Practising Patience When it comes to cargo claims, a bit of time, patience and effort can bear fruit. An incident occurs aboard the bulk carrier your company has chartered to transport a perishable commodity from Port A to Port B. Perhaps a bilge tank ruptures, damaging wheat stowed near the bottom of the hold. Or a hatch cover leaks, thereby contaminating the soy cargo with salt water. Or the vessel’s crane wire snaps, cascading metal fragments into a hold loaded with high-quality organic corn. Upon learning of the damage, your immediate commercial instinct is to demand compensation from the vessel owner. If that fails, your next instinct is to demand security (typically a letter of undertaking (LOU)) from the vessel owners’ P&I Club, which are frequently issued. There are however occasions when the vessel owner and/or its P&I Club turn a deaf ear to a charterer’s reasonable demands for compensation and/or for security, especially if deemed de minimis, and/or if there exists a string of charterparties between the charterer and the head owner, who may be immune to commercial pressure. But from that delay and/or refusal by a head owner or its P&I Club to redress the matter can arise an opportunity, provided patience and prudence prevail. Start with prudence. A charterer presented with a cargo loss must act prudently. Regardless of how the damages will eventually be assessed, it must take reasonable steps to mitigate its losses, even if those mitigation steps result in the charterer incurring costs (known as “incidental damages”). Take the example of the snapped hoisting wire cascading metal shards into the hold stowed with organic corn. In order to successfully prosecute its claim against the head owners, the charterer should mitigate its losses, which may entail sifting the cargo, incurring extra warehouse fees and transporting the damaged corn to the storage facility where the mitigation efforts are to occur, all of which are recoverable, but all of whi