Ship fuel consumption (SFC) prediction supports vessel operation optimisation, emissions estimation, and decision support systems (DSS) for sustainable maritime transportation. Numerous data-driven fuel models have been developed over the past two decades, but a critical and often overlooked limitation lies in their validation practices: most studies evaluate performance using random train--test splits, which, applied to high-frequency records, admit temporal leakage and yield optimistic results that do not reflect deployment conditions.

This paper examines that gap using time-aware evaluation, specifically Time Series Cross-Validation (TSCV) and Blocked TSCV (BTSCV). Using the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) Sir Wilfrid Laurier as a case study, six regression models and a physics baseline are tuned under three time-aware schemes and three feature configurations, then evaluated on a common chronological hold-out set drawn from approximately 3.88 million steady-state 1,Hz records.