46 CFR Part 28 · Fishing Vessels
Commercial Fishing — 46 CFR Part 28
compliance, handled.
Commercial fishing is uninspected in the traditional sense — most vessels carry no Certificate of Inspection — but it is far from unregulated. 46 CFR Part 28 sets the safety equipment, exam, and training requirements, and the dockside safety examination enforces them. The burden is equipment-and-date-driven, and the thing that gets owners is gear that's out of date. Binnacle AI keeps it current.
What Commercial Fishing asks of you
Immersion suits, life rafts or survival craft, lifebuoys, EPIRBs, and signaling devices appropriate to the route and water temperature — each with service or expiry dates.
Extinguishers and, on larger vessels, fixed systems — serviced on schedule.
Bilge pumps and high-water alarms.
Passing the voluntary-but-expected dockside exam, with the decal kept current — many fisheries and insurers treat it as a prerequisite.
Emergency instructions and drills for the crew, with a designated drill conductor on certain vessels.
Records that show the equipment is aboard, serviced, and within date.
How Binnacle AI handles it
- Service and expiry tracking for rafts, EPIRBs, immersion suits, extinguishers, and flares — with lead-time alerts.
- Dockside-exam decal currency tracked per vessel.
- Drill and emergency-instruction records.
- An AI document scanner that captures service certificates and crew documents from a photo.
- An audit-ready trail a dockside examiner can be shown in minutes.
- Flat pricing, no per-vessel fees — built for an owner-operator, not an enterprise.
Go deeper
Built for the small US operator
46 CFR logic, an AI document scanner, expiry alerts, and an inspection simulator — flat fleet pricing, no per-vessel fees.