Gencon form - Laytime commencement date omitted from charter - When laytime starts
The printed clauses of the Gencon form do not include any provision as to the commencement of laydays. The present fixture was negotiated very shortly before the ship arrived at the loading port. The fixture recap stated “laydays 22/30 July”. [The arbitrators held that that was clearly intended to mean that laydays were not to commence before 22 July, and that 30 July was the cancelling date.] However, when the charter was drawn up, the provision did not quite appear in that form. In clause 1, the ship was described as “expected ready to load under this charter about 22 July 1980” and clause 6 contained the cancelling date of 30 July.
The ship arrived and tendered NOR at the loading port at 08 00 on 21 July 1980. The owners argued that laytime should commence at 14 00 on the same date on the basis that, not only were they entitled to give notice of readiness at that time, but there was nothing in the charter to prevent laytime starting in accordance with the charter provisions immediately following the giving of notice.
Held , that to make business sense of the parties’ agreement, the date of 22 July had to be read as being the first of the laydays. It is essential that a charter such as this contain a date before which laytime cannot commence, and the arbitrators felt that the drafters of the Gencon form must have considered that no such express provision was required, because the giving of the ship’s eta in clause 1 implied that laytime could not commence before the date in question. Furthermore, looking only at the printed form as completed by the parties, there was ambiguity on this point, which was only compounded by the use of the word “about” in the “expected ready to load” provision, and therefore the arbitrators felt that they were entitled to look at the pre-fixture negotiations.
For the above reasons the arbitrators concluded that laytime could not start before 22 July. However, this did not mean that no valid notice could be given before that date. It was often thought that a notice of readiness could not be given before the commencement of laydays under a charter, but that was incorrect unless there was an express provision to that effect. In the absence of such a provision, a valid notice might be given at any time, but the laytime itself could not commence before the date given in the charter. The result in the present case was that the notice given on 21 July was valid, but laytime could not start before 08 00 on 22 July.作者: May 时间: 2013-5-9 10:08
