AVOIDING GROSS MISTAKES WITH SHIP TONNAGES

By DAVID HUGHES
Business Times - 21 Jan 2004

IF I could have US$100 for every news report about the new Queen Mary 2 'weighing
150,000 gross tonnes', or having a 'gross tonnage of 150,000 tonnes', that I have had
to read in the past week or two I could probably afford a very pleasant holiday on that
marvellous vessel.

To be fair, ships' tonnages and descriptions of size are the source of endless confusion
and it is not surprising the general press almost always gets it wrong.
More worrying is the trend for industry statements to increasingly refer to 'gross
tonnes'. That suggests that some of our own people simply do not understand how
ships are measured. That in turn implies a lack of basic knowledge about ships, and
that has got to be bad news for an industry that - . . . er, runs ships.
The standard international measurement of a ship's size under the Universal Tonnage
Measurement System (UMS), defined by the 1969 Tonnage Regulations, is the Gross
Ton. The 'ton' in gross tonnage is not a measure of weight but of volume (2.78 cu m)
and so must not be written as 'tonne' which is an internationally accepted unit (under
the SI system) referring only to weight.

In fact as I C Clark, author of the London-based Nautical Institute's standard text 'The
Management of Merchant Ship Stability, Trim and Strength' notes, the original
meaning of the word 'ton' was 'barrel' and as such was a measure of volume - 100 cu ft
until most of the world went metric. And the original spelling was actually 'tun'.

Back in thirteenth century England the king's tax collectors counted how many tuns of
wine were imported and levied a tax, called tonnage. That later became the standard
measure of a ship's volume, long before people got seriously interested in the weight
of ships and cargoes.
Gross tonnage is used by ship registers and P&I clubs to express ship size while the
related Net Tonnage (also 'tons' - not 'tonnes') is the main way of calculating port and
similar charges.

But, and this is where things start getting complicated, volume is only a useful guide
for certain types of vessel - especially conventional cargo ships and passenger ships.
The lifting capacity of a ship is the most relevant way of defining the size of much of
the commercial fleet. So Deadweight Tonnage (dwt), in tonnes, is the best way of
describing the size of a tanker or bulk carrier. Broadly speaking it is the weight of
cargo, bunkers and stores. A bunker barge might be 1,000 dwt. A VLCC (very large
crude carrier) could be about 300,000 dwt.

The actual weight of the ship, or Displacement Tonnage (in tonnes) is not used all that
much in commercial shipping. It is only really ships for scrap that, as lumps of old
steel priced by the tonne, are referred to by weight Light Displacement Tonnage
(ldt). Warships, however, are normally described in terms of their weight - Standard
Displacement Tonnage, in tonnes.
So far, so good? The only problem with all the tonnages just mentioned is that
industry practice is to measure a large portion of the world's fleet in entirely different
ways. Easily the most idiosyncratic is the TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit) which
was thought up by the late Richard Gibney 35 years ago. The TEU must stand as an
all-time example of a quirky but practical measure absolutely designed to infuriate the
metric-, or even tidy-, minded.
By all accounts Mr Gibney, shipping journalist and pioneer containerization
enthusiast, was a rather difficult individual with a perverse sense of humour. The TEU
has turned out to be quite some wind up and apparently is entirely in keeping with his
character. Just as the mariner was being weaned off his ancient fathoms and cables,
Mr Gibney gave us a measure which is the
antithesis of the metric system.

Those logical souls among us who delighted in the passing of a measurement system
based on the length of a long-dead English king's foot are not easily amused by the
TEU.
But the TEU has proved ubiquitous - because it works and is easily understood.
Everybody in container shipping talks about the size of vessels in terms of their
theoretical capacity to carry twenty foot-long boxes. A feeder ship could be 500 TEUs
or 1,000 TEUs, a latest generation super-post-panamax ship about 8,000 TEUs.

No doubt Mr Gibney would probably have been pleased to know that his TEU would
perpetuate an illogical standard container size which could now be no more easily
changed than the gauges of the world's railway lines (another pre-metric illogicality).

Gas carriers too are best described in terms of their cargo capacity, but in this case it is
the politically correct cubic metre that is used. Car carriers meanwhile can only really
be described in terms of their car capacity or in lane metres. There is one more widely
accepted oddity lurking out there. Refrigerated cargo ships are still generally
described in cu ft of cargo capacity.
You may well, though, come across other gems. When I first went to sea, cargoes
came in 'long tons' or 'short tons'. And there's always the Compensated Gross Ton
(another unit devised by Mr Gibney and still much appreciated by shipbuilding
industry analysts).

For the majority of readers I have probably carried out an exercise in teaching my
grandmother to suck eggs. Apologies to them, but perhaps they could save this page
and brandish it at the nautically challenged the next time 'gross tonnes' rears its ugly
head.

Copyright 2004 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd.