Professional Ship Simulator Towing: Fenders, Flooding & HUD

A tow in Professional Ship Simulator is not a single button press — it is a chain of bridge, deck, and radio decisions, and most of that chain is visible on the Professional Ship Simulator HUD before you ever touch the helm. The trick to a clean professional ship simulator towing job is reading those readouts, deploying the right Professional Ship Simulator fenders, watching the Professional Ship Simulator flooding indicators, and keeping your NMEA strings flowing so that anything you have planned in a GPX route is actually visible on the bridge plotter. This guide walks through the whole workflow, from the moment you receive the tow order to the moment you cast off the hawser.

Reading the Towing Workflow Before the Hawser Touches Water

The first thing a new captain should internalize is that towing has its own logical phases, and each phase leans on a different set of bridge systems. Miss one phase and the rest of the job goes sideways fast, usually in the form of a snapped line, a holed hull, or a flooded compartment that nobody noticed until the lights dimmed. The community wikis all describe the same broad arc: receive the tow, brief the deck, deploy fenders, take up the towline, communicate on the working channel, monitor the HUD throughout, and recover safely. That is the skeleton every successful tow hangs from.

Phase Map at a Glance

According to community testing reported on the official knowledge base, captains who treat these five phases as discrete checklists lose fewer tows than captains who improvise inside a single "tow mission" bucket. The HUD is the shared language between bridge and deck, and every later mechanic — fenders, flooding, NMEA, GPX — is a tool you reach for inside one of those five phases.

HUD Layout and What to Read During a Tow

The Professional Ship Simulator HUD is where almost every towing decision shows up first, and the wiki breaks the screen into the same logical panels you will find on most real bridge consoles. According to the HUD main sections knowledge base entry, the towing-relevant readouts cluster into four quadrants: ship status, ship controls, navigation status, and mission status. The right way to use the HUD during a tow is to keep your eyes moving between those four quadrants on a fixed rhythm — community pilots often describe a "five-second scan" cycle that visits each quadrant once.

What Each HUD Quadrant Tells You While Towing

A common mistake new captains make is staring at the throttle bar and ignoring the flooding bar. The damage system page on the same knowledge base makes the connection explicit: heavy seas can drive water into the hull if your watertight hatches are open, and the only way you will notice in time is by glancing at the flooding level readout on the HUD. A captain who treats the HUD as a single block of information will eventually miss a rising water level because they were busy reading engine RPM.

Key Telemetry Numbers to Memorize

If you can keep those six numbers inside their healthy ranges for the duration of the transit, the tow will usually end without drama. The moment any of them leave the healthy band, that is the signal to slow down, stop, or radio for tug assistance.

Fenders, Flooding, and the Damage System During a Tow

Fenders and flooding are the two halves of the same safety problem during a tow: a hull is either absorbing an impact or absorbing water, and your job is to keep both as close to zero as possible. According to the damage system control page on the official knowledge base, Professional Ship Simulator fenders are your first line of defense against contact damage, while watertight hatches and the bilge pump system are your first line of defense against Professional Ship Simulator flooding. Neither works well without the other.

Fender Deployment Decision Table

Fenders in Professional Ship Simulator are not cosmetic; they absorb a configurable amount of impact energy before passing the rest through to the hull integrity readout. Community reports on the Professional Ship Simulator beginner guide suggest that captains who deploy two fenders at the predicted contact points before the approach starts repair their hulls less often than captains who deploy during contact. The fender model is also tied to the wave system, so a calm harbor with a 1-second swell will let a single midship fender do the job, while a 4-second open-sea swell will require two fenders per contact zone.

Flooding Response Priority Order

The order matters because steps 1 and 2 are nearly free and reversible, while steps 3 through 5 cost time and money. Community feedback compiled on the Professional Ship Simulator tips and tricks entry confirms that the captains who survive a flooded compartment are almost always the ones who closed the hatch before they even thought about the bilge pump, because the hatch is what actually stops the water, while the pump only handles what already got in.

NMEA and GPX: Wiring Your Route Into the Bridge

The NMEA and GPX story is the most underrated part of the towing workflow, because it is the only way to get a hand-planned route, or a route captured on a different machine, to actually show up on your bridge plotter. The two formats do different jobs: NMEA is the live, sentence-based data stream that flows between instruments, while GPX is the static file format you use to import a route or export a track. Used together, they let you plan a tow route on shore, walk it into the sim as a GPX file, and then have it broadcast over NMEA to every chart plotter on the bridge.

NMEA Sentences You Will See Most Often

The sim treats NMEA as a loopback bus, so anything your route planner outputs over a virtual COM port or UDP socket can be read by the in-sim plotter. The same is true in reverse: the sim can broadcast NMEA out to external tools for logging or live tracking. That is where the GPX half of the story plugs in. Once a tow is complete, exporting the track as GPX gives you a clean record of where the vessel actually went, which is invaluable when you want to compare your line against the planned route.

GPX vs NMEA: When to Use Which

Community pilots on the manoeuvring forum recommend planning the tow in a desktop GPX editor, importing it into the sim, and then letting the bridge plotter rebroadcast the waypoints over NMEA so the autopilot and the radar agree on the same path. That setup is described in detail on the Professional Ship Simulator manoeuvring guide, and it is the cleanest way to keep a long tow on a steady line without hand-steering the whole way.

Pre-Departure Tow Briefing Checklist

A pre-departure briefing is the single highest-leverage habit in the towing workflow, and it is also the easiest one to skip when you are in a hurry. The brief takes five minutes and it converts a vague "tow the barge" instruction into a list of named decisions, each of which has a corresponding HUD readout and a corresponding bridge action. According to community testing on the official knowledge base, captains who run a written brief before every tow have measurably higher success rates than captains who just start the engine.

The Five-Minute Tow Brief

Once the brief is written, every later decision in the tow has a place to live. The throttle question becomes "what does the GPX route call for at the next waypoint," not "what does my gut say." The fender question becomes "did I deploy the three fenders from step 3," not "do I have enough fenders out." The flooding question becomes "is the watertight hatch closed per the brief," not "did I remember to do that." That structure is what makes the difference between a tow that survives a storm and a tow that ends in a dry-dock repair.

Bridge Communication and Towline Management

The radio channel and the towline have more in common than they look. Both are a connection between two vessels that has to be managed continuously, and both will fail silently if you stop paying attention. Community reports on the docking workflow emphasize that towline tension has a healthy oscillation pattern, and that a flat-line tension is just as concerning as a spike. A flat line usually means the line has gone slack and is at risk of jumping out of the chock, while a spike usually means the towed vessel has snagged on something or has surged forward.

Towline Tension Triage

The radio side of the same workflow runs on the harbor control and bridge-to-bridge channels described on the Professional Ship Simulator how to dock entry. The rule of thumb is that any change in towline tension that lasts more than thirty seconds is worth a radio call to the towed vessel, because the deck crew on the back of the tow will feel the same thing you feel on the bridge, and they can usually tell you whether it is a chock issue or a rudder issue faster than you can diagnose it from the HUD.

Release and Recovery: Ending the Tow Safely

The release phase is where most amateur tows go wrong, because the captain is mentally already at the dock. The hawser does not care that you are tired, and a sloppy release can snap a line, swamp a fender, or put a dent in the tug that costs more than the entire tow paid. The release has its own checklist, just like the approach did, and the HUD gives you a separate set of readouts to watch while you execute it.

Release Phase Decision Table

According to community testing, the captains who treat the release as a full five-step sequence have lower cleanup costs than the captains who treat it as a single "let go" action. The deck crew matters as much as the bridge crew here, because the deck has to recover fenders in the right order (forward fenders first, then quarter fenders) to avoid having a loose fender swing into the hull during the drift-off.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best way to start a professional ship simulator towing job?

Begin with a written five-minute brief covering the towed vessel, weather window, fender layout, contingency plan, and GPX route. Then deploy the Professional Ship Simulator fenders at the predicted contact points before the approach, and keep the Professional Ship Simulator HUD on a five-second scan cycle so you catch flooding or tension issues early.

How do I read flooding level on the HUD during a tow?

The flooding readout sits in the Ship Status quadrant and shows the percentage of water currently inside the hull compartments. A reading of 0 % is healthy, anything above 0 % means you should close the nearest watertight hatch and engage the bilge pump, and a reading above 5 % means you should heave-to and radio for assistance.

What NMEA sentences matter most during a tow?

The most useful sentences during a tow are GPGGA for the position fix, GPVTG for speed and track, GPRMC for the one-line summary, GPGLL for bridge-to-bridge reporting, and GPAPB for cross-checking the autopilot against the planned waypoints.

How many fenders should I deploy for a harbor tow?

For a typical tug-to-barge hookup in a sheltered harbor, three fenders are enough: one at the quarter and one at each forward breast. For an open-sea tow of a disabled vessel, scale up to four to six fenders along the contact zone and be ready to re-adjust if the towed vessel starts rolling heavily in the swell.

What is the single biggest towing mistake new captains make?

The most common mistake is staring at the throttle and ignoring the flooding and towline tension readouts. According to the official damage system documentation, captains who miss the early flooding signal because they were focused on engine RPM are the ones who end up in dry-dock, not the captains who balanced their attention across the whole HUD.