that treating it like a maintenance metric was exactly the mistake that kept sending me back to systems that had nothing to do with what had actually happened.

What We Actually Found in the DCS Data

Eventually we stopped checking machinery and pulled the vessel’s full annual DCS submission, sorted by date, and put daily fuel consumption next to daily distance run. It was not a sophisticated piece of analysis — a spreadsheet, two columns, a quick ratio calculated day by day. Most of the year looked exactly like we expected — fuel and distance moving together in a fairly consistent ratio, rising and falling with speed orders and weather in ways that made intuitive sense. One stretch did not. Fourteen consecutive days, months earlier, adrift outside a congested discharge port, waiting for a berth allocation that kept slipping. I remembered the delay vaguely, the way you remember any drifting/anchorage that ran longer than expected. I had not thought about it since we finally got the call to move alongside.

Across those fourteen days, the auxiliary generators had run continuously for normal vessel load and cargo system standby, and the boiler had fired periodically to hold cargo heating in range. Added up, that stretch alone accounted for somewhere close to a tenth of the ship’s entire annual fuel consumption. Distance logged for the same fourteen days amounted to a handful of nautical miles from repositioning inside the drifting area — nothing that meaningfully counted as voyage distance. On paper, it was the single largest concentrated contributor to our annual number, and at the time it had felt like nothing worth remembering. No incident, no casualty report, no reason it would have crossed my mind again once we finally got alongside.

What stayed with me was how ordinary it had felt while we were living through it. The Duty Engineer logged generator hours and boiler firing the same way he logged them every other day, because nothing about those two weeks looked different from any other quiet stretch adrift or at anchor. That is exactly what made it invisible until we deliberately went looking for it in a full year of numbers instead of in the day-to-day routine.

The Rule We Didn’t Know Existed

Once we understood that drifting/anchor-time fuel simply gets added to the emissions side of the CII calculation with no corresponding distance to offset it, we assumed there had to be some paperwork mechanism to soften that — a way to flag “this was waiting, not inefficiency” and have it treated differently. That assumption came from years of thinking about compliance documents as things with exceptions built in somewhere, if you know where to look. I went looking for one, and what I found was more specific than I expected. The IMO’s guidance on correction factors and voyage adjustments does allow certain fuel consumption to be deducted from the attained CII figure — but only for defined situations: ice-class passages, ship-to-ship transfer operations, and certain short port-adjacent voyages under specific distance and time thresholds, each with its own conditions for how the deduction is calculated. Ordinary drifting or anchor time spent waiting for a berth because a port is congested is not on that list, no matter how far outside the ship’s control the delay was. There was no clever fix waiting to be found for the fourteen days. That fuel counts, in full, permanently, exactly as if we had burned it steaming at full sea speed.

What I found instead was more useful, in a quieter way. Reading through that same guidance, I realized the vessel had carried out a ship-to-ship transfer earlier that same year, with several hours of associated waiting time that genuinely did qualify for a deduction under the correction factor rules — and it had never been claimed, because nobody on board or ashore had documented it in the SEEMP Part III at the time it happened. Those deductions only apply if the vessel’s own SEEMP records the specific correction, voyage by voyage, as it occurs. Ours did not. It was a small, recoverable number next to the anchor event, but it told me something larger: I had been treating the CII figure as something that only ever moved against me, when part of it was sitting on the table unclaimed simply because nobody had known to ask for it.

The Moving Target Nobody Explained to Me

There was a second factor compounding the first, and it took me longer to fully understand. The required CII line a ship is measured against is not fixed — it tightens every year against the same 2019 reference baseline, regardless of whether the ship’s actual operating pattern changes at all. The reduction factors run five percent in 2023, seven percent in 2024, nine percent in 2025, eleven percent in 2026, and the IMO has already locked in a steeper climb from there: roughly thirteen and a half percent by 2027, over sixteen percent by 2028, close to nineteen percent by 2029, and twenty-one and a half percent by 2030.

A vessel holding a perfectly flat attained CII from one year to the next is not standing still relative to the requirement. It is falling behind it, because the bar it gets compared against keeps dropping underneath it. In our case the drifting event pushed the attained figure meaningfully worse on its own, and it was being measured against a line that had already tightened again since the previous cycle — which is part of why a rating drop that felt disproportionate to what had actually happened turned out to be fully explainable once we saw both numbers side by side. We wish someone had walked us through that trajectory at our very first CII briefing, instead of us discovering it while trying to explain a lost fixture after the fact.

Talking to colleagues since, I no longer think of this as something specific to our ship. Any vessel trading into congested regions, or working charters with terminals that routinely run behind schedule, is absorbing a version of the same penalty every year while the required line keeps climbing underneath it regardless. Two ships can be operated with identical competence and land on different ratings purely because one of them draws port rotations with less waiting built in. That is an uncomfortable thing to accept about a number that gets treated, in a lot of commercial conversations, as a direct stand-in for how well a ship is run.

What I Changed on Every Vessel Since

Once I understood the actual mechanism, the response was only partly an engine room fix, because the engine room was never really where the problem lived. Specific things have changed in how I handle this on every vessel I have served on since.

• I track fuel consumed during anchor, drifting, and waiting periods as its own line item in monthly reporting, separate from voyage consumption, instead of letting it disappear into a single total.
• Before the annual DCS submission goes in, I review every voyage that year against the actual correction-factor list — ice passage, STS operations, qualifying short port-adjacent legs — and confirm anything we are genuinely entitled to claim is documented in the SEEMP Part III at the time it happens, not assumed or reconstructed later.
• I flag extended waiting or congestion events to the technical department and DPA in writing as they happen, with fuel burned and hours logged, instead of letting them surface as a surprise in the annual number.
• I keep a running quarterly estimate of attained AER against that year’s required line, rather than waiting for one annual calculation to tell me something I could have seen coming three months earlier.
• I raise expected waiting time and any planned STS operations with operators before a fixture is confirmed, so the SEEMP paperwork and the actual voyage plan are aligned from the start instead of reconciled after the fact.

What This Actually Costs

I want to be honest about the consequences without pretending to a precision I don’t have. The corrective action plan submission that followed our rating drop involved real scrutiny — identifying the congestion event specifically, rather than offering generic language about speed and trim that had nothing to do with what had actually happened. The lost fixture is harder to put a clean number on. By what our operator described afterward, it would have meant several additional weeks of guaranteed hire at a rate better than what we ultimately fixed at elsewhere. I was not in the room for that negotiation, and I am wary of dressing up a secondhand account as a precise figure. What I can say with more confidence is the shape of it: a commercial decision, made months after a drifting event nobody on board had thought twice about, cost real money, and none of it had anything to do with how the engine room was run.

The unclaimed STS deduction was smaller, but it bothered me more, in a way, because it was entirely within our control and we still missed it. The drifting/anchor days were never going to be avoidable once the ship was sent into a congested port — that decision belonged to a berth schedule and a terminal queue, not to anyone standing watch. The deduction was sitting in our own paperwork the whole time, waiting for someone to know it was there, and the only thing that had stood between us and claiming it was a section of a guidance document nobody had ever pointed out to me.

I do not think either half of this story makes for a clean lesson. One half is a cost that could not have been prevented by better engineering, only better anticipated. The other half is a cost that could have been avoided entirely, by someone simply reading the right document at the right time. Both were sitting in the same annual number, and until we went looking, I could not have told you which was which.