All Articles

A tug is assisting a loaded barge into a berth. The tug’s master misjudges the approach, the barge strikes the dock, and there is damage to the barge, the dock, and the cargo. Who pays depends almost entirely on two things. Which contract form governs, and which side of the Atlantic you are on. International towage has settled on a risk allocation that the United States Supreme Court declared void as a matter of public policy in 1955 and has never retreated from. That decisio

A counterparty screens clean. The name returns no hits on the Specially Designated Nationals list, the company is registered in a jurisdiction with no sanctions program against it, and the vessel it owns has never appeared on a designation notice. None of that tells you the company is not sanctioned. Under the ownership rules applied by the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, an entity can be subject to an asset freeze without ever being named, purely b

On August 21 and August 24, a specialized team of Coast Guard law enforcement officers, a vessel inspector, Coast Guard cyber protection personnel, and FBI cyber operators boarded two foreign-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. The joint statement said the boardings were designed to ensure the integrity of each vessel's operational and information technology systems following indications that their networks had been compromised by foreign cyber actors. One of the vesse

The bill of lading is the most important document in international trade and one of the few that does three unrelated jobs at once. It is a receipt for goods, evidence of the contract of carriage, and a document of title that can be bought, sold, and pledged while the cargo is still at sea. Most of the disputes that arise around it come from confusing those functions or from treating the third one as a formality. A shipper who focuses on the description of goods, a carrier wh

In October 2006, the capesize bulk carrier Ocean Victory was discharging iron ore at Kashima in Japan when weather deteriorated. A long swell combined with a northwesterly gale reaching Force 9 on the Beaufort scale. The master decided to leave the berth, lost control of the vessel in the Kashima fairway, and she was driven onto the breakwater and became a total loss. The vessel's hull insurers paid, took an assignment of the owners' and demise charterer's rights, and brought

A hoist motor on a ship-to-shore crane burns out. A compressor in a refrigerated warehouse seizes on a Friday night. A transformer feeding a bulk conveyor system arcs and fails. In each case the equipment is destroyed, the operation stops, and the commercial property policy does not respond. Not because of a limit, a deductible, or a coverage dispute, but because the property form excludes the cause of loss by design. Equipment breakdown coverage fills that gap. It is inexpen

Most maritime companies in the United States are privately held. Family towing operations, regional barge lines, terminal companies, shipyards, forwarders, and single-vessel owners. No public shareholders, no securities filings, and frequently no formal board beyond the people who own the business. The common assumption in that setting is that directors and officers liability insurance is something public companies buy to satisfy investors. It is not. Private company leadersh

For a terminal operator, warehouse, or forwarder, revenue can stop overnight while costs carry on. Rent, equipment leases, payroll, and financing do not pause because a fire closed your facility or a windstorm took the roof off. Business interruption coverage exists to bridge exactly that gap, and for an operation with high fixed costs it is frequently the difference between a difficult year and a closed business. It is also the coverage most often bought at the base level an

A voyage charter gives the charterer a fixed period to load and discharge. Use less and the owner may owe despatch. Use more and the charterer owes demurrage. Between those two outcomes sits a calculation that is arithmetically simple and legally treacherous, and most disputes turn on which hours counted rather than on how the addition was done. The Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013 define laytime as the period of time agreed between the parties during which the ow

A tank barge on the Lower Mississippi carrying 30,000 barrels of product is, in insurance terms, a modest asset. The hull value is a fraction of a deepsea tanker. The crew is small. The trade is domestic and familiar. The pollution exposure attached to it is not modest, it is not limited to the value of the barge, and under a set of circumstances that are considerably easier to trigger than most operators assume, it is not limited at all. This article covers how the Oil Pollu

Somewhere in your hull policy there is a figure. It was probably set when the vessel was acquired, adjusted once or twice since, and has not been examined closely in years. That number is not an administrative detail. It determines what you are paid if the vessel is lost, whether a casualty counts as a total loss at all, whether you are forced to repair a boat that is not worth repairing, and how much cover you can lawfully buy elsewhere. It is one of the few genuinely strate

A container ship catches fire in the Arabian Sea. Your cargo is in a hold that never burned, on a vessel you do not own, in a casualty you had nothing to do with. Weeks later you receive a demand for 54 percent of the value of your goods before anyone will release them. That is not a mistake and it is not extortion. It is general average, one of the oldest surviving principles in commercial law, and the demand is enforceable. For cargo interests it is the single most surprisi

Every towing vessel subject to Subchapter M holds a Certificate of Inspection, and every COI was obtained through one of two routes. The Coast Guard issues the certificate either way. What differs is who verifies compliance, how often, and on whose schedule. Operators frequently treat this as a procedural detail settled once at the start of the phase-in and never revisited. It is not. The choice determines your annual cost structure, your exposure to scheduling risk, the amou

[Photo by Bayu Tiyo on Unsplash] Ask a bunker buyer who they bought their last stem from and you will usually get a company name. Ask what that company's role was in the transaction and the answer is less certain than it should be. The confusion is widespread and it is not the buyer's fault. The three roles in marine fuel supply are genuinely distinct in law and in risk, but the market presents them inconsistently, some companies perform more than one, and the commercial conv

Fuel is sold by mass and, for most of the industry's history, delivered by volume. That single mismatch is the origin of nearly every quantity dispute in bunkering, and it is the gap that decades of tradecraft have been built to exploit. The stakes have risen with the price. With VLSFO running past $910 per metric ton in the spring of 2026, a two percent discrepancy on a mid-sized stem costs upward of $15,000 before the vessel has left the berth. Service providers who conduct

Most operators treat renewal as a price negotiation. The broker goes to market, quotes come back, and the conversation is about which number is lowest and whether last year's terms can be held. That framing misses where the leverage sits. By the time quotes are being compared, the underwriter has already formed a view of the risk, and that view was built from the loss runs, the survey report, and a set of judgments about how the operation is run. For a small fleet, those judg

Ten years after it took effect, Subchapter M is no longer a new regulation. It is the operating framework for the entire U.S. towing industry, and the phase-in that occupied everyone's attention between 2016 and 2022 is long finished. What has replaced it is a renewal cycle, and that cycle is producing a specific set of problems right now for operators who obtained their first Certificate of Inspection early. Requirements that were deferred for five years are coming due, and

In March 2014, OW Bunker listed on the Copenhagen exchange. It was Denmark's third largest company by revenue and the largest marine fuel supplier in the world. Eight months later it was in bankruptcy, thirteen banks were owed $750 million, and shipowners across every major trading region were discovering that they might have to pay for the same bunkers twice. The collapse produced a decade of litigation across multiple jurisdictions, a UK Supreme Court decision that reclassi

There is a version of the shadow fleet story that treats it as somebody else's problem. Sanctioned states move sanctioned oil on ships nobody reputable would touch, Western regulators chase them with designations, and operators running clean tonnage on legitimate trades watch from a safe distance. That version is wrong in a specific and expensive way. The shadow fleet now represents a large enough share of global tanker capacity that legitimate operators share water, anchorag

A deckhand on your towboat and a rigger on your dock can be injured on the same day, doing work that looks broadly similar, and be covered by two entirely different legal systems with different insurance policies behind them. Get the classification wrong and you have an injured employee, a claim your policy does not respond to, and a lawsuit your workers' compensation coverage was never designed to defend. For Gulf Coast operators, this is not an abstract legal question. Harb