At our site, we have all different kinds of vessel documentation. You can get your initial Certificate of Documentation, you can renew it, you can even delete it if you’d like. We understand that lives change constantly. That’s part of why we make it so easy to fill out and process forms like “change of address,” change of vessel name or hailing port” and so forth. However, we also have one function on our site that isn’t a type of documentation you can fill out. In this blog, we’ll explain the ins and outs of our Coast Guard vessel lookup. We’ll explain how the search works, why you may want to use it, and how it works in conjunction with other services we offer.
Our Coast Guard Vessel Lookup
If you go to our site and scroll down, you’ll find a link to the “USCG NVDC Database Vessel Documentation Search.” This simple looking page just asks you to fill in the official number of a vessel as well as its name. Then, you can look up the vessel in the official Coast Guard database. That’s it. That’s really all it takes, it’s that simple a process. We didn’t want to have to make this search too complicated; we just wanted to provide our customers with another tool to help them to research their vessels.
Purposes of the Search
People perform these searches for various reasons. Typically, the most common reason that these searches are used is for researching a vessel. Often, this is for someone that’s interested in buying a vessel and wants to know more. For example, say you were looking to buy a vessel, and the owner told you the vessel was “just a couple years old, in really great shape, you’re going to love it.” Then, you did a vessel search, and discovered that the vessel was actually ten years old. This is an extreme example (hopefully, you don’t encounter a vessel owner so unscrupulous) but it does show the kind of information that this search can provide).
Researching Your Own Vessel
Many of our customers use this search so that they can learn more about the vessel they already have. Not everyone who has a vessel is always 100% up to date on the status of their paperwork. So, this search makes it easy to check in and see exactly what the status of your vessel is. We hear from customers all the time who are glad for this function, as it let them know more about their vessel than they might have otherwise realized. Several customers purchased a vessel and didn’t realize that it was registered to a different hailing port. So, this search gave them the opportunity to change that to the correct port that they would be hailing out of.
Search Tips
We made the search process very streamlined and straightforward, but there are some things that you want to keep in mind to make your vessel search just a bit easier. You want to know the exact name of the vessel you’re looking up. This includes spelling as well as the proper capitalization. For example, “Fun Zone,” “FunZone,” and “Funzone” could all potentially be different vessels. These vessel names have to be entered exactly correctly to get the name of the vessel. This can be a problem with vessels as so many of them have numbers at the end of the name. “Party Boat IV” and “Party Boat 4” are two different vessels, for example.
You also want to fill out the entire name of the vessel when you can. If you just include a bit at the beginning, or what part of the name that you know, you may not get the exact correct vessel that you’re looking for. An example of this would be if you were looking for a vessel that had a nautical term in its name, like “tides” or “seas” or something similar. If you were to just type that in, it may not go through. Of course, putting in the official number manages to get you around many of these concerns. And of course, as we put on our page, this database is updated every quarter. As we don’t control the database itself, we cannot guarantee the accuracy.
Several of our customers have used this lookup and discovered that their vessel needed some kind of documentation. That’s where we come in. You don’t even have to leave the page of your vessel documentation lookup to find the documentation that you need. Simply click on the left for the proper documentation for your vessel. Should you have any further questions about the search, or any kind of documentation that your vessel requires, just give us a call at (800) 535-8570 or head to our site.