Dynamic analysis of a marine slender structure is often involved with contacts among bodies or between bodies and seafloor. This paper presents an efficient and general contact search algorithm for dynamics in the context of the compliance contact model. A global detecting method that a bounding box is divided into several pieces in global coordinate system is presented in this paper. The method has an advantage that the number of contacting searching am be smaller than other methods for a system. The developed an efficient contact search algorithm is applied to the simulation program of 3D nonlinear dynamics of slender structure. Some examples are presented to show the validity of the proposed method.