Istill remember being overwhelmed the first time I had to calculate the laytime for one of my Saudi boss's six general cargo vessels - be it the "Mofarrij-A", "Mofarrij-B", "Mofarrij-C" "Mofarrij-D", "Mofarrij-F" or "Mofarrij-G" - and his hundreds of other charter vessels.
All those NORs, SOFs, WWDs, SHEX, and SHINC, and the small print in Charter Parties were far more confusing than accountancy's simple dictum that for every debit there must be a credit. It's done with computers now but back then in my Greek salad days (with my apologies to Shakespeare's Cleopatra) in my office overlooking the busy port of Pireaus it was still done the old-fashioned way with paper, pen and hand-written time-sheets. I was often laid up for days with lengthy laytime calculations!
After a desperately placed classified in the ATHENS NEWS, I was lucky to find Bozenna, a former employee of Polfracht, a Polish shipbroking and chartering company in Gdynia (which is part of what my former fellow-countrymen used to call Danzig, but we won't go there now), and with a vastly over-qualified master’s degree in maritime transport economics.
"Nie ma problemu", said Bozenna and set to work, often craftily interpreting Charter Parties to swing the calculations in our favour. It proved to be a fortuitous encounter, just as it had been for Bozenna in 1979 when her Polish employers had sent her on a holiday replacement to their office in Piraeus. Two days after her arrival, another Pole, a marine insurance broker, invited her to dinner - and the rest is history.
I know that history well because by the time I got to Greece in late 1982, Bozenna was already married to Tadeusz, the marine insurance broker, and both became my best friends during my time in Greece.
As it turned out, Bozenna was not only smarter than me in calculating laytime but also smarter than me by staying on in Greece. Those years were the best years of my life, SHINC (Sundays and holidays included).
