Thirty flags, on their published record
How the public directory is built: thirty flags, each on its published Paris MoU record and its own published guidance — sourced, dated, and never scored by us.
Victor Mamalis · · 4 min read
Choosing a flag is one of the few decisions in shipping that is made almost entirely on hearsay. An owner asks a broker, the broker asks a manager, the manager remembers a registration that went well or badly a decade ago, and a ship ends up flying a flag for reasons nobody could write down. The facts exist. They are published. They are simply published in thirty different places, in thirty different formats, by people who had no reason to make them comparable.
The directory is those facts, in one place, made comparable. In August it reached thirty flags. This is what each page holds and where every line of it comes from.
The record the ports keep.
The first thing on a flag's page is its standing under the Paris Memorandum of Understanding — White, Grey or Black, its rank among the flags ranked that year, and the inspections and detentions behind it. These are the Paris MoU's own published figures, stored as published and never recomputed; the page names the edition and links the annual report. A flag with too few inspections to be ranked is shown as not rated, which is a data threshold and not a verdict. My colleague wrote a whole post on what the standing means; the short version is that it follows the ship into every European port it calls at.
The record the registry publishes.
The rest is the registry's own word: the fees it publishes, the timelines its guidance states, the documents its checklist asks for, the services it offers and the vessel types it accepts. We copy those from the registry's published material, we date the copy, and we say where it came from. Published guidance ranges from five days at the fastest registries to eight weeks at the most rigorous, and every one of those figures assumes a file that is correct first time — which is the part EnSign exists to make normal.
We would rather show you a fact with its source than a score with our name on it.
What we refused to add.
A rating. We built one, early, and took it down before the directory opened. A number a company invents to rank flags is an opinion wearing the costume of a fact, and the moment an owner chooses a flag on it, we own a decision we had no standing to make. So the directory ranks nothing. It shows two things — the record the ports keep and the record the registry publishes — side by side, and lets the comparison be the reader's.
The marks on the directory identify public listings and nothing more; no flag in it has any relationship with EnSign by being there. What it will have, from October, is a registration filed through EnSign for any flag that runs on it — and three flags side by side for anyone still deciding.
