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How to read a tonnage circular

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A circular is the e-mail owners and competing brokers send out every morning listing the ships they have free. A working desk receives twenty to forty a day. Each line is worth money for about forty-eight hours and then it is stale, which is the whole reason they arrive so often and are written so tersely.

There is no format

This is the first thing to understand and the reason circulars resist automation. Every desk writes its own layout, and the same desk changes it. The only dependable structure is that a hull's identity and her availability sit near each other, usually on two lines:

MV BOW PERSISTENT   36,000 DWT / 2020 BLT
OPEN FUJAIRAH 12/16 AUG

and frequently on one:

DEJIMA 63,000 OPEN PARADIP 15/19 AUG DELY DOP

The word that carries the meaning is OPEN. It is what makes the line say "free", and a position list written without it has written something else. Everything to the right of it is where and when; everything to the left is which ship.

The line, field by field

PartExampleWhat it is
PrefixMV, M/V, MT, MS Motor vessel, motor tanker, steamship. Not part of the name, and dropped when matching her against a register.
NameBOW PERSISTENT The only identifier most circulars give. Rarely an IMO number, which is the problem below.
Deadweight36,000 DWT Often approximate, often written abt. Decides the size class she will be quoted as.
Built2020 BLT Year of build. Charterers set age limits, so it is quoted early.
Open port or areaOPEN FUJAIRAH Where she comes free. As often a range as a berth: "Arabian Gulf", "Singapore / Straits".
Dates12/16 AUG The window she is available in, not a single day.
TermsDELY DOP Delivery dropping outward pilot. Riders that belong to no column.

The abbreviations that ride on the line

These are not fields. They qualify the offer and they are worth recognising if only so they are not mistaken for part of a port name.

How the dates are written

A window, almost always, and in several shapes: 12/16 AUG for a range inside one month, 28 AUG/03 SEP across two, and a single 15 AUG which still means a day or so either side in practice.

The trade also has words for parts of a month, and they are windows rather than points:

WrittenMeans
EARLY, BEG, BEGINNING1st to 10th
MID11th to 20th
END, LATE21st to month end

Resolving "MID SEP" to the 15th throws away what the owner actually said. It is a window and it should stay one, because a cargo with a laycan of the 11th to the 14th fits it and a single date would have excluded her.

The hard part is the name

A circular gives a name and almost never an IMO number. A name is not a unique key.

5,027

Vessel names in the register that are carried by more than one hull with an IMO number. Ships are also renamed constantly, so last month's circular and this month's may name the same ship differently, or different ships identically.

This is why matching a circular to a fleet database cannot be done confidently on the name alone, and why anything that claims to has quietly picked one of several candidates. The deadweight narrows it, the year of build narrows it further, and past that a human has to decide. Attaching the wrong hull to a laycan is not a small error: it puts somebody else's ship into a negotiation.

Why they are still read by hand

Twenty to forty e-mails a morning, each holding a handful to fifty hulls, all of it stale within two days. Nobody retypes that into a system, so on most desks the position list either does not exist or is a spreadsheet somebody gave up on in March. The circulars stay in the mailbox and get scrolled through when a cargo lands, which works until the ship you needed was in one you had already scrolled past.

Turning a circular into rows a desk can search is the work itself, and it is rules-based work that no parser should be trusted to finish on its own. What the parser takes, and what it refuses sets out which lines are read, which are held back for a person to accept, and why a superseded position is kept rather than overwritten.

Once a vessel’s availability is understood, the next question is whether she actually fits the cargo, which is where matching a cargo to a ship comes in.

For desks handling large numbers of vessel positions, purpose-built broker software can help keep open tonnage, vessel information and related broker activity organized in one workflow.

References

Position list vs AIS vs port line-upThree things routinely confused in chartering: where a ship is, when she is free next, and what the port authority expects at the berth. Dry bulk vessel sizesHandysize to Capesize: where the deadweight bands sit, why the boundaries are conventions, and how many hulls are in each. Matching a cargo to a shipOne cargo, five open ships and one real candidate. Which constraints are arithmetic, which are somebody's opinion, and why the shortlist is short.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas reads a pasted circular into candidate positions, shows the line each one came from, and asks a person to confirm the ship before anything is saved. Nothing is matched automatically, for the reason above. 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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