The Turkish working year a northern programme does not have

A programme sheet arrives from a northern office. The class dates are on it in a colour of their own. The long-lead order dates sit against contract signature, not against fitting. The recoat windows are drawn as windows and not as single days. Somebody drew every clock the yard does not control. One of them is drawn where it stood last year.

The one drawn wrong is the only clock on the list that moves, and this year's dates were published before the tender went out.

The symptom turns up later and looks like ordinary slippage. A hold point is rebooked, a tank is re-entered instead of continued, a stage already signed off is done again. The programme was drawn against the working year of the office that drew it, and the vessel is lying in a different one.

Two calendars inside one working year

Turkey keeps two calendars at once, and a yard period drawn in weeks lies across both. The national days are fixed against the Gregorian calendar and fall where they fell last year, which is why a programme drawn with local experience usually has them marked somewhere.

The two religious holidays do not. They are reckoned on a lunar calendar, which runs shorter than the Gregorian year, so they arrive roughly eleven days earlier each year against the dates a northern office works to. Over a few seasons a holiday walks backwards through the year, and a yard period in the month that cleared both of them two years ago can sit on top of one now. Both sets are published well in advance, and neither is a surprise to anyone who looks.

The consequence is narrow. Last year's programme for the same months is the wrong template, and so is anybody's recollection of how a given month ran. Reading the Turkish shipyard holiday calendar across the proposed window sits with the owner's team and the vessel's agent, in the same register as the entry and customs questions set out in planning a yacht refit in Turkey.

Why the day count is the easy half

The concession comes before the argument: on the arithmetic, this very nearly nets out. Hours lost to a holiday block can be counted in advance and priced, and the working week a northern programme was drawn against is not necessarily the working week it will meet here. Set one against the other and the totals can finish close to level.

Contiguity is what a programme loses, and the count of hours conceals it. A run of continuous days is a different asset from the same count of days in two pieces, and refit work is full of items that take only the first kind.

A cure period runs on the clock of the material, and yacht steel repair in Turkey put it plainly: the cure period is the cure period whatever the programme says. The interruption in front of it was on a published calendar. A hot-work permit covers one task, one compartment, one shift, with a fire watch held on after the last spark, as yacht refit insurance and liability sets out. A tank opened on the last working day in front of a block does not resume; it is re-tested, re-certified and re-entered on the far side. And a witnessed hold point is a diary entry held by somebody not on the yard's payroll: attendance is booked when the slot is booked, as a yacht refit class survey has it, and a surveyor's diary and a national holiday interact.

What a block costs, in the order it costs it

The damage is a cascade, and it does not start on the days themselves.

A coating stage pushed past its recoat window is not late. It is redone, with the preparation in front of it. No labour on the far side reopens a window that has closed.

A compartment standing open because a certificate lapsed holds every trade queued behind it, which is the queue yacht refit project management describes under decision latency, reached from another direction. A dock period is less elastic still, with another vessel booked behind her, as superyacht dry docking sets out.

Yard services accrue against a calendar rather than against a scope, as what a yacht refit costs sets out: a berth is occupied and staging stands whether or not a trade is aboard that morning. The agent, the surveyor and the shops outside the gate are short of hands in the same weeks.

The only clock published before the tender

Of everything that moves a redelivery date, almost all of it is either discovered or negotiated: scope found at strip-down, a maker's lead time, a specialist's turnaround. How long a yacht refit takes argues that the answer to a date slipping is to move discovery in front of the quotation rather than to pad the programme, and that is right.

This is the easier case of the same medicine, because these dates are not discovered or negotiated. They are looked up, for the right year. A single programme can be built around a known block, but only if it is drawn where it falls this year. Nobody sequences around a week drawn in the wrong place.

What to draw, and what to ask in writing

Four marks on the programme, none of them needing a yard's permission.

• Draw the non-working days onto the bar chart at tender stage, in the same colour as the class dates. Until they are drawn, each programme is priced against a different set of working weeks.
• Put the interruption-sensitive items on a line of their own, which is cure, permit-gated hot work, tank entry and witnessed hold points, and check that none of them spans the block.
• Ask each yard, in writing, for its own non-working days across the period quoted. Ask again about any programme that does not show them.
• Write the re-start sequence and not only the re-start date. The first morning back, with certificates to reinstate and a compartment to open again before anyone works, is a paperwork day rather than a working one.

What this yard cannot do about it

Reviva can hold the trades on one calendar. Eleven in-house workshops on one payroll means metal, pipe, electrical and joinery run on a single programme, so an interruption lands on all of them in the same week rather than on four programmes in turn. That is an arrangement rather than an exemption: the non-working days that apply here are not ours to set.

No yard in the Tuzla shipyard district can publish another yard's calendar, promise that a block will not move a date, or reach into a classification society's diary.

What is available is earlier. Anyone weighing Turkey refitting against a northern yard can look these dates up for a window nobody has quoted yet. Draw them before the tenders are compared, and a whole class of argument about responsibility never has to be had.

Written at the yard in Tuzla. Nothing here states this yard's own hours, shift pattern or non-working days for any period, and no holiday dates are quoted: the published national and religious dates for a given year are for the vessel's agent and the owner's team to read against the window, not for this yard to publish.