BOW WAVE 56

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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Wavy Line	sam@wavyline.com
(c)2000 WavyLine.com	Issue No 56 11 Dec 00
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Spanish Speakers See Here
3. Poten & Partners
4. Professor Tetley's Site
5. CMB Update
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

What are we to make of the way the ocean container industry is shaping up to the portal wars? After the launch of INTTRA, the eurocentric Maersk backed effort comes the pre-launch of Global Transportation Network (GTN) heavily backed by NOL and a slate of mainly Asian operators right across the various alliances. The official launch is aimed for January 2001

From The New World Alliance:
APL
Mitsui O.S.K. Lines
Hyundai Merchant Marine

From COSCO/K-Line/Yangming:
"K" Line and Yang Ming

From United Alliance:
Hanjin including Senator Lines

Unaligned members:
CP Ships and ZimIsrael

The industry neutrality supposedly comes from the technology company Tradiant which is running the whole show.

We cannot remember a development which better illustrated the will of the wisp quality of container consortia and alliances. Unless it be the dramatic realignments which followed the merger between NOL and APL.

Truly groupings based on mere alliances are honeymoons rather than marriages.

It is possible the industry is dividing along a regional faultline in this and in other sectors? Yes it is.

See the Tradiant Press Announcement

http://www.tradiant.com/cgi-perl/press_releases.cgi?releaseID=12/

2. Spanish Speakers See Here

Maria Dixon, the shipping consultant and force behind WISTA has written in to announce that a new maritime e-group for Spanish Speaking people has been set up.

The aims of the group are to create a network around the world of Spanish speaking maritime professionals to keep abreast of the business. Knowing as we do the formidable organisational skills of Ms Dixon and her friends, we are sure this new network will prosper.

To subscribe send an email to:

mundo_maritimo-subscribe@egroups.com

3. Poten & Partners

From Charles de Trenck,the ever inquisitive Asia Pacific Shipping Analyst over at Salomon Smith Barney comes this reference to this well regarded firm of shipping,LNG and tanker specialists and their intelligent website.

http://www.poten.com/

4. Professor Tetley's Site

The man who has been the bill of lading and cargo claims guru to many of us has written with news of changes to his web presence. After four years of appearing on the site of "friend and fine lawyer Chris Giaschi" he now has a new site at Mcgill Univversity of his own. People with comments and suggestions should let him have their views.

The site is a model of its kind and like all good websites, it has a strong individual flavour which reflects the interests and the views of its author. We particularly like the maritime glossary of terms and web links which repays many visits. You can do many things on the web, but sometimes the things which have been built up gradually, item by item, are the most valuable.

See the site at:

http://tetley.law.mcgill.ca/

5. CMB Update

News reaches us of the CMB website which makes a good job of the task of explaining the company's history and current business activities. The links pages will pass readers on to an interesting selection of mostly Belgian maritime and cargo sites. The editor knew the company best in its liner shipping incarnation in the 1980s and 1990s during the period when consolidation forces were bearing down heavily on this and other second generation container liner operators. Today the company is in the energy,stevedoring and insurance business. Quite a good site:

http://www.holding.cmb.be/

6. And Finally...

We continue the strong American flavour of recent issues.

Golf is a game played by many readers of Bow Wave. Especially the insurance ones. Golf has a regular item which appears even in the Saturday edition of Lloyd's List, the world's oldest daily newspaper
.
The editor, who is something of a rootless urban intellectual, has eschewed the game more or less since his playing years as an undergraduate, which is a time in life when experimentation is a virtue in itself and any old excuse to miss lectures is welcome.

But it is to Tim Walker, who was born and raised in Edinburgh and is thus no mean golfer himself, that we owe the receipt of this perceptive and unsigned meditation on Golf and Midlife which has been doing the rounds of the internet:

Let me explain. I once assumed that golf was a sport for elderly country club Republicans. The sort of men who wore green pants with whale belts and protected their clubs with fuzzy duck head covers. Golf was Dwight David Eisenhower. My family was Adlai Stevenson. In my 20s I thought golf was God's way of telling you that you had too much time on your hands.

In my 30s I decided that a low handicap was admissible evidence of child neglect in any custody dispute. In my 40s, as a fairly decent tennis and squash player, I couldn't imagine hitting a ball while it was standing still. Quite frankly, it seemed unfair. But somewhere along the way,somewhere between Bill Clinton and Big Bertha and Tiger Woods, between chiropractors and knee surgery and Advil, I had an epiphany (that's something close to a muscle spasm) that said: golf is my next sport. To wit: my last sport.I'd better learn it now.

This was a decision aided and abetted by a quirky nine-hole golf course in Maine where people still stroll and stop to look at the view. It was also aided and abetted by a quirky husband (more Bobby Kennedy than Adlai Stevenson) who enthusiastically gave me all his clubs. This was an act of generosity that I didn't immediately recognize for what it was: A ploy for him to get new equipment. Now, as I approach Columbus Day weekend with a full set of clubs and big plans, I feel fully qualified at last to offer up my views on why golf begins at 50.

Yes, I know that one sign of a new and erratic duffer is the penchant for turning golf into a good walk through midlife spoiled. For reasons that remain unclear, golf has spawned more philosophical rambles than fairways. Nobody compares tennis to life. A love game? Ken Burns and several million fans talk about baseball as the collective field of youthful dreams, but there's no senior tour on the diamonds.

Today there are, I hasten to add, some 25 million golfers and 16,010 golf courses. There are speed golfers and networking golfers and boring golfers. There is even, for reasons that escape me, a golf channel. All golf, all day long. There is a business writer who actually correlated the handicaps of CEOs with their stock performance. And there are the very,very serious golf professionals who sit around discussing whether they should ban new improved clubs because they are making the game too easy. Say what? But from my perspective, golf is the midlife sport of choice for very different reasons.

First of all, it's easier to reach your goals. In midlife, after all, it's a snap to have a handicap below your age and a score below your weight.And getting easier all the time.

Golf is like midlife because only now do you realize that the course you have set upon is governed by rules so vast, so arcane, and so arbitrary that the average person -- you -- will never figure it all out.

Golf is like midlife because it is absolutely unfair. As a young person,you carry the illusion that, if you do your homework, study, and work overtime you'll get it all right. By middle age, you know that every time you've got it all together -- work, family, putt, pitch -- some piece is about to unravel. I promise you.

Golf, like midlife, is played against only one opponent: yourself. the time you reach 50, you'd better figure out that doing well doesn't depend on others doing badly. You don't have to wish them ill. They're not the reason you are shanking the ball.

Golf is like middle age, because -- ah, you knew this was coming --in these years you really do have to play it as it lays. You don't get to start everything all over again. The most you get is a mulligan. If it's an unplayable lie, everybody sympathizes, but you still have to take a penalty. On the other hand, golf, like midlife, also offers another chance. No matter how badly you hit one ball, you can still recover on the next. Of course, no matter how well you hit one ball, you can always screw up on the next.

Finally, golf is like midlife because at some time on a beautiful October day, when you are searching for a ball, or for that matter your swing,you look around and realize for the first or 50th time that in this game,you're the one keeping your own score.

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