Reduced crew performance is frequently cited as a major causal factor in maritime accident causation. Although considerable research has been conducted on the hours of work undertaken by seafarers through interviews and the analysis of records, experimental studies to observe the effects of factors such as high workload, shift patterns, stress, sleep deprivation and disturbance on the cognitive performance of mariners have been limited. Other safety-critical transport industries, such as aviation and rail, have developed fatigue management tools to help manage the work patterns of their operators. Such a tool for mariners would assist shipboard crew, marine pilots and shore management in planning and improving work schedules. The overall aim of this paper is to determine a fatigue factor, which can be applied to human performance data, as part of a software program that calculates total cognitive performance. This program enables us to establish the levels of cognitive performance of a group of marine pilots to test a decision-making task based on radar information. This paper addresses one of the factors that may contribute to the determination of various fatigue factors: the effect of different work patterns on the cognitive performance of a marine pilot.