We build the compliance platform we wished we had on the bridge.
Founder & CEO
Craig founded Magnor Vessels after working as a Bosun and then Mate aboard yachts of 50 metres and above — the years when compliance paperwork stops being someone else’s problem and becomes yours. Rest-hour sheets, crew certificates, drill records, filled in at the end of a long day.
The software available to manage it made the crew do the data entry and still could not answer the question an inspector would actually ask. Magnor Vessels exists to close that gap — not a filing cabinet with a search box, but a system that reads the records and tells you where the vessel genuinely stands.
The problem in three short stories.
A captain spends Saturday morning before a charter reconciling the rest-hour spreadsheet, photographing certificates for the management company, and chasing the engineer for the latest drill record. The same routine, every time, on every vessel. None of it makes the vessel any safer; it just satisfies the next person who's going to ask. We thought: if a software tool kept this in order automatically, the captain could spend Saturday morning sailing.
Port State Control doesn't book ahead. An inspector boards, asks for twenty documents, and the master spends thirty minutes hunting through ring binders and a network drive. The vessel isn't non-compliant — the documents exist — but producing them takes time the inspector doesn't have, and small gaps become deficiencies. We wanted one screen the master could hand over, that already had every PSC focus area on it.
Most maritime compliance software is built for commercial shipping — tankers, container ships, bulk carriers — and shoehorned onto yachts. The result is a workflow built around cargo manifests and stevedore schedules that asks captains questions that don't apply to a 95 GT motor yacht. We wanted a tool that knew the vessel's flag, GT, and type before it asked the first question, and only showed the rules that actually applied.
Most compliance software stores what you type and hands it back. The difference is what happens after that.
STCW requires ten hours of rest in any 24-hour period. Not per calendar day — any. A sheet laid out by day, whether paper or spreadsheet, can only ever show you days, so the window that breaks compliance is structurally the one the form cannot draw. It is nearly always the one that straddles midnight. Magnor evaluates every rolling 24-hour window across the period and reports the worst one, because that is the window an inspector will find.
The compliance score is computed from sixteen live registers across five weighted components — documentary, crew qualifications, rest hours, systems and audit, and external audit. Any open detainable finding caps the grade at F regardless of how strong everything else looks, because a vessel with a detainable deficiency is not a B. Nothing on the dashboard is a number somebody typed in.
Every finding carries the issue, the root cause, the specific action to close it, and the points recovered by doing so. A compliance score without a next step is just anxiety. Certificate expiry warnings run at 30, 14, 7, 1 and 0 days, addressed to the DPA and Master actually named on that vessel’s designation register — not a generic office inbox.
The risk brief reasons across every module to surface compound risk — an expiring certificate alongside a rest-hour breach and a deferred work order is one detention risk, not three unrelated alerts — and it cites the findings it used. It cannot edit a record and it cannot send anything on your behalf. On a statutory record, an assistant that can act is a liability, not a feature.
Where a check has not been done, Magnor says so rather than inferring a pass from silence, and every assumption the system does make is labelled on the record so you can see it and argue with it. Evidence comes out in the format the inspector expects — the IMO-format 31-day rest-hours record sheet, the drill record book, the permit register. A screen that reads “all clear” without having looked is worse than no screen at all.
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