On a yacht, a cleaning pass is only finished when somebody with a clipboard has walked the deck, said what is clean and what is not, and written that down in a way the next shift can trust. The inspection is not a formality added after the work: it is the half of the job that turns a wet deck into evidence. This article walks the order a yard actually uses after a wash-down on exterior surfaces — what to look for, in what sequence, with what light, who decides the doubtful cases, and what belongs in the record.
Inspect the surfaces a wash can damage before the surfaces it cleans
Start the walk at the openings, not at the big flat panels. Exterior deck surfaces are crossed by skin fittings and seacocks, deck drains and their grates, through-deck fittings, stanchion bases, chain plates, deck hatches and their seals, padeyes, cable and hose runs that disappear below, and the joints where deck hardware is bolted down. A wash pass drives water and loosened grime into exactly those places. Each one is looked at, opened where it is meant to open, and dried, and each one goes on the record as checked or as needing attention. A record that says the deck was cleaned and says nothing about the drains is a record nobody can act on.
Then the coating itself: painted hull and superstructure topsides, gelcoat, non-skid, varnished spars and trim, anodised or stainless rail and fittings, and any metallic or timber detail on the topsides. The cleaning pass is judged against the condition found before it, not against a memory of the last wash. If a topcoat was already chalked, crazed or edge-lifted, the inspection records what it looked like before and after, because that is the only way anyone later learns whether the wash helped, did nothing, or made a bad boundary worse.
Use a standard pass: sequence, light, and a second pair of eyes
Random looking finds random things. A standard walk goes in a fixed order around the boat — bow to stern on one side, then the other, then the transom, then the coachroof and the areas only reachable from a ladder or a alongside pontoon — and it checks the same handful of things at each station: is the surface film-free, are the seams and bolt beds clear of the residue that was there before, is anything now lifting, chalking, or wet where it should not be, and is the run-off route doing its job.
Light matters more than anyone admits. A topside that reads clean in flat midday sun shows a smearing film at a low angle or under a lamp held across the surface, so a raking light is part of the pass, not an extra. So is a second inspector for the sign-off surface: one person washes and one person signs, and where the boat is going back to an owner or a charter operator, the person who did the washing is not the only person who says it passed.
Decide what counts as acceptable, and write it down before the next job
A cleaning job on a yacht has no universal finish standard, and pretending one exists is how arguments start on the dock. What works instead is a small set of observable criteria agreed with the owner or the manager before the work is priced or booked, surface by surface: film-free and streak-free on the topsides under raking light; non-skid walked over with no grit left in the pattern; bolt beds and seams free of the dark residue they held; drains clear and flowing; no standing water in wells, under fittings or at the toe rail; hardware free of the residue that was photographed before the job. Anything not written into that list becomes an opinion at the moment of handover, and opinions are the most expensive thing on a dock.
Write the exclusions on the same sheet. Deck seams that are not to be worked, old coatings of unknown history, varnish that is already failing, electronics and instrument housings, windlass and thruster openings, and any joint where a wash pushes water into a cored deck are named as out of scope with what is done instead — a wipe, a dry, an inspection, or nothing at all until a specialist looks. A cleaning pass with an exclusion list is a plan; a cleaning pass without one is a gamble with someone else's boat.
Run a bounded trial on one panel and let the record decide the method
When a new surface, a new coating or a new stubborn deposit appears, a trial is taped off on one panel that can be replaced or corrected: photographed at an angle before anything is applied, worked, then photographed again in the same light, then re-inspected after the boat has been back in its normal use for a period. The stop conditions are written before the first pass — lifting, blistering, a seam opened, water found where it should not be, run-off going somewhere it must not. A single panel measured and photographed settles arguments that a whole-deck trial with an opinion attached never will.
Equipment belongs in the record as a category, not as a brand promise. What mobile pressure-washing or heated cleaning units did on this site's own pages is documented for vehicle work, not for yacht surfaces, so no claim about what a given machine will do to a topside belongs in a boat's file. When a yard's scope genuinely needs a configuration the standard catalogue does not cover — a platform, an enclosure, an on-board installation — that is what the customized steam cleaning equipment engineering service described on this site is for, and it starts with a surface list, not with a brochure.
What the record must contain, and what it must not
A usable cleaning record for a yacht is short and specific. It carries the date and place; who washed and who inspected; the surfaces covered and the surfaces excluded, written out rather than assumed; the water and discharge arrangements used, since afloat and berthed work is regulated and a berth that forbids run-off to the water changes the whole method; the acceptance criteria the job was judged against; the observations, station by station, in neutral language; the photographs before and after, with the angle and the light noted; anything found wrong that is not the cleaner's to fix; and the signature of the person who accepted the job. That last line is what a warranty conversation, an insurance question, or a disagreement at the end of a charter season turns on.
What the record must not contain is inference. "Cleaned" is not an observation; "film visible on port topside under raking light, removed on second pass, re-checked" is. Dates, weather, tide and whether the boat was in the water or alongside matter more than anyone expects, because they explain why a surface was still wet at sign-off or why a job stopped. Frequency is the other figure that belongs in the file: how often the exterior is washed is set by what the boat's own record shows the deposits doing over a season, and by the yard's or owner's rules, not by a number copied from the internet.
Who signs, and what happens when the result fails
Sign-off authority should be named in the scope, not assumed on the day. On a privately held boat it is usually the owner's representative or the manager; on a charter boat it may be the skipper; on a yard's own job it is the person who issued the work order. Whoever signs gets the record and keeps it, and the person who cleaned keeps a copy — a file only the owner has is a file that cannot be used at the next job.
A failed inspection has a route, and the route is written in advance. A surface left with film goes back for a second pass, not for an argument. A coating that has lifted, a seam that has opened, or water found below deck stops the wash in that area, gets photographed, and goes to the surveyor or the yard rather than being "fixed" by the person holding the hose. A failed run-off control stops the job where it stands. Every one of those outcomes is recorded as an event, not erased by the next pass, because the value of a maintenance record is the pattern it builds across seasons.
Make the record work at the next job
A record that is filed and never read is paperwork. The one that earns its keep is brought back before the next wash and read against the last one: which stations were marked doubtful, which exclusions were asked about, which deposits were back within weeks, whether the frequency is set by the boat's own history or by habit. The site's own cleaning pages cover vehicle exterior and interior work and the general cleaning-equipment categories, not a yacht duty sheet, so a boat's file is built from its own observations; for a yard standardising how those observations are taken, the PowerDe cleaning equipment range is the place to start the equipment conversation, and the record is what tells you whether the conversation was ever worth having.
That is the honest answer to the question in the title: inspection is a fixed walk in known light with named criteria, and a record is a short file of observations, photographs, exclusions and signatures, kept where the next job will have to read it. Everything else — the machines, the modes, the chemistry — is decided by what those two documents say.
