Entry & progression
At some point a vessel will offer you a line, and you will have perhaps ninety seconds to decide what that line is. Towage or salvage. The answer is worth a great deal of money, and the decision is yours alone.
Salvage — what it is
Salvage is a voluntary service rendered to a vessel in danger, which produces a useful result. All three elements must be present. There is no salvage without danger, and no reward without success — the principle is no cure, no pay.
The reward is assessed against a list of criteria under the Salvage Convention 1989: the value of the vessel and property saved, the skill and efforts of the salvors, the measure of success, the nature and degree of the danger, the time used, the risks run, and the promptness of the services. The reward can never exceed the value of the property saved.
The environmental exception, and SCOPIC
No cure, no pay had a perverse consequence: a salvor faced with a stricken tanker that would probably be a total loss had no incentive to attend at all. Article 14 of the Convention created special compensation — a salvor who prevents or minimises environmental damage may recover expenses even where there is no cure. SCOPIC is the contractual clause used with Lloyd's Open Form to make that mechanism workable, with an agreed tariff and a Special Casualty Representative appointed by the underwriters.
Lloyd's Open Form
- LOF is a one-page contract. No cure, no pay. The reward is fixed later by arbitration in London.
- It is designed to be signed in the dark, on a heaving deck, in ninety seconds. That is its entire purpose.
- Signing LOF does not fix a price and does not hand over your ship. You remain in command.
- The master has authority to conclude a salvage contract on behalf of the shipowner. You do not need to telephone anyone. In practice — telephone anyway if you have thirty seconds to spare, and then decide.
WARNING — Towage or salvage — do not find out afterwards A friendly fishing boat offering to pull you off a sandbank in flat calm on a rising tide, for an agreed sum, is towage. The same boat, same sandbank, in a rising gale on a falling tide, with your hull working, is rendering a salvage service — and a claim will follow. Agree, out loud and in writing if you possibly can, what the service is before you take the line. Silence is not neutral. It is a claim waiting to be quantified.
General average
A general average act is an extraordinary sacrifice or expenditure, intentionally and reasonably made, for the common safety, to preserve the property involved in a common maritime adventure from peril. Jettison, beaching to save the hull, salvage costs, a port of refuge and its costs. The loss is then shared rateably among the interests saved — hull, cargo, freight — as adjusted by an average adjuster under the York-Antwerp Rules.
The three tests are: the act must be extraordinary; it must be intentional and reasonable; and it must be for the common safety in the face of peril. An engine that fails is not a GA act. Deliberately grounding to prevent a sinking is.
On a yacht, general average is thinner but not absent. There is no cargo — that is the definition — so the contributing interests are essentially the hull and the bunkers, and any freight or charter hire at risk. The arithmetic changes; the principle does not, and a GA declaration on a superyacht after a salvage service is entirely routine.
The master's authority
Where the ISM Code applies, the company must state in writing that the master has overriding authority and responsibility to make decisions with respect to safety and pollution prevention, and to request the company's assistance as may be necessary. That is not a courtesy. It is the structural guarantee that no commercial voice on the other end of a satellite phone can overrule the person standing on the bridge.
It also cuts the other way. If the authority is yours, so is the decision — and so is the responsibility for making it, on time, on the information available. Nobody is coming.