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Bulk

Dry bulk cargo handling

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A bulk carrier that has arrived has not started loading. In between come five steps: clean holds, an agreed loading plan, the terminal's loading rate, trimming and two draft surveys. Each one is a place where lost hours turn into demurrage, the daily charge for keeping a ship longer than agreed. A broker who thinks of loading as a single event cannot explain a claim.

Holds have to pass before anything counts

Almost every dry cargo charter makes readiness depend on the holds being clean, dry, free of loose scale and rust, and fit for the intended cargo. A ship waiting at anchor with a hold that fails inspection is not ready, whatever its notice of readiness says. In most trades that means the laytime clock has not started.

The cargo sets the standard, not a general idea of cleanliness. Grain is at the strict end and is usually inspected to a formal "grain clean" standard, while a coal cargo after a coal cargo needs little more than sweeping. The previous cargo is what turns this from an operational matter into a commercial one. If leftovers from the last cargo stain or contaminate the next one, a cargo claim can arrive years after the ship has sailed, and the two cargoes may have been fixed by two people who never spoke to each other.

Cleaning holds takes time and water, and often a detour. Who pays for it, and whether a failed inspection stops laytime, are questions for the charterparty, and the standard forms do not all answer them the same way.

The loading plan is a joint document

The BLU Code is the IMO code of practice for safely loading and unloading bulk carriers. It rests on one principle: the master is always responsible for safe loading and unloading, and the details are agreed with the terminal in a written plan. The code exists because bulk carriers were suffering structural damage from the way their own cargo was loaded.

The danger is not the total weight but the order of loading. A modern terminal can put thousands of tonnes an hour into one hold. Filling the holds in the wrong order puts bending and shear forces on the hull that its structure was never designed for, and the ship can be damaged, or even lost, while lying alongside in calm water. The plan sets out how many pours (separate loading runs) go into which holds, in what order, how much ballast is pumped out at the same time, and when the checks happen.

If the terminal loads faster than the plan allows, or the master stops loading because the terminal did, the delay has a cause, and that cause decides who pays. This is why the loading plan and the statement of facts belong in the same file.

Trimming, and the word doing two jobs

In naval terms, trim is the difference between the forward and aft draft. Trimming a cargo is something else: levelling it so that the surface is fairly flat and the cargo fills the corners of the hold. The two ideas are unrelated but share a word, and it is cargo trimming that appears in the charterparty.

Trimming matters for three reasons. It lets the hold take more cargo. It is a stability requirement for cargoes that can shift, which is the whole basis of the Grain Code. And it costs labour, so the charterparty says who pays, usually through a "spout-trimmed" or "machine-trimmed" term that moves the cost between owner and charterer.

The quantity is settled by a draft survey, not by the terminal’s scale

The quantity loaded is measured by reading the ship's drafts before and after loading. The surveyor corrects the readings for water density, trim and the bending of the hull (hog and sag), then subtracts fuel, water and the ship's constant weights. The difference in displacement is the cargo. A surveyor does this arithmetic on the ship, and the bill of lading figure is usually based on it.

A careful survey is accurate to roughly half to one per cent. On a Panamax cargo, that is hundreds of tonnes of pure measurement uncertainty, which is why shore and ship figures routinely disagree and why a letter of protest about the difference is ordinary rather than hostile. The constant is the most useful check. If it comes out clearly different at loading and at discharge, the ship did not gain weight; one of the two surveys is wrong.

Discharge damages the ship, and that is normal

Bulk cargo is unloaded with grabs, heavy buckets dropped again and again onto the tank top (the floor of the hold). Bulldozers then go into the hold to clear the last of the cargo. Damage to tank tops, sloping hopper plates and hold ladders is an expected result, not an accident. That is why charters include a clause on who pays for damage caused by stevedores (the dock workers), with a time limit for reporting it, usually a short one. If damage is not reported within that time, the owner pays for it.

Cargoes that are dangerous without being dangerous goods

The IMSBC Code, the international code for solid bulk cargoes, puts every solid bulk cargo into one of three groups, and the group decides the precautions.

For Group A cargo, the shipper must declare the moisture content and the transportable moisture limit. The limit must be tested within six months of loading, and the moisture sample taken within seven days of it. A broker who fixes concentrates without a liquefaction clause in the charterparty leaves the master with a decision and the owner with the risk. BIMCO publishes a standard clause for exactly this case. It was written because, without one, a master who refused a dangerous cargo had nothing in the contract to rely on.

Where the money leaks

Nearly every dispute on a dry cargo voyage comes from this sequence, not from the freight rate. Typical sources are the hours between arrival and a passed hold inspection, waiting for a berth under a laytime clause that may or may not cover it, a terminal working below its guaranteed rate, rain stopping work on a cargo that must stay dry (and whether the charterparty counts that against the weather working day), and a gap between the ship's figure and the shore's figure. None of this appears in the recap. All of it appears in the statement of facts, and the laytime calculation is where the two are finally brought together.

References

Notice of readinessThe one page that starts the laytime clock: arrived, ready, tendered, and the different way each of those three is challenged. How to calculate laytime and demurrageWhen the clock starts, what stops it, how the demurrage figure is worked out, and why most claims fail on the paperwork, not on whether they were right. The statement of factsThe agent’s timed record of everything that happened in port. Every demurrage claim is decided on it, long after anyone was there to see. Stowage factor and broken stowageTwo numbers that both turn space into tonnes. Only one of them is printed in the cargo book. Grain cargoes and stabilityThe cargo that can capsize a ship nowhere near its load line, and the document that decides whether the ship may carry it.

Neptune Atlas

A fixture in Neptune Atlas carries its laytime terms, and the port agent's statement of facts is read into a laytime sheet instead of being retyped, so hours lost to a failed hold inspection or a missed loading slot are counted where they happened. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.

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