Sized the way the market talks

The register carries a size class on every hull that has a deadweight on file, 75,596 of them, derived from the deadweight rather than typed in: coaster, handysize, supramax, panamax, capesize. A tonnage search takes a deadweight range, a size class, and a region to region, which is how a fixture is actually described before anybody knows which ship will take it.

Where a hull has no deadweight it is shown as unknown, never as zero. That distinction matters more here than anywhere: a zero-deadweight ship would sort to the top of an ascending range search and quietly poison every answer.

The circulars are the market

Position lists are circulated by owners and competing brokers and no vendor sells them. That is the whole reason this product starts at the mailbox rather than at an API.

Connect the account you already use and each circular is read as it lands: the vessel, the open dates, the port or the trading area, and the owner's own wording kept alongside. Nothing reaches the board until a broker confirms it, because a circular names a ship without an IMO and thousands of names in the register are shared. The reading is automatic. The identification is not, and should not be.

Cargo enquiries arrive the same way and are parsed the same way. A desk that has come to trust the parse can let voyage cargo file itself without review; time charter enquiries never do, because a period fixture is not a cargo and the parser says so.

From an enquiry to a fixture

Tonnage search

Desk and above

Deadweight range, size class, and where she needs to be, against the tonnage on your own desk and the shared register. The answer separates what came from your e-mail from what came from our records, because those are different claims and only one of them is yours.

Sea distance and passage time

Desk and above

Between any two of 11,425 ports, routed through water rather than over land, with canal transits and the days that follow from a speed.

Voyage estimate and TCE

Chartering and above

Freight, bunkers by grade, port costs, canal dues, address commission and brokerage, ending at the time charter equivalent per day, which is the number that decides whether a cargo is worth taking.

One cargo against several ships

Fleet and above

The same estimate run for up to eight hulls at once and ranked by TCE per day, so the question "which of these should I offer" has an answer rather than a feeling.

Fixtures

Desk and above

Firm offer, subjects, fixed. The recap is kept exactly as it was issued rather than regenerated later from data that has moved since.

Laytime and demurrage

Chartering and above

The statement of facts becomes the time sheet: allowed, used, and the demurrage or despatch that falls out of the difference. Weather and stoppages carry their reasons, so a claim can be argued from the sheet instead of from memory.

Who owns her, and who to call

Four roles, routinely four different companies: the registered owner, the group owner, the technical manager and the commercial manager. The one a broker needs is almost never the one on the certificate.

45,386 hulls carry a commercial contact who can be e-mailed about a fixture. The rest are shown as having none, which is a fact about the register rather than a blank to be filled in optimistically.

What it costs, or read how a cargo is matched to tonnage across 101,900 hulls.