BOW WAVE 525

Bow Wave Issue 525--Boxing the Compass Edition

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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(c)2009 WavyLine.com	Issue No 525 08 Dec 09
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Quarterpoints for December 2009
3. New Clecat Board
4. Open Letter on Piracy
5. Yangtse Newsletter
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Poem of the Week

Advent 1955

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound -
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out 'Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.'

And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there -
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards, And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know -
They'd sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
'The time draws near the birth of Christ'.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

John Betjeman

(Thanks to the poetry lovers over at Impress
Communications for sending this one in--ed)

New Readers this week include:-

David Buckingham of Pequod Associates
Alastair Fischbacher of Rio Tinto
Nick Taylor of CTC
Ettia Poole of OAMPS in North Sydney
Consultant Phil Greenwood
Luis Alberto Garcia of Rogers & Co in Madrid

News of Readers

With the launch of Asia Maritime in December the continent has its only English language maritime periodical.

For further details contact the editor Mike Grinter at

mailto:mike.grinter@thisisasiamaritime.com

Readers Write

From Tim Lection

I am presently sailing on the Jubilee Sailing Trust tall ship "Tenacious" off Majorca, bound for Sardinia, Sicily and Malta. If you are not familiar with the JST, they run sailing voyages for disabled and able bodied people working together, requiring no prior sailing experience to many locations.

It may be an interesting article for you to run and bring much needed exposure to the shipping community about this very worthy charity. The have a website at:

http://www.jst.org.uk

mailto:tim.lection@simsl.com

From Jerry Giroux in Toronto:-

By mutual agreement Atlantic Marine Underwriters / Aldis Underwriting and CNA have decided to discontinue their relationship effective November 18, 2009.
.
Aldis Underwriting is pleased to announce their new insurance partner lineup which includes: GCAN Insurance Company, ACE Canada, and Certain Underwriters at Lloyd’s. All of our insurance partners have an "A" rating or better and are excited to participate in our growth and expansion strategy. All of our markets are fully licensed Canadian Insurers as per Part XIII of the Insurance Companies Act.

mailto:jgiroux@aldisunderwriting.com

AfterOfficeHours News

After Office Hours, the Emergency Contact Directory for people who need help quickly is now being accessed 150 times a day. Do you provide services to marine and transport insurers and shipping companies? Should your company be listed?

Register for free on the site

mailto:contactus@AfterOfficeHours.com

http:///www.AfterOfficeHours.com

Note from the Editor

This week's Bow Wave certainly boxes the compass with news from all over the industry

Many thanks to the contributors this week.

Enjoy!

2. Quarterpoints for December 2009

Your editor's most recent column in Lloyd's list pondered the synergy between realty and container stevedoring...

I first became aware of the affinity between modern stevedoring and property development during the 1980s, when, underwriting terminal risks for the TT Club, I was presented with a series of risks related to the transportation activities of one Peter Savarys, an English entrepreneur who assembled a singular collection of waterside operations from Falmouth in the south to the Manchester Ship Canal in the North. This was a time when the balance of cargo handling was shifting rapidly to the containerized systems and many traditional port locations were in flux or indeed in operational decline. Container terminals required deeper water, bigger hardstands, more expensive cranes, far less labour and more fluency. Often the only way forward for the modernizers was a green field site with a suitable hinterland.

Thus from the start the marriage between real property and working cargo was apparent and it prevails today in many if not all the leading terminal groups in the world. The tensions of this liaison are never far from the surface. A modern terminal works all night producing noise, smells and light scatter as byproducts. The quiet enjoyment of people in residence in waterside apartments is not always easy to ensure. The derelict waterfront at Dibden Bay near Southampton has been mooted as a place for port expansion more than once in recent times. The notions sits uneasily with the residents of Hythe, a designed quarter filled with townhouses with their own yacht moorings outside their back doors.

You do not have to go far to identify the most accomplished realtor/stevedore in the world. Mr Li Ka Shing’s Hutchison Whampoa has written the book on how to combine a mighty property and industrial portfolio with a massive international collection of terminal risks. In this group the terminal business is a minority activity, it is dwarfed by the interests in realty, power generation, communications and retailing. Based on long experiences garnered in Hong Kong w here space shortages and laissez faire government produced the blue print for making a success of container handling in geographically limited conditions. The expansion of the group is of relatively recent vintage. Go back to the mid 1990s and this mighty international player was operating in Hong Kong and a few other not particularly eye-catching locations in the Pearl River Delta and a smallish venture in Shanghai. It is quite a challenge to insure the assets and liabilities of this kind of leviathan and the halls of London marine insurance are populated by people who at one time or another have volunteered for the challenge.

At roughly the same time, a rather talented group of ex-mariners based in Sydney under the leadership of Capt Richard Setchell were assembling a collection of new terminals with less capital to call upon. P&O Terminals set up interesting new operations in Russia, Scheckou, Irian Jaya, Mozambique, BA to name but a few. Here the model was more in the nature of Build Operate Transfer or Joint Venture. Back in the HQ of the mother company, interest in these operations was not exactly intense and far more excitement was being generated at the time by the Group’s property ventures and of course its liner shipping operation. In insurance terms, the insurer able to offer building bonds captured more attention than the ordinary purveyors of cargo handling insurance for stevedores.

So it should not come as too much of a surprise that the mighty DP World has become a somewhat uncertain catspaw in the story of financial overreach in Dubai, a relatively bright stone in a crown of property debt in the Emirate kingdom. Assembled from existing locations in the Gulf and the acquisition of the P&O portfolio of ports (excepting always those North American ports which caused so much political trouble in post 911 America) . It is thinkable that this great terminal group will have to go on the block as part of the solvency measures being worked out in Dubai. It is unlikely that a disposal of Dubai realty will be efficacious in what is a tanking property market.

This could a test of the ports market in the morning-after-the-great- banking- crisis market. The appetite for container terminals has hitherto been apparent in markets as diverse as Canada and the Philipines. All the eye-watering deals of the past decade were concluded in a world of ample money chasing understandable projects in the real economy with proper long periods of amortization and payback. Who is in the market these days? Many container shipowners who might in the past have been keen to expand may have other calls on their capital. The great modern terminal groups have on the whole operated on an acquisition by acquisition basis--Mr Li and DP World excepted . Yet as always the terminals seem to do better financially over time than the ships. The choices available to the great lines are limited and the ability of shippers to strike a very hard bargain is blunted at the terminal gate. Within the ports sector the globalization process is very well advanced. Operations in one place only like Rotterdam or Antwerp would struggle to prevail as the singletons they once were. My money would be on "Far Eastern Interests" as the tilt in the centre of industrial and shipping gravity to the producer economies of the Asia Pacific continues into the decades ahead.

3. New Clecat Board

Mr Marco Sorgetti, the Director General of Clecats has passed us word of the new President and Board of
Clecat which were appointed by the Clecat General Assembly on 02DEC09.

The new Board is formed by the following individuals:

PRESIDENT Mr Clive Broadley GB
SECRETARY GENERAL Mr. Heinrich Rogge D
TREASURER Mr Colin Beaumont GB
CHAIR CITI Mr. Fernando Carmo P
VICE CHAIR OF CITI Mr. Pierre Cornet F
CHAIR ROAD Transport Ins. Mr Stefan Back S
VICE CHAIR ROAD T.I. Mr Wouter van Benten NL
CHAIR OF RAIL T.I. Mr Ivan Petrov BG
VICE CHAIR RAIL T.I. Mr Frank Lehner EL
CHAIR OF AIR T.I. Mr Olivier Layec F
VICE CHAIR AIR T.I. Mr Piet Timmermans B
CHAIR OF MARITIME T.I. Mr. Willem van der Schalk D VICE CHAIR MARITIME T.I. Mr Marc Huybrechts B
CHAIR OF SECURITY INS. Mr Maurizio Fasce I
VICE CH. OF SECURITY INS. Mr Frantisek Komora SK
ELECTED MEMBER Mr Jerzy Wójtowicz PL
ELECTED MEMBER Mr Francesco Parisi I

mailto:orgetti@clecat.org

http://www.clecat.org

4. Open Letter on Piracy

George Grishin writes:-

This Anti-piracy Appeal letter signed by the representatives of shipping and insurance communities during a Marine Insurance and Law seminar in Odessa, Ukraine.

The Seminar participants feel IMO is the only organisation able to move the anti-piracy struggle from the present stalemate.

To:
Flag Administrations
IMO
BIMCO
Parliament and President of Ukraine
The UNO

Dear Sirs,
27th November, 2009
Piracy: International Maritime Problem No 1

Piracy at sea, especially, in the Gulf of Aden area, has become the largest threat to peaceful maritime trade. Measures undertaken by several non-connected navy forces, being a major military drain on all nations resources during a time of peace at sea, have proven to have little effect.

Ukrainian and Russian crew members and officers represent a large proportion of seafarers held captive by the pirates. On behalf of them and their families, as well as on behalf of marine transport, maritime law and marine insurance companies represented at the seminar in Odessa on 27th November, we would ask you to consider the following:-

(1)Arming crews and/or security companies

The recent success events have shown that the presence on board of a ship of armed security guards and/or providing crews with fire arms, as per the example of the US- and Iran-flagged vessels, is the only possible solution to tackling the piracy at sea.

We would ask you to urgently adopt bye-laws / regulations allowing for the crew members to defend themselves. This request is based on the common sense principle of necessary defence level.

(2)Fighting piracy at land, not at sea

The navy operation in the Gulf of Aden has become a fiasco. In spite of the largest navy ships presence in the area at time of peace the pirate actions have not been reduced.

We suggest steps are taken by the UN, in the tune of 1910-1930s practice of establishing mandates over territories, as well as the more recent multinational actions in the Former Yugoslavia . The Government of Somalia should be asked to let international peacekeeping forces be established in Puntland and other pirate bases in order to prevent piracy at land, not at sea.

(3)m/v Ariana

Motor vessel Ariana captured 10 months ago has been effectively abandoned by her Owners. The predominantly Ukrainian crew on board are suffering.

We suggest in similar cases the flag administration states (Malta and Greece) and/or the state of crew members’ of the predominant nationality (Ukraine) should finance the Owners, arrange for the release of the vessel and for her subsequent sale. Direct negotiations between a state agenciy and the pirates should not take place.

We are asking the Maltese, Greek and Ukrainian Parliament and the Presidents of these countries to take immediate steps to have Ariana crew members released.

We consider the above steps to be absolutely urgent. They are needed to keep peace at sea and in the world shipping and trade in general.

Yours faithfully,
Signatories as per the list enclosed.
The original list deposited with Ukrainian Marine Lawyers, Kherson

List of 27 Signatories to the Anti-Piracy letter
Odessa, 27/11/09

S. Tolstov/Black Sea Agency/Odessa (Shipping)
S. Nedyak/C.M.T. Ltd/Odessa (Freight Forwarding) A. Saychik and L. Aleynikova/Generali Garant/Odessa (Insurance) S. Lapin, A. Golodnova, T. Bolshakova, I. Mykhaylov/Kaalbye Shipping/ (Shipping) D. Seligeev/Kapital Insurance/Moscow (Insurance) E. Forzun, G. Chepurnoy, O. Filonenko/M D Shipping/Odessa (Shipping) S. Gorchakov/Maritime Expert/Odessa (Law and Insurance) G. and K. Grishin, B. Pierce/Oakeshott Insurance/London-Kiev (Insurance) K. Rashevskiy/Private person/Odessa (Shipping)
A. Krasiljnikov/Railwood Transit LLP/Odessa (Trade) V. Bessmertny/Sea Dynasty Ltd/Odessa (Shipping)
V. Chesnokov/Seasotra Maritime Ltd/Odessa (Shipping) V. Bets/Seatrans Service LLC/Odessa (Shipping)
Y. Forzun/Silver Knot Shipping/Odessa (Shipping) A. Dyrchenko/Tesoro Marine Ltd/Odessa (Shipping)
V. and S. Gudko/Ukrainian Marine Lawyers/Kherson (Maritime Law) R. Zoteev/Unicor Odessa/Odessa (Shipping)
A. Korsunskiy/VSK Insurance/Moscow (Insurance)

Contact George Grishin at:

mailto:wecanhelp@oakinsur.com

5. Yangtse Newsletter

David Lammie has sent in the latest edition of his newsletter which aims to provide transport and investment news relating to the Yangtze corridor and China’s interior, with a particular focus on shipping developments. This is certainly a welcome addition to the world of specialist e-zines I would say. Here is an extract:-

Lightening volumes soar in Yichang

The number of coal-carrying vessels from Sichuan province via the Three Gorges that have to lighten in Yichang has increased dramatically since a compulsory lightening rule was enforced on 11 November, according to the Yangtze Maritime Safety Authorities (MSA).
The Three Gorges Dam has increased water levels in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, but the current severe drought in Yichang and other parts of the middle reaches means that all vessels sailing via the reservoir have to lighten in order to sail through safely. They are required to have a draught of 2.8 metres or less, except those carrying dangerous goods that must have a draught of 2.7 metres or less.

By 27 November, 227 coal-carrying vessels had been lightened by a cumulative amount of nearly 190,000 tons. By activating a monitoring station on top of the Yichang-Wanzhou Bridge, the local MSA officials are now able to stop and inspect any passing vessels that they suspect of overloading.

On 22 November, the Yangtze MSA issued an urgent warning to all captains that their licences would be suspended or even revoked if their vessels became stranded because of overloading; they would also receive a fine.

Contact David at:-

mailto:dl@yangtzebusinessservices.com

6. And Finally...

Many thanks to Peter Hughes of Middlesex University for this one:-

A well-dressed but rather shabby gentleman went into a quiet pub. Approaching the barman he said he would show him something truly amazing if he gave him a pint. It being quiet and feeling pity he pulled him a pint.

The gent took a couple of deep mouthfuls and then went across to the piano but instead of playing, he reached into his plastic bag and pulled out a rat which he placed on the keyboard and the rat began to play. Mozart, Chopin, the Russian bloke with the long name, Elton John, all with real style. Very impressive.

Returning to the bar, the barman agreed that it was amazing. "If you give me a sandwich, I’ll show you something equally amazing" suggested the gent. The barman agreed and rushed off to fix the sandwich. In a few minutes the gent was tucking into a triple-decker with trimmings. Then he went across to the piano and pulled a frog from his bag and put it on the top. The rat began to play and the frog began to sing, opera, musicals, pop, the whole range.

By this stage a crowd had been drawn into the pub by the music and among them was an American straight from Hollywood who looked at the rat and frog and saw thousands of dollars flashing before his eyes. He made the gent an offer, 100 000 for the act "Pounds Sterling" replied the gent. The American hesitated a moment but then agreed. "But I could only let you have the frog" said the gent, obviously not a sucker. More hesitation, but the American could still see the potential, a singing frog, anyone could do the accompaniment. So he agreed. The financial details were put in place, the frog was passed across and the American left. What a deal! Later, the barman asked the gent why didn’t he sell the rat as well? "You could have got at least £400 000 if you held out". "No" he replied "I couldn’t do that. You see, me and the rat, we go back a long way. I could never part with the rat and besides".. where would I ever get such a good ventriloquist?"

P.S.

Thanks to Paul Dixon for this one:-

The minister asked for anyone who knew a truly perfect person to stand up. After a long pause a meek-looking fellow in the back stood.

"Do you really know a perfect person?" he was asked.

"Yes, Sir, I do," answered the little man.

"Would you please tell the congregation who this rare perfect person is?"

"Yes, Sir, my wife's late first husband."

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