Where should you store your STCW and ENG1 certificates?

You will be asked for your papers at the worst possible moment. Not in a calm office with your laptop open, but on a dock, in the sun, with a purser waiting and your phone at 6%. I have watched a good deckhand lose a start date to that exact scene. I built SeaPapers, which includes a document folio, so read this knowing that. The advice below works whether you use it or a shoebox.

The three ways crew lose their certificates

Lost. The paper stays in a drawer at your parents' house in another hemisphere. Or the laptop with the scans on it gets stolen out of a crew house in Antibes. Or the email account you sent them to in 2024 is the one attached to a phone number you no longer have.

Expired without you noticing. This is the quiet one. STCW Personal Survival Techniques and Fire Fighting must be revalidated every five years (seaemploy.com, seen 2026-08-18). An ENG1 runs two years for most seafarers, one year for those aged 16 to 18 (UKSA, seen 2026-08-18). Both dates land during a season, when you are busy, and neither one announces itself. A boat cannot sign you on with an out of date ENG1, and finding an MCA approved doctor in a foreign port at short notice costs you days.

Asked for at the worst moment. The CV got you the conversation. Now the purser wants STCW with the dates, ENG1, passport, visas and two references, and wants them today because crew paperwork is due to the management company. If your answer involves the words "I will send them tonight when I get wifi", you have already dropped a place in the queue behind whoever answered in one message.

What boats actually ask for

Every boat asks slightly differently. This is the set that covers almost all of it.

• STCW Basic Safety Training, all five modules, with issue and expiry dates
• ENG1 medical certificate with its expiry
• Passport, and any second passport, with the expiry
• Visas held, with expiry. B1/B2 and Schengen are the usual two
• Written references or testimonials, with contactable names
• Sea service testimonials once you have sea time
• Any department tickets: Powerboat Level 2, Efficient Deckhand, food hygiene, and so on

Definition: ENG1 is the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency seafarer medical certificate. It must be issued by an MCA approved doctor, and the MCA publishes lists of approved doctors in other countries, including France, Spain, the United States and South Africa. The UK statutory fee is 115 pounds as of 13 November 2025 (Join Yachting fact bank, Aug 2026).

Paper, phone, cloud or folio

The honest summary of that table: a well organised cloud folder gets you most of the way there. The two things it will not do are tell you what runs out when, and let you share exactly one set of documents with one person and take it back afterwards.

What else exists

Seazone is the closest existing product and deserves the credit. Their crew side is free, stated without conditions on their own pricing page, and their builder captures certificates with expiry dates (seazone.app, seen 2026-08-18). The catch for a crew member is where the tracking lives: the document folders and the expiry notifications sit on the manager and owner side of the product, bundled into their paid Pro and Bundle tiers, which are bought by boats rather than by you (seazone.app/solutions/crew-documents/, seen 2026-08-18). It is a real feature. It is just built for the person hiring you.

YachtSync (yachtsync.uk) came up in my search on 2026-08-18 as a tool that tracks an ENG1 expiry date and sends a renewal reminder in advance.

That is the honest landscape. It is thin, which is why I built ours.

How the SeaPapers folio does it

The folio is private storage attached to the same account as your CV. You upload STCW, ENG1, passport, visas, references and testimonials. Each document carries its type and its expiry date, so the folio can check validity against today and show you the state of your papers in one screen. You see what runs out when.

On Pro, uploading is faster because the folio reads the document type and the expiry date off the certificate itself rather than making you type them.

Sharing is one link. A captain or a purser opens it and sees the set, not a folder of everything you have ever scanned. When the job is decided, you revoke the link and it stops working. That last part matters more than crew expect. Your passport page and your medical certificate are not documents you want living in the WhatsApp history of a boat you did not join.

On expiry emails, the straight answer as of August 2026: they are on the roadmap and not shipped. Today the folio shows you what runs out when. It does not email you about it. I would rather write that sentence than imply a reminder that does not exist and have you miss an ENG1 because of my marketing.

From the bridge: The crew I sign on fastest are not the most qualified. They are the ones who answered the paperwork request the same afternoon, in one message, with everything legible. It reads as competence, because it is.

Do this now

• Photograph or scan every certificate flat, in colour, whole page, including the number and both dates.
• Write the expiry date of your ENG1 and your STCW modules somewhere you will see it, today.
• Put the paper originals somewhere fixed and dry that is not your backpack.
• Put the digital set into one place you can share in a single link, and check you can actually send it from a phone.

Once your papers are in order, make sure the CV lists them correctly: what certificates go on a yacht CV, and how to fit it all inside two pages.

You can open a folio on SeaPapers and load your certificates tonight.