Statement of Facts

What the Statement of Facts is

A voyage charter party splits the time risk of port operations between the shipowner and the charterer through the laytime and demurrage framework. Laytime is the free time the charterer is allowed for loading or discharging. Run past it and the charterer pays demurrage; finish inside it and some charters pay the charterer despatch money for the time saved. Whether the operation ran five hours long or seventy-two hours long is a question of fact, and the Statement of Facts is the document that settles it.

The SoF is signed at the end of cargo operations, when the master and the agent agree a chronological reconstruction of the call. Each event gets one line. The vessel reached the pilot station at 03:14 Tuesday; the Notice of Readiness was tendered at 03:30; the pilot boarded at 04:42; the vessel was all fast at 06:55; free pratique was granted at 07:20; cargo commenced at 09:30; rain stopped work from 14:20 to 17:05; cargo completed at 18:40 Wednesday; hoses were disconnected at 19:15; the vessel sailed at 21:25. From those lines the laytime accountants on each side build the voyage charter party laytime statement.

Why the SoF is the evidentiary record

Without an agreed SoF, the laytime calculation rests on two one-sided accounts, the master’s deck log and the agent’s port log, which routinely disagree on the small numbers. The small numbers carry the money. A thirty-minute difference on commencement of loading can move several thousand dollars of demurrage on a Capesize fixture where the rate is USD 35,000 per day. The SoF closes that gap by putting both signatures on one agreed chronology, so the argument narrows to interpretation of the charter rather than a fight over what the clock read.

That evidential role explains why the document is treated with more care than its plain layout suggests. Owners’ claims teams, charterers’ port captains, P&I correspondents, and, when a claim goes the distance, arbitrators and commercial judges all read the same SoF to reconstruct the call. A clean, joint, fully reasoned SoF settles most laytime questions before they harden into disputes. A thin or contested one keeps them open.

Who the agent is, and why independence matters

The second signature on the SoF is the port agent’s, and which side appointed the agent colors how the master treats the record. Under many voyage charters the charterer nominates the load or discharge agent, so that agent’s port log tends to reflect the charterer’s interest on a contested time. Some fixtures give the owner the right to appoint a protective agent alongside the charterer’s agent, precisely so the owner has a representative watching commencement, stoppages and completion in real time. Where the owner has no agent of its own, the master is the owner’s only eyes on the berth, which raises the stakes on the deck log and on careful SoF reconciliation.

None of this makes the charterer’s agent an adversary. A competent agent records the facts straight, because a padded SoF that collapses in arbitration costs the agent its reputation with owners it may serve on the next fixture. The point is structural rather than personal: the master should read every entry knowing who drafted it and whose interest it might, without any bad faith, quietly favor. That is another reason the 1975 BIMCO and FONASBA standardization matters. A common form with fixed fields for the same events leaves less room for one side to frame the chronology, and it gives the master a template to check the agent’s draft against line by line.

Distinction from related port documents

The SoF sits among several time-related port records and is often confused with them. Each has a distinct job.

The Notice of Readiness

The Notice of Readiness is a single act of communication: the master’s notification that the vessel has arrived at the agreed destination and is ready to load or discharge. Its valid tender can start laytime. The SoF is not that notice; it is the running record that captures the NOR tender as one timestamped entry among many. A defective NOR delays commencement, and the delay shows up on the used side of the account that the SoF feeds. The two documents work together, but the NOR starts the clock and the SoF logs it.

The time sheet

The time sheet is the calculation, not the record. It takes the SoF chronology, applies the charter’s Sundays and holidays treatment, the weather exceptions, the shifting rules and the breakdown allocation, and produces time used, time allowed, and the demurrage or despatch balance. BIMCO publishes a Standard Time Sheet (short form) as the companion to the Statement of Facts for exactly this step. In some tanker trades the same physical document blends the two, but the distinction stands: the SoF says what happened, the time sheet says what it costs.

The deck log and the port log

The deck log is the master’s continuous record of vessel events, kept under SOLAS Chapter V regulation 28 on records of navigational activities. The port log is the agent’s internal record of port events. Both are unilateral. The SoF aggregates the time-relevant entries from each side and carries both signatures, so it is the bilateral synthesis, not a third independent measurement. When an SoF entry is challenged, the deck log and the port log are the first documents pulled to test it.

The mate’s receipt

The mate’s receipt is the vessel’s acknowledgement of the cargo taken on board, with its condition and quantity, and it is the basis on which the bill of lading is later issued. It concerns cargo custody and description, not the timing of operations. It can share a completion timestamp with the SoF, but the two answer different questions: the mate’s receipt asks what and how much was loaded, the SoF asks when each thing happened.

Other time records

Several supporting records feed or sit beside the SoF. The pumping log on a tanker is a high-resolution trace of discharge rates, manifold pressures and vacuum tests, appended to the SoF and used to test the pumping warranty. The cargo tally sheet counts bagged or break-bulk units for quantity reconciliation, not for laytime. The NOR ledger lists every notice tendered with its timestamp and any rejection note. Each is narrower than the SoF, and each can be produced to corroborate an SoF entry that the other side disputes.

The Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013

The standard meanings of the events an SoF records come from the Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013, produced jointly by BIMCO, the Comite Maritime International, FONASBA and the Baltic Exchange, and published in 2013 to replace the 1993 Voyage Charter Party Laytime Interpretation Rules. The definitions bind only when a charter party expressly incorporates them, which many modern fixtures now do.

When the charter incorporates the 2013 definitions, terms such as commenced loading, shifting, weather working day, whether in berth or not, and free pratique carry the exact meanings set out there. That precision is what makes an SoF hard to argue with: both sides mean the same thing by commencement, by a weather stoppage, by an excepted period. Where the definitions are not incorporated, the parties fall back on older wording, on the case law of the governing law, or on local port custom that varies berth to berth. The 2013 definitions do not change what the master writes on the SoF; they fix what those words mean when the time sheet gives them effect.

Composition of the Statement of Facts

Vessel and voyage particulars

Every SoF opens by identifying the vessel, the voyage and the parties, so the record can be matched to the right charter weeks or months later:

• Vessel name, IMO number and flag.
• Port of loading or discharge, berth number, and anchorage.
• Charterer, shipper or receiver, and agent.
• Charter party date and type, such as GENCON 2022 , ASBATANKVOY or SHELLVOY 6.
• Cargo description and quantity, for example 82,000 mt iron ore fines or 70,000 mt gasoil.
• Voyage number for the owner’s records.

The chronological event log

The body is a timestamped list of events. A dry-bulk SoF for a Panamax loading iron ore might read:

A tanker log adds hose connection, manifold pressure tests, line displacement, sample drawing, custody-transfer survey, ullage and temperature readings, and the pumping-log entries. Each event is timestamped to the minute, and on an electronic SoF often to the second. The time zone is port local time, with the offset stated so an international charter cannot be misread.

Signatures and stamps

The SoF is signed on each page, or on a single signature page if it is short, by the master, or the chief officer for the vessel, and by the charterer’s appointed agent. In some ports the terminal representative signs too, particularly for cargoes with detailed handover procedures such as LNG, LPG, ammonia or parcel chemicals. Surveyors sign where either side appoints them, and a port authority stamp is required in some jurisdictions.

The vessel’s stamp goes next to the master’s signature; the agent’s stamp goes next to the agent’s. Stamps cut the scope for a later argument about which official actually tendered or received the document, which is why a missing stamp is itself a point a challenger will raise.

Standard forms

BIMCO Standard Statement of Facts (short form)

The Standard Statement of Facts (short form) is the general-purpose SoF for dry-bulk and break-bulk trades. It was first published in 1975 and is recommended by BIMCO and FONASBA. The form carries boxes for the vessel and voyage particulars, dated and timed lines for the standard arrival and cargo events, remarks space for stoppages with their reasons, and a signature block. Its guidance notes instruct users to date entries year-month-day and to state the reason for every stoppage in the remarks column.

BIMCO offers it through the SmartCon editing system, and it pairs with the Standard Time Sheet (short form), which records the laytime calculation derived from the SoF entries. Note there is no BIMCO SoF carrying a “2014” designation; the recommended general form is the short-form Standard Statement of Facts.

BIMCO Standard Statement of Facts (Oil and Chemical Tank Vessels)

For tankers, BIMCO and FONASBA publish the Standard Statement of Facts (Oil and Chemical Tank Vessels) short form, also issued in 1975. It captures the tanker-specific chronology: NOR tender, hose connection, commencement and completion of cargo, pumping times, and the reasons for any delays. Its entries feed the same laytime and demurrage arithmetic, but the pumping detail matters because a tanker charter’s pumping warranty interacts with the account.

ASBATANKVOY and SHELLVOY time records

The tanker voyage charter forms carry their own time records rather than relying on a separate BIMCO SoF:

• ASBATANKVOY, the tanker voyage charter associated with the Association of Ship Brokers and Agents, is common in Atlantic Basin trades and is worked with a statement of facts and time sheet that record NOR, cargo timings and pumping performance.
• SHELLVOY 6, Shell’s voyage charter form, sets out its own laytime and time-counting mechanism, so the time record built at each port converts directly into laytime used.
• BPVOY and ExxonMobil VOY2005 are the equivalent oil-major forms, each with its own time-counting terms.

Tanker time records are drafted tighter than dry-bulk ones because the pumping warranty, typically 100 psi sustained at the manifold or discharge within 24 hours, whichever comes first, interacts with laytime. Time lost to the vessel’s own pumping under-performance falls to the owner’s account whether or not laytime is exhausted, so the SoF and pumping log must show discharge rate against pressure throughout.

Port and terminal-specific forms

Many ports and terminals issue their own SoF templates that supplement the contractual form. Large Brazilian iron ore terminals and Australian coal terminals use operator templates with weather and equipment-availability columns and, at the coal ports, vessel-queue and channel-availability records. Refinery jetties often use a terminal SoF listing valve line-up steps that no generic charter form carries.

Where a port form differs from the contractual form, the master should sign both, the port form for the terminal’s records and the contractual form for charter accounting, and check that the two carry consistent times. An inconsistency between a terminal SoF and the charter SoF is a gift to whichever side the difference favors.

Signing protocols and protests

Joint signing

The strongest SoF is jointly drafted and signed. The master and the agent sit down at the end of cargo operations, reconcile their logs, agree each entry, and sign without reservation. A jointly signed SoF carries the most evidential weight in any later dispute, because neither side can later say it did not agree the figures.

Joint signing assumes agreement on every line, and in practice at least one line is usually contested. The recurring flashpoints are the time of NOR acceptance against the tender time, the effective time of free pratique, the start and end of each suspension, and the split between completion of cargo and completion of documents. These are resolved at the table where possible; where they cannot be, a protest is recorded rather than papered over.

Signing “for receipt only”

If the master receives an agent-prepared SoF and disagrees with one or more entries, the master can sign ‘for receipt only’. The notation confirms the master received and acknowledges the document without endorsing its content. The signature still proves the SoF was tendered, but it does not stop the owner from challenging the contested entries later. The agent’s mirror move is to sign the master’s draft subject to the charterer’s approval, or with a similar reservation.

Letters of protest

A letter of protest is a separate one-page document recording a specific objection. It names the addressee, the vessel, the fact objected to, the objection itself, and a demand for reply, over a signature and stamp. Letters of protest are routinely tendered for excessive waiting at anchorage, loading or discharge rates below the charter warranty, off-spec or contaminated cargo at loading, terminal restrictions that slow pumping, and delays caused by shore equipment rather than the vessel. The protest attaches to the SoF and travels with it to the claims department, where it backs the laytime calculation against the other side’s rebuttal.

Refusal to sign

Refusing to sign is the last resort. It signals fundamental disagreement and forces the agent to record on the port log that the master refused. It is reserved for an SoF so wrong that even ‘for receipt only’ is inadequate: a fabricated suspension, a backdated NOR entry, a deleted rain stoppage. The cost of refusal is that laytime has to be rebuilt from the deck log alone, a one-sided record with weaker weight. For that reason most masters sign ‘for receipt only’ with a strong protest attached rather than refuse outright. The agent has the same options in reverse and can decline to sign the master’s draft when the agent disputes it.

From the SoF to the laytime statement

Building the laytime statement

The SoF entries feed the laytime statement, the working that converts events into laytime used:

1. Fix commencement of laytime from the NOR tender time plus any contractual notice period or turn time.
2. Fix completion of laytime from the time cargo finished, the last lift clear of the dock or the manifold valves shut and pressure at zero.
3. From the span between commencement and completion, subtract the excepted periods the charter allows: Sundays and holidays under a SHEX clause, weather, shifting, surveys, and owner-side faults.
4. The remainder is laytime used.
5. Compare it with laytime allowed. If used exceeds allowed, the excess is demurrage time; if used is less, the saving may earn despatch.

The arithmetic is mechanical. The contested step is the classification of each SoF entry: excepted or counted, in full or pro rata, owner’s account or charterer’s account. That is where the SoF’s precision earns its keep, because an entry that records only “loading suspended” without a cause cannot be classified at all.

A worked contested-suspension example

Take the rain stop from the event log: loading suspended at 14:20, resumed at 17:05, an interruption of 2 hours 45 minutes. On a SHEX weather-working-day charter that period is excepted, so it comes out of laytime used. The demurrage rate is USD 30,000 per day. Converted to a daily figure the excepted time is worth:

So roughly USD 3,438 turns on whether that single suspension is credited. Two questions decide it, and both are answered from the SoF and its attachments. First, is the stoppage agreed as weather? The master should append the port weather-station log or a meteorological record, because some charters require the rain to be heavy enough to stop work, not a passing drizzle. Second, does the charter count time on a weather working day, so weather that halts cargo removes a proportionate slice of the day, or is it an unconditional laytime clause where the time counts regardless? The SoF entry has to be precise enough to support either calculation; the time sheet then applies the charter’s rule. If the SoF had recorded only “suspended, 14:20 to 17:05” with no cause, the charterer could argue the exclusion was never weather at all.

SHINC, SHEX and the weather working day

Two abbreviations govern how much of the SoF chronology counts. SHINC, Sundays and Holidays Included, runs laytime straight through weekends and holidays. SHEX, Sundays and Holidays Excepted, takes those days out of laytime. They are trade shorthand rather than numbered entries in the 2013 definitions, which instead define the underlying ideas the shorthand invokes. The weather working day is one of those defined ideas: a day, or part of a day, on which work would proceed if the weather allowed, counted only to the extent weather permits. The definition prorates the exclusion by the ratio the interruption bears to the working period, so a four-hour rain stop inside a notional eight-hour working stretch removes a fraction of the day, not the whole of it. The charter picks the regime; the SoF supplies the raw times; the time sheet applies the rule.

A worked end-to-end laytime statement

Run the dry-bulk event log above through a full statement to see how the classification decides the money. Say the charter allows 24 hours of laytime for the parcel, is SHEX on a weather-working-day basis, and carries a demurrage rate of USD 30,000 per day. Laytime commences at 09:30 Tuesday, the moment loading began after the notice period, and cargo completes at 18:40 Wednesday.

• Gross time on berth, 09:30 Tuesday to 18:40 Wednesday: 33 h 10 m.
• Rain stoppage, 14:20 to 17:05: weather, excepted, so deduct 2 h 45 m.
• Shiploader breakdown, 22:00 to 04:30: shore-side, the charterer’s account, so it counts as laytime used, deduct nothing.

Laytime used is $33\text{ h }10\text{ m} - 2\text{ h }45\text{ m} = 30\text{ h }25\text{ m}$. Against 24 hours allowed the vessel is on demurrage for the excess:

So about USD 8,021 of demurrage flows from this call. The single most consequential decision is the treatment of the 6 h 30 m breakdown. Classify it as a shore fault on the charterer’s account and it counts, as above. Argue it as a vessel-side fault, an owner’s-account exclusion, and laytime used falls to 23 h 55 m, inside the allowance, and the demurrage disappears while a small despatch may arise instead. The whole swing rests on the SoF note next to the 22:00 entry, which is why “shiploader breakdown” is worth more than “operations suspended”.

Recurring disputes rooted in SoF entries

NOR tender against NOR acceptance

A frequent argument is whether laytime starts from the master’s NOR tender or from the charterer’s acceptance, which can follow hours later. The charter should say which; where it is silent, tender is the usual default for a valid notice. The SoF should record both times with care, and the point bites hardest with out-of-hours tenders, where an email served at 02:00 may be treated as received the next working morning. The gap between the two timestamps is exactly what a demurrage argument turns on, so both belong on the record.

Free pratique against cargo readiness

Free pratique is the port health authority’s clearance for the vessel to work with shore. In some ports it is granted by radio on a clean bill of health; in others it needs a physical inspection. Cargo cannot start before pratique is granted, so the SoF should record the time of grant, not the time the master requested it. Unless the charter waives pratique as a formality, the span between NOR tender and pratique is usually owner’s account, which is another reason the grant time has to be exact on the record.

Shifting

Shifting is the move of the vessel from one berth to another, or from anchorage to berth. Shifting time is normally excluded from laytime when it is at the charterer’s request, for instance a move from a broken loader at berth 7 to berth 9. It is counted when it serves the vessel’s own purposes, such as bunkering. The SoF should record the time of unmooring at the first berth, the time all fast at the second, and a brief reason, because the dispute turns on whether the move was charterer-driven or vessel-driven.

Equipment breakdown

Breakdowns fall on the vessel, ship’s gear or ship’s pumps, or on shore, the loader, conveyor or terminal pumps. For each, the SoF should record the time work stopped, the side responsible, the time work resumed, and a short note on the fault, such as “shiploader belt jammed” or “no. 3 cargo pump tripped on overload”. Vessel-side breakdowns are normally owner’s account; shore-side breakdowns are normally charterer’s account. Mixed-cause events, where a vessel pump and a terminal valve interact, generate the most argument, and the SoF note is the first thing read to untangle them.

Documents on board

Some charters require documents such as bills of lading and mate’s receipts to be signed and delivered to the master before laytime ends. If the charterer’s office delays them, a documents-on-board clause may put the extra time on the charterer’s account. The SoF should record completion of cargo separately from documents on board, so the time sheet can calculate the account either way.

The electronic Statement of Facts (eSoF)

Why an electronic record

The paper or PDF SoF is signed at the end of each call, scanned, emailed and filed. The format makes laytime accounting slow: every entry is re-keyed by the owner’s claims team into the time sheet, then each is classified by hand against the charter rules. Transcription errors creep in at the re-keying step. The electronic Statement of Facts (eSoF) removes that step by exchanging the port events as structured data, XML, JSON or EDI, that the owner’s system ingests directly, so the calculation runs against machine-readable timestamps.

The standards and regulatory setting

No single mandatory format governs the commercial eSoF, but the regulatory push toward electronic port data is settled. Under the IMO Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic (FAL), electronic data interchange for ship clearance has been mandatory since April 2019. The 2022 amendments to the FAL Convention annex, adopted as resolution FAL.14(46), entered into force on 1 January 2024 and make the Maritime Single Window mandatory: public authorities must maintain a single electronic portal for the information required on a ship’s arrival, stay and departure, with data submitted once and reused.

To keep these systems interoperable, IMO maintains the IMO Compendium on Facilitation and Electronic Business, a data set and reference model developed with ISO, UNECE and the WCO so that different parties’ systems share definitions and formats. In 2023 the FAL Committee approved the Guidelines for harmonized communication and electronic exchange of operational data for port calls (FAL.5/Circ.52), which support just-in-time arrival by standardizing the operational data ships and ports exchange. These instruments govern the regulatory port-call data, not the commercial laytime SoF directly, but they set the direction the SoF is moving in.

The hybrid reality

Because no universal commercial eSoF standard is mandated, the working reality is a hybrid. Structured data carries the bulk of the timed events, while a signed PDF still carries the master’s and agent’s signatures for the contractual record. Full automation needs the agent and the owner to agree a single format in advance, which is easier inside a single operator’s platform than across an open market. A vessel calling at a large terminal often receives both a data feed and a PDF: the master signs the PDF for the charter file, and the data runs in parallel for the claims and analytics systems. Any figure quoted for eSoF market penetration should be treated with care, since no authoritative body publishes one.

Evidential weight in a dispute

An SoF is not a contract and it does not fix liability, but it shapes how a laytime dispute runs. A jointly signed SoF is treated as a strong admission by both parties of the facts it records, and a party trying to depart from it carries the burden of showing the record is wrong. That is why claims teams push for full joint signing: it narrows the later argument to the meaning of the charter, not the reading of the clock. When arbitration or a commercial court has to decide a demurrage claim, the SoF is usually the first document read and the last one relied on.

A signature under reservation changes the picture. Signing ‘for receipt only’, or with a protest attached, tells the tribunal that the signer accepted the document was tendered but disputed its content, so the contested lines are open to challenge on other evidence. An SoF with no reservation and no protest is harder to unpick, because the challenger has to explain why it signed a record it now says is false. Letters of protest carry weight here in proportion to how specific and how contemporaneous they are: a protest tendered at 14:30 naming the exact stoppage beats a general complaint raised weeks later in correspondence.

The SoF also interacts with the claim documents package. A demurrage or despatch claim is normally submitted with the SoF, the NOR, deck-log extracts, the pumping log on a tanker, weather records, and any letters of protest, so the arithmetic can be traced back to primary evidence. Where the charter sets a documented time bar, commonly 90 days from completion of discharge, the whole package must be complete and in time, and a claim missing the SoF or a supporting log can be rejected as unproven or time-barred regardless of merit. The SoF is the spine of that package; the rest of the documents hang off it.

Multi-port voyages and the per-port SoF

A voyage that calls at two load ports, or a load port and several discharge ports, produces an SoF at each call. The document is a port-level record, signed where and when the events happen, by whoever is master and agent at that berth. There is no single voyage-wide SoF, so a Baltic-round grain fixture loading at two ports and discharging at three yields five separate statements, each with its own chronology, signatures and protests.

How those per-port records combine depends on the charter’s laytime structure, not on the SoF. Under split, non-reversible laytime each port is calculated on its own SoF and the results are netted afterward. Under reversible laytime the load and discharge allowances are pooled, but the used figure at each port is still computed from that port’s own SoF and its own exceptions before the totals are added. The master at the load port has no reason to think about reversibility when signing; the reversibility convention lives in the time sheet the claims department builds downstream. A clean SoF at every call protects both sides whatever laytime basis governs the voyage.

The per-port structure raises a practical risk worth naming. A weak or contested SoF at one port can undermine the account for the whole voyage on a reversible charter, because a bad notice or an unproven stoppage there flows into the pooled total and can erase despatch the charterer earned by a brisk operation at another port. Masters should tender clean notices and reconcile the SoF carefully at every berth on a reversible voyage, since the financial reach of an error at one port is wider than the port itself.

What weakens an SoF

Certain habits turn a strong record into a contestable one. An entry that logs a time but not a cause, “suspended 22:00, resumed 04:30”, cannot be classified and invites the other side to allocate it favorably. A stoppage recorded without supporting evidence, a rain stop with no weather record or a breakdown with no fault note, is easy to attack. A gap between the terminal’s own SoF and the charter SoF hands the difference to whichever party it suits. And an SoF signed without a stamp, or by an official whose authority is later questioned, opens a preliminary argument before the substance is even reached. The remedy in each case is the same: log the time, log the cause, attach the corroborating record, and reconcile the terminal and charter forms before anyone signs.

Practical guidance for the master

Before arrival

Confirm the charter form and the SoF template required, and check whether the 2013 Laytime Definitions are incorporated. Brief the chief officer on the entries to record from end of sea passage through completion, and prepare the Notice of Readiness for tender in the manner the charter requires.

During the port call

Record events to the minute in the deck log. Note the reason for every suspension, not just its start and end. Capture the weather record during rain stops, keep a running file of letters of protest tendered and received, and on a tanker monitor the pumping rate against manifold pressure throughout, logging any under-performance with its cause.

At completion

Reconcile the deck log against the agent’s port log, negotiate the disputed lines, and record the agreed times on the SoF. Where a line cannot be agreed, sign ‘for receipt only’ and attach a letter of protest. Email the signed SoF and its attachments to the owner without delay, and keep the originals on board until handover.

After departure

File the voyage report with the SoF as an appendix, and be ready to confirm details to the owner within a short window, because the time sheet often needs the master’s confirmation of a contested entry before the claim is submitted inside the charter’s time bar.

Limitations

This article states general voyage-charter practice under the standard forms and the English-law approach that most of them assume. A charter party can define its own laytime terms, adopt or exclude the 2013 Laytime Definitions, prescribe a bespoke SoF or time sheet, and set its own time bar; the specific wording controls over any general rule described here. Governing law matters too, since a charter under another legal system may treat a silent point, such as tender against acceptance, differently. A signed SoF is strong evidence but not conclusive, and it can be tested against the deck log, weather records and protests. Where a live dispute turns on the exact meaning of a clause, the primary sources cited below and qualified advice on the actual contract are the proper references, not a general summary.

Related Articles

• Laytime : the framework the SoF feeds.
• Demurrage : the financial consequence of a laytime overrun.
• Notice of Readiness : the event that starts laytime, logged on the SoF.
• Reversible laytime and despatch : how time saved and lost are pooled and paid.
• Voyage charter party : the contract that houses the laytime and demurrage terms.
• GENCON charter party : the standard dry-cargo voyage form.
• Charter parties overview : where voyage, time and bareboat charters sit relative to one another.