Neptune Atlas

Laytime

The statement of facts

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A statement of facts is the agent’s chronological record of everything that happened to the ship in port, from the moment she arrived off the pilot station to the moment she sailed. It is not a formality. It is the evidence, and a demurrage claim argued a year later is decided on it rather than on what anybody remembers.

What it is, and who signs it

The SOF is compiled by the port agent from the ship’s log, the terminal’s records and the agent’s own attendance. It is signed by the master, usually by the agent, and often by the shippers, the receivers or the terminal as well. Nobody is obliged to sign a document they disagree with, which is why a signature block carrying three names is worth considerably more than a tidy one carrying one.

It is a record of fact, not a calculation. It says rain stopped work at 0210 and that work resumed at 0645. It does not say whether those four hours and thirty five minutes count against laytime. That question is answered by the charterparty, applied to the SOF afterwards. Keeping the two apart is the whole discipline. An SOF that has already decided what counts is an argument dressed as a record, and the other side will treat it as one.

The events it records

The order below is the ordinary shape of a load or discharge call. Names differ by trade and by agent, and a tanker port speaks of hoses where a bulk terminal speaks of the first grab.

EventWhat it fixes
End of sea passage, arrived off pilot station The ship’s own claim to have arrived. Under a port charter this is the moment the argument about arrival begins.
Anchored, and where Waiting time and the evidence for congestion. The anchorage matters: inside or outside port limits is a different answer to the same question.
NOR tendered, NOR received Two separate times, and they are frequently not the same. Record who received it.
Free pratique, customs clearance, holds or tanks inspected and passed Whether the notice was true when it was given.
Pilot on board, first line ashore, all fast, gangway down The berthing sequence. Waiting for a berth ends somewhere in here, and the exact line depends on the clause.
Hoses connected, or first grab, commenced cargo When work actually started, which is not when laytime started.
Every stoppage: start, resumption, and the reason The whole claim. See below.
Shifting: unmoored, shifted, all fast again Berth to berth, or berth to anchorage and back. Who pays for shifting time is a clause, and it cannot be applied to a movement nobody wrote down.
Draught survey or ullage, sampling, hold or tank inspections in progress Time on board that is not cargo work but is not idleness either.
Completed cargo, hoses disconnected, last grab The end of laytime, and the start of most time bars.
Documents on board, bills of lading signed Time between completion and sailing, which is where detention claims live.
Pilot on board, unmoored, sailed The close of the record.

How the calculation is assembled from it

A laytime calculation is a sum over the intervals between those events. Nothing more, though the intervals are where every argument happens; the calculator takes the two ends and the excluded time and prices the difference. Illustrated on a fixture allowing four weather working days:

NOR tendered           14 Mar 0930
Laytime commenced      14 Mar 2130   (12 hours turn time)
Commenced loading      15 Mar 0410
Stopped, rain          16 Mar 0210
Resumed                16 Mar 0645
Completed loading      18 Mar 1750

Elapsed, commencement to completion   3d 20h 20m
Excluded, rain                            4h 35m
Laytime used                          3d 15h 45m
Allowed                               4d 00h 00m
Despatch                                  8h 15m

Every line on the left of that is lifted from the SOF. The arithmetic is trivial and it is never what a claim turns on. What it turns on is whether the events underneath it were recorded properly, and whether the four hours and thirty five minutes were correctly taken out.

The reason beside a stoppage is the most valuable text in the document

0210 to 0645

Four hours and thirty five minutes of stopped work. Whether that time falls on the owner or on the charterer depends entirely on the words written beside it. An interval with no reason against it is not evidence, it is a gap.

Consider three versions of the same stoppage:

Same interval, three different bills. This is why the reason is the part of the SOF worth arguing about at the time, when the crane driver and the chief officer are both still standing there, rather than months later in correspondence between two claims departments who were not.

Weather deserves a note of its own, because it is the exclusion that carries the most drafting. A weather working day is a day on which weather permits work. Whether rain during a period when no cargo work was scheduled counts as time lost, and whether the exclusion is the whole stoppage or a proportion of the day, are both questions the forms answer differently. So record what the weather did and record whether work was actually interrupted by it. Those are facts. Let the clause decide what they are worth.

Five ways a statement of facts is spoiled

  1. A stoppage with no cause. “1410 stopped, 1655 resumed” is an admission that two hours and forty five minutes went missing and nobody can say whose they were. Whoever is drafting the claim will assign them to themselves.
  2. Times rounded to the hour when the contract counts in minutes. An SOF that reports everything on the hour has been tidied, and a tidied document invites the question of what else was tidied. If demurrage runs at a daily rate pro rata, minutes are money.
  3. Local time with no zone stated. The commonest silent error. Ports move to summer time on their own schedule, ships’ clocks are advanced or retarded on passage, and a document that says 0930 without saying 0930 where is unusable against a notice tendered from a different clock. Write the offset, or write UTC, or write both. It costs nothing at the time and it cannot be reconstructed later.
  4. An unsigned copy, or one signature where there should be three. A master’s signature alone proves the ship’s account of events. It does not prove the terminal accepted it. A copy signed “for receipt only” proves the paper arrived, not that anyone agreed with it, and the two are read very differently.
  5. A remark clause added by one side. “Signed under protest”, “times as per terminal figures”, “without prejudice to owners’ rights in respect of waiting time.” A remark is useful: it flags a live disagreement at the point it arose, which is better than silence. What it is not is agreement. A remark written on one party’s copy after the others signed is worth nothing against them, and it is the reason the desk’s file should hold the version everybody actually signed rather than the version that reached it last.

To that add the case where two records exist and disagree: the ship’s own statement of facts and the terminal’s. Neither is automatically right. Get both, keep both, and treat the divergence as the first thing to settle rather than the last.

The claim arrives months after anyone was watching

The people who recorded the SOF have sailed, changed employers or forgotten the call entirely. The demurrage claim lands on a desk where nobody was present, and it is answered against a document written by somebody who was. There is no substitute for that. A contemporaneous record made by a person at the berth carries a weight that no later reconstruction from e-mail traffic can match, and every tribunal knows it.

So the SOF has to survive. It has to stay attached to the fixture rather than to whoever handled the voyage, in a form somebody can find without knowing which agent sent it or what the attachment was called. Most forms time-bar a demurrage claim at a set period from completion of discharge, and require the supporting documents to be presented with it: the SOF is one of them, and a claim that cannot produce it is a claim that fails without ever being examined on the merits.

Ten minutes spent at the time, getting the reason written beside the stoppage and the offset written beside the clock, settles arguments that otherwise run for a year.

Reading a statement of facts into a time sheet by hand is where most of the errors in a demurrage claim are introduced, and it is the part a desk repeats on every single voyage. How this site imports one sets out what the reader takes off a scanned document and what it refuses to guess at.

References

How to calculate laytime and demurrageWhere the clock starts, what stops it, how the demurrage figure is actually worked out, and why most claims are lost on the paperwork rather than the merits. Notice of readinessThe one page that starts the laytime clock: arrived, ready, tendered, and the separate way each of those three is attacked. Demurrage vs detentionOne is a daily rate agreed before the delay, the other a loss proved after it. Container shipping uses both words for something else. Who is who on a fixtureA dozen parties, several of them called the owner and two of them called the agent. Who instructs whom, and who you may telephone.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas records statement of facts events against the fixture as timestamped entries in UTC with the local offset kept, each stoppage carrying its reason rather than being netted away. The laytime calculation is rebuilt from those events on demand, so a claim raised months later is answered from the same timeline the desk recorded at the time. 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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