Classifying vessel time: who pays for the day nothing was done

An offshore campaign is invoiced by the day, and every day carries a label: acquisition, transit, weather standby, breakdown. The label does not merely describe what happened. It decides who pays.

It is assigned on board, usually in the evening, by whoever fills in the daily progress report – often at the end of a shift, and almost always by the contractor. It is one of the few decisions on a campaign that are worth tens of thousands of euros and that nobody treats as a decision.

Why the word matters more than the fact

In offshore charters of the SUPPLYTIME family, the off-hire clause lists the causes that suspend hire: deficiency of crew, strike, breakdown of machinery or equipment, damage to the hull or other accidents to the vessel. No hire is payable for the time lost, and the cost stays with the contractor.

Weather is not on that list. A vessel on standby because the sea exceeds its operating limits remains on hire: the client pays the day in full.

The list has a boundary that matters, though: the same clause excludes from breakdown any equipment installed on board by the charterers. If the instrument that stops was brought by the client, its failure does not suspend hire. Who supplies the spread therefore also decides who pays when the spread does not work, and that is a check to run against the contract before running it against the daily report.

Hence the asymmetry that governs everything else. The same vessel, the same sea, the same twenty-four hours in which not a metre of data was acquired: they cost the contractor if the cause was a breakdown, and the client if the cause was weather. Between those two outcomes there is no measurement. There is a word written in a report.

A worked example

The figures below are illustrative – built to show the mechanism, not taken from real projects – but the structure recurs.

A 28-day geophysical campaign. At the end of the works, the summary of the daily progress reports looks like this:

Twenty-five billable days out of twenty-eight. The total adds up, and nobody disputes the three days of breakdown: the contractor declared them itself.

Reviewing the daily reports, however, means cross-checking every weather standby entry against the recorded sea state. Two of the seven days report significant wave heights of 1.4 m and 1.6 m, against a contractual operating limit of Hs ≤ 2.5 m for acquisition. On those two days the vessel did not work because the motion reference unit (MRU), part of the contractor-supplied spread, was producing a degraded output: in that sea – inside the limit, but not calm – the data fell out of specification.

That is not weather standby. It is equipment that does not work, and a sea that merely exposes the fault.

Two days: 8% of the twenty-five that had been invoiced to the client. The duration of the campaign does not change by an hour: what changes is which side of the contract it falls on.

The check that finds it

The check itself is one comparison, provided somebody makes it: take every weather standby entry and compare the sea state recorded over that interval with the operating limit written into the contract.

A standby day declared with the sea well inside the operating limits proves nothing on its own, but it is a question that deserves an answer in writing. If the answers do not come, or come back identical for different days, the classification does not hold.

The check only works if the sea state is recorded alongside the standby entry, from the source the contract named. If the weather data and the daily report live in two documents that nobody cross-checks, the verification is impossible – and that is exactly how almost every campaign is organised.

The objection that will come

A contractor will reply, correctly, that significant wave height alone does not define workability. A 1.4 m sea on the beam with a short period can be worse, for a hull-mounted multibeam transducer, than 2.2 m in a head sea. Relative heading and period matter as much as height, and a limit written as a single number contains neither.

The objection is sound, and it does not dismantle the check: it relocates it. The criterion is not "Hs below the limit, therefore the classification is wrong". The criterion is that the operating limit should be written as an envelope – height, period, relative heading – and that every standby entry should state which condition was exceeded.

A limit expressed as one number does not prevent the dispute: it prepares it, because it leaves each party room to be right.

What to require in the specification

• 01Exhaustive time categories, with no residual entry. Every hour of the campaign must fall into a category defined in the contract. An "other" line is where the days nobody wants to discuss end up.
• 02The sea state alongside every standby entry. Significant wave height, period and relative heading, from the source named in the contract – onboard sensor or hindcast – and not from two different documents depending on who is writing.
• 03The operating limit as an envelope, not as a number. Stating which activity it applies to: acquisition, deployment, recovery and transit do not stop in the same sea.
• 04The grey area defined in advance. Equipment degraded but not broken: is that off-hire, standby, or work paid at a reduced rate? That is where most disputes end up, and it is the point almost no contract addresses.
• 05The daily report countersigned every day. By the client representative on board, within twenty-four hours. A report approved at the end of the campaign is not a verification: it is a reconstruction made when nobody remembers the sea on that particular Tuesday.
• 06The report categories reconciled with the invoice categories. They are almost always two different taxonomies, filled in by different offices. Until somebody lines them up, the classification can change between the sea and the accounts department without anyone seeing it.

The underlying point

Vessel time is the largest single cost item on an offshore campaign, and it is assigned by a word written on board by the party with an interest in writing one rather than another. This is not bad faith: it is a structural conflict of interest, left without a check.

The check costs little – cross-referencing two columns the contract can oblige to exist – and it has to be specified before the vessel sails. After delivery it can still be done, but by then it is no longer a verification: it is a claim, argued with a party that has already issued the invoice.

References

• BIMCO SUPPLYTIME 2017, clause 13(a) – off-hire: deficiency of crew or of the owners' stores, strike of crew, breakdown of machinery and/or equipment, damage to hull or other accidents to the vessel. The same clause excludes equipment installed on board by the charterers under clause 4.
• The Shipowners' Club, comparative review of WINDTIME and SUPPLYTIME – in offshore wind charters the weather risk is often split against the vessel's warranted capability: a different allocation, useful as a point of comparison.

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