Maritime Transportation And Shipping Talk

Over on Maritime Community there was an article about Ship Spares In Transit and what the term means. Here in Canada when a Ship Spares In Transit shipment arrives it is preceded with a pre-notice of arrival containing way bill number, Customs invoice (value for customs), detailed list of all content in shipment including weight. This notice is usually sent from the shipper. Once receiver or receiver agent receives this note they can pre-arrange for custom clearing and forwarding of spares to the ship. The process entails completing various Customs documents that will be processed by Customs once the shipment arrive. In order to complete a process like this the custom broker and carrier has to be defined as a bonded operator. This again means that there is a Bond Insurance filed with the Customs (Federal Government). This Bond is of a value large enough to cover the value of shipments that they would be processing with Customs. There are a variety of different Bonds available and the value can also be very large. It all depends on what the operator would have arranged for and also what the volume of his bond would be. An operator/broker would most likely have sufficient coverage for the volume of business they are processing.
When all these documents are processed and no discrepancy is detected, the actual physical movement of the shipment usually goes rather quickly. In this case we are talking about “Ship Spares In Transit” as it was not to be cleared for payment of duty and taxes. To clear a shipment for and levy duty and taxes would be a whole other process and we will not cover that here.