Dry-docking of Nile cruisers is a complex, expensive, time-consuming and stressful activity. Time spent in dry-dock is time spent out of service and above all subject the ship to undesirable high docking stress. Consequently, dry-dock hull inspections effectiveness is being challenged by the ever decreasing time that these vessel remains in dock. Most of the inspections rely on the experience of the inspectors to identify the potential problem areas, critical areas and the conditions of the hull.

  This paper introduces a simple and quantifiable methodology to implement the inspection which is not based on checklists but scoring system which can be analyzed to view the condition of compartments, and the vessels. The inspection criteria and a list of target inspection areas are defined based on statistics of data gathered from more than 50 Nile cruisers docked in the previous 5 years in Upper Egypt. The main benefit behind this methodology is to reduce docking time, increase the value of the ship hull inspections, maintaining a uniform standard across all Nile Cruisers and being able to document the ship’s condition.