BOW WAVE 506

Bow Wave Issue 506--Readers' Rest Edition

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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(c)2009 WavyLine.com	Issue No 506 27 Jul 09
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Book Review
3. Scopic--Its Time has Come?
4. (another) Crane Collapse at Southampton
5. Roman Ships Found
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Poem of the Week

Advice to Young Poets

Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head

Martín Espada, from The Republic of Poetry (2008)

New Readers this week include:-

Matthew Davies of Marine Insurnace Brokers in Auckland Sham Palaure of ISS Shipping
Edgardo Mackay
Bruce Swanson of the Kiln Group in Cape Town
Ousman Bk Jabang of Abden Company in the Gambia
Martyn Hughes of the London P+I CLub

News of Readers

Prolific blogger Dennis L Bryant left law practice in February but continues to publish his frequent alerts from his website at:-

http://brymar-consulting.com/

Nick Owen of Charles Taylor Adjusting- Marine was elected Chairman of the Liverpool Underwriters & Maritime Association at their AGM on 22 July. It is the first time that a claims adjuster has held the post.

mailto:nick.owen@charlestayloradj.com

Miller Insurance Services Limited is to launch a facultative reinsurance operation from its Singapore office after recruiting two senior brokers from rival Benfield. Nigel Cross and Adam Fuller joined the firm having spent considerable time within Benfield’s Asia operations and become the latest recruits within the broker’s Fac team which was launched in June

Note from the Editor

A damp summer weekend provided your editor with some extra time to read and nap, also thanking the contributors below.

Enjoy!

2. Book Review

All Hands and the Cook--The Customs and Language of the British Merchant Seaman--1875-1975

by Captain Barry Thompson,(£18.50 + £3 postage) 383pp, Bush Press NZ

The author of this absorbing work kindly forwarded a review copy to your editor and a wet weekend was duly filled with examining his endeavour. The book looks like it started as a work on professional nautical terms but it has ended more like a work of industrial sociology with some 2000 terms examined and explained in the light of work practices during the period concerned. This reviewer began his career in the marine mutual insurance world in 1984, a near decade after the end of the classical merchant navy era in Britain addressed in this book. There were men in the P+I Club then who had swallowed the anchor and come ashore as extra masters , working in the P+I Club as industry missionaries, attempting to keep ignorance at bay from the likes of the insurance and legal people on the rest of the staff. Such men had an air of loss, even melancholy about them as they watched a traditional way of life ebb away in the post modernist economy of Thatcher's Britain (as it then was). Many commented with tart cynicism on the new global merchant marine which emerged in the container age. eVEN Michael Grey, the dean of marine journalists, if he has a fault,it is that his writings contain a large number of elegiac passages mourning the passing of the age of the general purpose, tween decked general cargo ship.

Captain Thompson keeps this sadness at bay but labours hard to show the uninitiated a deep insight into the world and words of the merchant mariner of the golden age. It was a world bristling with technical terms, transformed by slang and humour into a second set of closed terms, part cockney, part scouse, best understood by the politically incorrect nautical specialists of the day.

Anyone who is below say the age of 60 can spend a day with this book with profit, learning the origins and uses of terms which linger in the work life of people in the modern world of shipping. The deeply detailed information on the design of uniforms is supplemented by a pungent chapter on on social and recreational aspects of life at sea. There are good chapters on the design of ships, the handling of cargo, navigation, watch keeping to name but a few.

This reviewer, coming from the world of the Clubs, themselves not bereft of history and tradition , found plenty of material of interest, but not a single reference to a P+I Club as such. Also although the book is full of fascinating information on the Indian, lascar, contribution to the industry, it is short on the Chinese equivalent, a sad ommission for those of us who have learned something of the industry in those parts.

This book deserves to be widely known among the industries addressed in Bow Wave and your editor warmly recommends it to Readers

For a copy of the book send an e-mail to

Captain Malcolm Rushan at:

rushan@shoreside.demon.co.uk

3. Scopic--Its Time has Come?

Denzil Stuart writes:-

Shipping market turbulence is set to pave the way for increased use of the compensation mechanism designed to reward marine salvage companies for fighting oil pollution when they are contracted to save ships, according to an informative article in the new issue of Currents, the American P&I Club magazine.

Greater invocation of the Special Compensation Protection and Indemnity Clause (Scopic) under Lloyd’s Open Form, the world’s most commonly used salvage contract, will however increase the financial liabilities of P&I clubs, says Tony Goldsmith, a partner with law firm Hill Dickinson Singapore.

Goldsmith’s analysis is especially pertinent at a time when salvors have expressed concern at the preference of some underwriters to negotiate deals that avoid using LOF because of the perceived high level of salvage awards. Lloyd’s has recently refined the arbitration section of the Form in an effort to ensure it remains an attractive option.

Referring to the reduced value of vessels and their cargoes since mid-2008, Goldsmith says: "This will place a lower cap on salvage awards and make it less likely that an award acceptable to salvors will be obtained on a ‘no cure -- no pay’ basis alone.

"Given current market lows for the values of many vessels and cargoes it is now significantly more likely that Scopic would be invoked in cases where salvage is performed on the basis of LOF. On the whole, market conditions in both the shipping and commodities markets are not predicted to rise substantially for a number of years to come.

"Market volatility itself could be a sufficient influence for salvors to invoke Scopic. Where there is market volatility, vessel and cargo values at the time of commencing an operation may be much higher than when the vessel and cargo arrive at a place of safety (being the time at which the value of the salved fund is to be assessed)."

Salvors will not want to leave it too late before invoking the special clause, and in a volatile market will be more likely to do so earlier rather than later, Goldsmith writes.

Scopic, which was drawn up following such tanker casualties as the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and Amoco Cadiz in 1976, when the maritime community recognised the need for an incentive to protect the environment from oil pollution as well as saving property, can only be applied when salvage services are performed under LOF.

With a reduction in values, hull underwriters may show less reluctanc e in accepting LOF terms, says Goldsmith. Lower demand for shipping might logically reduce the number of casualties, but the large number of vessels lying dormant at crowded anchorages increases the prospects of incidents, and some shipowners facing high running costs might reduce funding for maintenance, crewing and training, thus increasing the likelihood of casualties.

Goldsmith comments: "How ultimately this will all play out is not yet known, but if there are more casualties they will, generally speaking, be of lower value than in recent years, which will result in greater potential for Scopic being invoked."

Goldsmith quotes International Salvage Union figures showing that from the introduction of Scopic in August 1999 to March 2007, there were 844 LOF cases, with Scopic invoked in 183 of them. Only five went to arbitration, a testament to the Scopic scheme being considerably more user-friendly and cost-effective than the previous regime, he says. Cases are generally resolved faster, avoiding lengthy and costly arbitrations.

Using other data, he calculates the average spend per P&I club on Scopic each year at about $2.6m. Except for years of high casualties, such as the Tricolor collision in the English Channel in 2002 and the MSC Napoli beaching on the UK coast in 2007, there was no obvious trend of increased sums being paid under Scopic year on year.

There was also no obvious correlation between sums paid under Scopic by comparison with the expense of wreck removals, which on average amount to about $7m per P&I club each year, again subject to high cost/high profile casualties such as the recent cases in Gibraltar of the New Flame and Fedra.

More casualties against the background of lower values would inevitably result in P&I clubs facing greater financial liabilities.

On the positive side, Goldsmith says that Scopic is a major benefit to shipowners and their P&I clubs in providing for them to have their interests represented at the site of casualties, together with cargo and hull underwriters, giving them greater knowledge of, and potential influence over, the handling of incidents.

A copy of Currents is available on request or can be downloaded from:-

http://www.american-club.com

4. (another) Crane Collapse at Southampton

DP World again claimed market attention as its operation in Southampton hosted another collapsed crane into the hold of a ship. The talk is of a $ 5 million property loss to count against the books of the new underwriters. Liability underwriters at the TT Club will field the exposure to interests in cargo. Here is a summary of the casualty:-

A man was trapped and suffered serious leg injuries when the Morris crane he was operating collapsed onto a containership at Southampton Docks, in the early hours of Monday morning on 13JLY09.

A spokesman for DP World Southampton said all shipside operations had been suspended after the incident at Dock Gate 20 at 5:20am.

It follows a similar incident on 18 January 2008, when high winds caused a refitted gantry crane--also a Morris--to collapse at Southampton Container Terminal

NYK confirmed that the NYK vessel Nyke Themis was being loaded when the crane fell and said: "The crew members onboard the vessel are safe and there is no reported oil pollution nor damage to the environment. However our thoughts are with the injured crane operator.

A photo of the collapsed crane may be viewed by clicking on the link below

http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/incident-photo-southhampton-crane/

5. Roman Ships Found

This report appears in the regular Maritime News Clippings e-zine published out of Rotterdam:-

A team of archaeologists using sonar technology to scan the seabed have discovered a "graveyard" of five pristine ancient Roman shipwrecks off the small Italian island of Ventotene.

The trading vessels, dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD, lie more than 100 meters underwater and are amongst the deepest wrecks discovered in the Mediterranean in recent years, the researchers said on Thursday, informs Reuters.

The ships are submerged between 100 and 150 meters (about 330 to 490 feet) off Ventotene, a tiny island that is part of an archipelago off Italy's west coast between Rome and Naples.

The ships carried amphorae -- vases used for holding wine, olive oil and other products -- as well as kitchen tools and metal and glass objects that have yet to be identified, Italy's Culture Ministry said. The spot was highly trafficked, and hit by frequent storms and dangerous sea currents.

The discovery is part of a new drive by archaeological officials to scan deeper levels of the sea and prevent looting of submerged treasures, The Associated Press reports. "The ships appear to have been heading for safe anchorage, but they never made it," Timmy Gambin, head of archaeology for the Aurora Trust told Reuters.

"So in a relatively small area we have five wrecks...a graveyard of ships." Discovered about 100 meters underwater near the Italian island of Ventotene, the ships were carrying wine from Italy, fish sauce, known as garum from Spain and north Africa, and metal ingots from Italy, believed to have been used in statues or weapons.

(Source:Pravda)

http://www.maasmondmaritime.com/Inschrijven.aspx

See also:-

http://rogueclassicism.com/2009/07/23/roman-shipwrecks-of-ventotene/

6. And Finally...

These jokes come courtesy of the house of Frazer Hunt:-

Sentencing

This 80 year old woman was arrested for shop lifting. When she went before the judge he asked her, "What did you steal?" She replied, "A can of peaches."

The judge then asked her why she had stolen the can of peaches and she replied that she was hungry.

The judge then asked her how many peaches were in the can.

She replied 6.

The judge then said, "I will then give you 6 days in jail."

Before the judge could actually pronounce the punishment, the woman's husband spoke up and asked the judge if he could say something.

The judge said, "What is it?"

The husband said, "She also stole a can of peas."

P.S.

A lawyer is a man who prevents somebody else from getting your money.

My attorney is brilliant. He didn¹t bother to graduate from law school, he settled out of class.

All I need to enjoy life are the three 'L’s: love, laughter and a win on the lottery.

I know the perfect gift for the man who has everything - a burglar alarm.

You know what I got for Father’s Day? The bills from Mother’s Day.

I gave my wife a gift certificate for Christmas. She ran out to exchange it for a bigger size.

For our anniversary I presented my wife with an all-expense-paid trip for two to Tahiti. She’s been busy ever since trying to decide who to take with her.

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