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How to read a tonnage circular

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A tonnage circular is an e-mail that owners and other brokers send out every morning, listing the ships they have free. A busy desk receives twenty to forty of them a day. Each line is useful for about forty-eight hours, and after that it is out of date. That is why circulars arrive so often and are written so briefly.

There is no format

Understand this first, because it is the reason circulars are hard to automate. Every desk uses its own layout, and the same desk changes it. The only reliable pattern is that a ship’s identity and its availability appear close together, usually on two lines:

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

and often on one:

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

The key word is OPEN. It is what makes the line mean "free". In a position list, a line without it means something else. Everything to the right of OPEN 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, so drop it when you match the ship against a register.
NameBOW PERSISTENT The only identifier most circulars give. They rarely give an IMO number, which causes the problem below.
Deadweight36,000 DWT The weight the ship can carry. Often approximate, often written abt (about). It decides which size class the ship is quoted in.
Built2020 BLT Year of build. Charterers set age limits, so it is given early.
Open port or areaOPEN FUJAIRAH Where the ship becomes free. As often an area as a single place: "Arabian Gulf", "Singapore / Straits".
Dates12/16 AUG The window when the ship is available, not a single day.
TermsDELY DOP Delivery dropping outward pilot. Extra conditions that do not belong in any column.

The abbreviations added to the line

These are not fields but conditions added to the offer. Learn to recognise them, if only so you do not mistake them for part of a port name.

How the dates are written

Almost always as a window, in several forms. 12/16 AUG is a range within one month. 28 AUG/03 SEP runs across two months. A single 15 AUG still means a day or so either side in practice.

The trade also has words for parts of a month. These are windows, not single days:

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

If you turn "MID SEP" into the 15th, you lose what the owner actually said. It is a window and should stay one, because a cargo with a laycan (loading window) of the 11th to the 14th fits it, and a single date would have ruled the ship out.

The hard part is the name

A circular gives a name and almost never an IMO number, and a name does not identify one ship only. When a circular does give a number, an IMO number check confirms it and shows the ship behind it.

5,027

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

This is why you cannot match a circular to a fleet database with confidence on the name alone. A tool that claims to do so has picked one of several possible ships without telling you. The deadweight narrows the choice, the year of build narrows it further, and after that a person has to decide. Linking the wrong hull to a laycan is not a small error, because it puts someone else's ship into a negotiation.

Why they are still read by hand

A desk gets twenty to forty e-mails a morning, each holding anywhere from a handful to fifty ships, and all of it is out of date within two days. Nobody types that into a system by hand, so on most desks the position list either does not exist, or it is a spreadsheet nobody has updated for months. The circulars stay in the mailbox and people scroll through them when a cargo arrives. This works until the ship you needed is in an e-mail you have already scrolled past.

Turning a circular into rows a desk can search is the real work. It follows rules, but no parser should be trusted to finish it alone. What the parser takes, and what it refuses explains which lines are read, which are held for a person to accept, and why an older position is kept rather than overwritten.

Once you understand when a vessel is available, the next question is whether it actually fits the cargo, which is covered in matching a cargo to a ship.

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

Owners can also list a ship on a public board instead of circulating it by e-mail.

References

Position list vs AIS vs port line-upThree things people often mix up in chartering: where a ship is, when it is free next, and what the port authority expects at the berth. Dry bulk vessel sizesHandysize to Capesize: where the deadweight bands sit, why their edges are trade habits, and how many ships fall in each. Matching a cargo to a shipOne cargo, five open ships and one real candidate. Which checks are simple arithmetic, which are judgement, 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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