Last week on a small-craft collision in Galveston, liability turned on AIS tracks from 09:12–09:19 UTC and a missing pre-departure photo — exactly the sort of detail that determines coverage and subrogation trajectory. For those jumping in, do you sequence intake with risk assessment first (seaworthiness, weather, navigational compliance) or run coverage and causation in parallel to keep the file defensible and cycle time under 30 days?
Start with spoliation and risk triage — freeze AIS playback and grab raw NMEA from the plotter — then run coverage in parallel but don’t stake a position until seaworthiness docs and weather are verified. On a Galveston skiff loss I preserved the “09:12–09:19 UTC” AIS window with MarineTraffic playback and pulled marina CCTV to replace the missing pre-departure photo, which swung subro. If you can’t get onboard fast, have the owner email a full NMEA0183 dump and an NDBC station link the same day (https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov).
I lock the timeline to UTC across every source first; on a Galveston skiff, AIS showed 09:14 but the helm plotter was 6 minutes slow and it flipped who was stand-on. @carol_brooks81’s point is solid, and I’d add to hunt the “pre-departure photo” in crew chats — WhatsApp/Signal often preserve EXIF when the camera roll doesn’t. Run coverage in parallel, but I won’t opine on causation until nav-light status is verified from bulbs or nearby marina CCTV.