Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
SOME NYPE TIME CHARTER PROBLEMS
Fresh water and stores
Pilotage
Customary assistance
Michael Mabbs, London
The New York Produce Exchange (NYPE) time charter form 1946 has served us well over many years. It will take time to eliminate it from the general usage it now enjoys even though revisions are well in hand. Many of its somewhat hoary phrases have been tested in the courts, particularly when the stakes have been high. Such major issues are thereby illuminated and the shipbroker struggles, not altogether unsuccessfully, to keep abreast of developments and to incorporate his new-found knowledge into the pressurised amendment and adaptation of standard charter-party forms during swiftly moving negotiations. Any moderately senior shipbroker, a category to which I aspire, can recount numerous personal anecdotes of hasty draftsmanship of clauses forced upon him by rather obdurate principals—with risible results if not worse. It is therefore somewhat galling to find that certain minor points in the unaltered printed text turn out to be troublesome and tend to set at naught the shipbroker’s efforts to bring his principals into a harmonious contractual relationship. I have selected three such points from the New York Produce Exchange time charter form which are notorious as dispute-breeders but which are too minor to have come before the courts. I do not presume to offer conclusions of my own but have reported and commented upon the conclusions of others whose work I wish to acknowledge gratefully.
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FRESH WATER AND STORES
Lines 7 and 8 of the New York Produce Exchange time charter form state:—
“… deadweight capacity (cargo and bunkers, including fresh water, and stores not exceeding one and one half per cent of ship’s deadweight capacity, allowing a minimum of fifty tons)”.
Common market practice is to delete all the printed text after the word “exceeding” and to substitute therefor a figure such as “250 long tons”. Such a figure is often loosely referred to as the “constant” in conversation and sometimes actually labelled “constant” in the typed addition to the charter-party. Once in a while, and especially when the deadweight cargo capacity becomes important to time charterers (it would not be so, for example, when lifting grain), Lines 7 and 8 guarantee an argument. It always commences by a complaint from the charterers that the vessel has failed to load the full quantity of deadweight cargo calculated by the charterers to be possible on the given voyage. The owners indignantly refute this contention, and calculations are exchanged.
The charterers have taken the deadweight all told (dwat) on summer marks (adjusting if for other zones) from the charter-party and have derived the deadweight cargo capacity (dwcc) for the voyage by deducting
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