New Star Marine stopped taking crewing orders in 2026. This page is a record, not an offer.
LPG · LNG · Product and chemical tankers · 2017–2026For nine years I ran New Star Marine — masters, officers, engineers and gas-experienced ratings for LPG, LNG and tanker principals in Europe, Greece, the UAE and Asia. I closed it in 2026. I build software for crewing agencies now.
Six years on the port side before the agency — fixtures, documents, the paperwork of the same ships. Then nine years of crew changes, from an office in Odesa to a desk in Indonesia, until the agency closed in 2026.
Eight steps, in this order, before a CV left the office. Click any step to see what it meant in practice.
Applications arrived by referral, from officers coming back for another contract, or through an open call. Each CV was read for sea-service continuity, vessel-type match and certificate validity windows. Most went no further than this.
I closed New Star Marine in 2026. It takes no orders, holds no vacancies and places no crew. There is no roster behind this page and nobody waiting to be matched.
The reason was not commercial. I had started building software for crewing agencies, and an agency selling software to its own competitors asks them to believe two things that cannot both be true. So I stopped competing.
Vitalina Volodchenko. Six years in a shipping-logistics office — fixtures, documents, the port side of the same ships — then nine years running New Star Marine for LPG, LNG and tanker principals. Not a seafarer: everything here was learned from the desk, not from the bridge.
“The crew list lived in Excel, the truth lived in WhatsApp, and the certificate that stopped a crew change was never the one anyone was looking at.” — Vitalina Volodchenko, founder
Nine years of crew changes left me with one specific irritation, and it was never the shortage of officers. It was that the office could not see, on any given morning, which certificate was about to stop which crew change.
That is the work now: software for crewing agencies. Not a crewing agency, not a marketplace, and not a service that competes with the people who use it. If you run a crewing desk and want to compare notes, write to me.
Short notes on what moves crewing — rates, regulation, and where the officers are short. Every one of them links to the primary source.
The agency is closed, so there is nothing to quote and nobody to place. If you want to talk about the work, these three reach me directly.
