The Yacht Law Podcast
The Yacht Law Podcast answers your legal questions about buying, selling, and owning superyachts; working aboard them; and more. Hosted by maritime attorney Michael Moore and yachting journalist Diane Byrne, each episode provides insight into how to better navigate the luxury yachting lifestyle. While we discuss common legal issues, the information shared is not intended as legal advice or as a substitute for the personalized advice of your own attorney. Consider The Yacht Law Podcast as a starting point to better educate yourself about the superyacht world.
The Yacht Law Podcast
Superyacht Transport and the Fine Print That Decides Everything
Text us your ideas and feedback!
Paper beats steel when a superyacht rides a transport ship. We break down how a gleaming vessel turns into “cargo,” why the bill of lading is the most powerful page in the journey, and how small oversights in cradles, insurance, and scheduling cascade into seven-figure losses. From purpose-built float-on carriers to NVOCCs, we map the key differences between owning the ships and brokering space on them, and what that means when timetables slip or one with your precious yacht aboard chases higher-paying freight.
True stories underline the stakes: original bills of lading stolen, a port agent missing bookings that triggered massive demurrage, and a multi-million-dollar yacht loss gutted by limitations under the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act. You’ll hear why custody of documents determines release, and how to plan for on-deck cargo risks on routes that don’t run on yachting schedules. We also talk through emergency playbooks—posting bonds, racing into court for fast relief, and coordinating with insurers—so you can save your yacht when the window is measured in hours.
If you’re lining up a seasonal migration, this conversation emphasizes how crucial it is to vet freight forwarders, verify bills, and secure end-to-end insurance coverage. The core lesson is brutally simple: contract terms and insurance decide your recovery, not replacement value or intentions. And there’s a hard deadline you cannot miss—the one-year time bar for cargo claims from delivery or scheduled delivery.
Enjoy the episode, then help another captain, broker, or owner avoid a costly mistake: follow the show, share this with your team, and leave a quick review telling us the one detail you’ll handle differently next time.
Have a yacht law question? Email it to info@megayachtnews.com or michael@moore-and-co.com for your chance to have it answered on our podcast. All requests for confidentiality and/or anonymity are respected.
Hiring a lawyer is a big decision. Visit Moore & Company for the legal team's qualifications and experience. And, to learn the latest about superyacht launches, shipyards, designs, and destinations, visit Megayacht News.
Welcome everybody. Michael, we have another really good topic of conversation today, and it is quite timely. Super yacht transport. The ships that are carrying some yachts from the Mediterranean over to the United States for the winter season. These ships are obviously moving around the world any given part of the year because of the seasons and the work that the yachts seek. And for our purposes, like most things, the devil is in the details, those fine print details.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. The critical part to our industry is how do you get yachts from point A to point B for the owner's needs, a broker's needs, the charter broker's needs, or the to get it serviced. And that's a huge business that people don't really hear about much until something bad happens.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and nobody in yachting ever considers a yacht as being cargo. We always think about cargo as being one of those containers that you see in the ports, right? Things that have the furniture, all the goods that we're buying on Amazon and other websites around the world, the things that are going into the stores. But at the end of the day, anything that is literally carried on a ship is cargo. And that's actually part of the fine details with these transport ships. I think this might be a good place for us to start the conversation because I think this is one of the biggest points of confusion. There's the transport ship that is tailor-made to carry these yachts, kind of those float-on, float-off carriers that are very commonly seen. And then there are, I think you used the term freight forwarders when you and I were discussing this the other day, where a vessel is lifted onto a cargo ship and taken across the ocean. It seems like it's basically the same thing. You're carrying a yacht, but like I was just saying, the fine details, the differences. So what are those that people are getting confused about and then are leading to legal battles?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Ross Powell, so it's many things, and I've had so many lawsuits that you would describe as fine details. I think that first and foremost, you have a standard shipment, you have a shipper as a starting point. That's the person that ships the cargo. It really is just the name on the bill of lading. Bills of lading now are kind of electronically, but it's still they're still there, and they are magic documents. They are a document that signifies ownership. It's a document that signifies the financial arrangements a lot of times on the cargo being carried. And of course, they are a contract of a freightment. In other words, what are the terms that the shipper who puts cargo on board has agreed to with the carrier? And then at the end of the shipment, you have the consignee. Who is the cargo going to be consigned to? So you look at a bill of lading and the names, everything is vitally important. If you don't match up with these details, then you're going to be stuck in a port someplace trying to convince someone in that port to release that cargo to you. Now, I'd like to say a couple of things that, you know, it's it is a question of where do you start, but I think going right to the nub of your concern, there is actually a name for people that are out there. They were a vital part of the global movement. The vast majority of business is done on the seas. It's water. It's the turf that every person in yachting knows from a variety of points of view. The biggest thing that I see is called the NBOCCs. These are non-vessel-owning common carriers. They are specifically licensed off all over the world. They are very important, but they don't own ships. What they are is people that move things electronically, and they're matching up cargo and ships, ports of call. It's not so easy. You've got a cargo that's going to the Comoros Islands, which are between Madagascar and Africa. Well, you know, it's not exactly a yachting destination. There's no yacht port there, but if you need a if you need to get something to that location, you're going to call up an NBOCC. Sometimes they they're referred to as freight forwarders, and they're kind of used interchangeably. But they are the people that figure out that to get something from Gibraltar to the Comoros Islands, you're going to have to get across the Mediterranean, down through the Suez Canal, down the coast of Africa, and somehow have a reason for calling it this tiny little country that's between Madagascar and Africa. And an NBOCC or a common carrier is going to do that for you. We take for granted the shipping in the yacht world where you load a bunch of ships in places like Genoa, and you kind of get in line, and the yachts are taken on board the ships that are designed to carry yachts, that's one aspect. But then there's the ships that are load cargo on board that's on deck on deck cargo. One of the first questions I have, and I'll tell you how it comes up, is you mentioned earlier, but the the what the world has runs on what is called a multimodal transportation system. Multi-modal means that container GC can move from the ship to a train to a truck. All the same cargo you contained in that container. The thing that changes from ship to railroad train to truck is the same container. Now, a client of mine owns a submarine. First question I had is can it fit into a container? I say, well, see right there is a design defect. If you got the designer thinking ahead and thinking, oh my God, you can't get it in a container. It's always going to have to be on the deck of a yacht. It's going to have to be a big yacht, or it's going to be on the deck of a ship that's going to get it from point A to point B, and then it goes on a yacht. So it can get very, very complicated. It's a wonderful thing, but it's a it's a complicated, multifaceted idea. I let me just, if I may, just throw in one war story and then you can keep firing away on your questions so we run out of time. But I get a call that someone has been mugged in Brazil, and that what the mugger took was their briefcase. Inside the briefcase are a bunch of original bills of lading. So the mugger now owns something that facially is title, contract of refraintment, and uh so I said title of ownership, contract of refraintment, and financing document. When I would say a financing document, a lot of times you're not gonna be able to get the cargo at the port of discharge unless you pay whatever money is due. That's a way of collecting your money. You're gonna be arriving at a certain port. There's gonna be somebody on the dock, figuratively speaking, and they're gonna have to show you that bill of lading before you present that to the carrier or to the person standing in for the carrier, which will be the yard where the cargo's been discharged. And you better pray that the person that holds that piece of paper is the actual owner. I know the guy's been mugged. I know that the built the cargo's moving toward, are you ready for this? Lagos, Nigeria.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_00:It's not Monica.
SPEAKER_01:Ouch!
SPEAKER_00:They call me from Brazil, your your random maritime lawyer sitting in sitting in Carl Gables, Florida, and it's like a four million dollar problem, and the cargo is a commodity. So easily sold like a grain or coffee. And you have to understand that carrier, when it arrives in Lagos, if the wrong guy is on that dock with a good story to back up why he's there, and he's gonna take delivery of that cargo. And he knows what the cargo is, he's got a bill of lading. He's gonna get it. He's gonna already have arranged to sell it. He may have already sold it. He may have sold the bills of lading. See, if you give me a million dollars, I give you this four million dollar cargo.
SPEAKER_03:Right, right.
SPEAKER_00:I have the ownership papers here. Now that guy is what is called a BFP, bona fide purchaser for value. That gets you into a whole other area of the law. But finally, there's some countervailing rules. You can't take title from a thief, this kind of thing. You're into a world of hurt one way or the other if your four million dollars of cargo has just gone down the road with some Nigerian driving to wherever.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And you're in a corrupt country. But back to yachting.
SPEAKER_03:You have to let it just be clear that we don't have that right.
SPEAKER_00:It's not that not that that different. We the cargo will be discharged from the vessel. It will never be released from the yard until sufficient paperwork is presented. After a short period of time, the owner of that cargo is going to be incurring liens for demurrage. And those are massive daily attachments of money. Because the simple truth is, all over the world, the people who run the boards want you to get your cargo out of there as fast as possible. We've got more, we've got more coming in. I'm not going to sit around and let you resolve your commercial disputes. Get the cargo the hell out of here, or the amount of money we're charging, it will be so great that we'll take your cargo from you and sell it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:So I think the problem that you're getting at, and the word to our listeners, is when you're dealing with a freight forwarder, you better be dealing with a reputable one. If they're not good, what'll happen is they'll what they're going to be trying to do is match up a ship to come to a certain port to load your yacht. There's so many problems along the way. The yacht must be in position to get on the boat when the boat calls. The boat may just be making one stop, very quick stop, designed to lift one yacht, put on that cradle. Cradle now has to be constructed enough to actually carry the vessel. It's got to be ready to go. Everything has to be already in position. Usually the lashings and things are already in position. So when the ship stops, you pick up the yacht, put it on board, cradle and all. And then the crew is now just working to nail it down and secure it to the deck. If the cradle's insufficient, if the loading bands are in the wrong place. And remember the vessel that the freight forder has lined up for you, you may think you're saving a few bucks, but we're not talking about Seven Star here, where they do this. They are a vessel-owning common carrier, as opposed to a non-vessel-owning common carrier. So you've got the ship from Dubrovnik or someplace. It's coming around and it's going to make that one stop to pick up that car, go to get paid for that. Maybe it'll pick up five yachts. The NBOCCs can actually issue bills of lading. But they've got a backup bill of lading that was issued to them from the ship. So they have a ship bill of lading and the backup, that's called a back-to-back bill of lading that they issue to the shipper, basically because they want the shipper to believe they are a big carrier. Well, they may not be a big carrier, there may just be someone in their bedroom with a printer.
SPEAKER_03:So it sounds like to put it in delayman's terms, some of these arrangements are from the yacht owner standpoint. The owner is signing a contract to have another contract that will ensure their vessel gets carried from point A to point B.
SPEAKER_00:And the person that issued you the contract may not have any assets. That may be a person in their bedroom that posted a$25,000 bond and they got a license from the FMC to act as a freight porter. And the$25,000 bond is basically people making a living. They posted that bond, they're in good faith. They consider themselves to be acting in good faith. But if they get screwed by the party they're now doing business with, the carrier, that carrier could go, if he turns right, he can make$500,000. If he turns left, he'll make$100. That's called a geographical deviation. The bill of lading said you'd pick up in this port and discharge in that port. But the simple truth is it's very hard to enforce that anything against that backup bill of lading. There may be a clause that allows him to geographically deviate.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_00:It's a timing issue where the tramp steamer, they're tramping, they're kind of out there just trying to find cargo, and they don't have set schedules. They're not going to always be in Nice the first of every month. Think of it as an endless train of cargo, and it's ships moving always 24-7 around the world. That's not what you have in the yacht world. In the yacht world, you have these schedules. You must be in this port on this day. Hopefully, this is helpful to people that don't do this every day. I can cite one situation where the shipment was from Fort Lauderdale to Dubai, and the contract of a freightman was he had already paid$184,000. And he would forfeit every penny of that if he's not in that port on that day at that time. The cargo gets arrested three days before the carrying vessel arrives in Fort Lauderdale. Oh yeah. So we go into action. My colleague and I, Casey Plittman, got on our dancing shoes. With one eye, we're watching the computer tracking of the ship as it's heading toward Fort Lauderdale, hoping it'll be a day late or so, or maybe two days late. We're now in federal court begging the court to grant an immediate hearing, set a bond amount, and release the cargo in time for us to move it from Point A to the Fort Lauderdale carrying vessel. And we would done in three days. It was a miracle. It requires a federal judge to sit, hear, understand the problem, basically put you at the front of the line. And basically it's just about money. You know, you got a federal judge or pointer for life sitting up there, and you say, Your Honor, we will lose one other ninety-four thousand bucks if we don't get this boat to Port Lauderdale on time. Of course, we posted a bond to be discussed later as to what was valid about the claim being asserted. Ultimately, we got all that money out of the court, too. That was a happy day. But that happens every day. We had a cargo discharged into Dubai. The tugs needed to take the vessel from the ship. It was a yacht. The carrying vessel said we're going to leave with the cargo on board. We cannot stay in this port. By law, we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get yelled at by the port authorities. We can't just put the yacht in the water. We're not allowed to do that. You must have your tugboats standing by to receive the cargo. It's a yacht. So you put it in the water, the tugboats take it away. It cost the shipper and ultimately the carrier$300,000 because they had the tugboats, we had the ship went on demourage and and like waited a day or something for the tugboats.$300,000. Completely inept port agent, idiot, fool. But you're still out of pocket,$300,000.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:It's a real deal, you know. So I I hope I'm hope you're piecing together the the thing about it is cargo arrives late, or cargo gets damaged en route. Quite a normal thing. You absolutely must ensure that someone, I'm not saying it has to be an attorney, but it I think it should be a maritime lawyer, because that's who knows what they're looking at. That you're you're covered from the moment it leaves the dock at the port of when the when the if it's not being discharged into the port where it's going to be carried, it needs to be insured from the port of transition from your slip to the port that it gets on the carrying vessel needs to be insured from the carrying vessel all the way to the discharge port. And I've had several where they thought they had insurance, they just assumed it. And it was like, no, you don't have insurance.
SPEAKER_03:Right, right.
SPEAKER_00:You have a package limitation under the bill of lading.
SPEAKER_03:That's reminding me of the situation with the sailing yacht, my song, a few years back.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_03:There was a very public lawsuit between the owner and the carrier, which was Peters and May, and ultimately uh the yacht rolled off the ship.
SPEAKER_04:Yep.
SPEAKER_03:It total loss, the replacement value he claimed it was 27 million euros. Oh, God. And uh there were a lot of different pieces. It was the cradle failed, that's why the yacht rolled, etc. But the bottom line was he said that he was owed the 27 million replacement value.
SPEAKER_04:Right.
SPEAKER_03:And Peterson May said, no, you signed the booking note, which served as the contract, and it was a freight situation. So I think he only and was only going to be entitled to maybe 500 euros a fraction. So that was what you were just describing is in terms of the need to insure the yacht. You need to understand everything that we've been talking about in terms of the the fine print that it is a cargo vessel, not necessarily a yacht transport vessel. Um cargo, it sounds crazy, but I but I understand it from the cargo carrier standpoint. They're going to say everything on board is worth X amount of money. It doesn't matter whether it's a an Aston Martin being shipped or a a$30 million super yacht. They're going to just put a basic value on everything that they're carrying unless you take the step to insure it otherwise.
SPEAKER_00:Totally. We have seen our share of yachts like my song that jumped out of their cradle. For whatever reason, they went over the side. Well, your only recourse is if you've booked proper insurance at the very front end of your carriage of goods by sea. And if you don't, you are going to be under the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act, which is basically a package limitation, and the yacht is the package. You can see it. It's just one unit. It's called a unit. It's a bit often called the package. It's the package limitation, but in that context, it is the yacht. And you will get a check for$500. I think it's the current level. It's either$1,000 or I think it's still$500. It doesn't really make a difference when your yacht is a$20-something million dollar motor yacht. That's the danger, but even sophisticated owners like the owner of my song just are not properly advised. I get this quite often. People would come in and I just want you to take a look at this. I can look at it within five minutes. It's like looking at a recipe on the back of a brownie mix box. I don't need to read all that stuff on this side and this side. I just need to say two eggs, cup of milk. I know what I'm going to be looking for, but a lot of times people just assume we're good. We're just going to put this yellow in the boat. And they do it to save pennies, which is really something that is kind of frightening. But insurance plays a huge role in the whole world of shipping. Your lenders, your bankers, and your insurers on everything in the world. That's a place you never want to cut your losses. You want to just go in there and pay for the insurance. That's what it comes to.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Make sure you got a good underwriter. You're dealing with high trust societies. Generally speaking, the wealth of the world is concentrated in certain locations and a certain band, the band that includes all of the EU and the UK and across to America. Probably doesn't go more than 50 miles north of the Canadian U.S. border. Well, you know, I I don't want to get too I'm not an economist, but these high trust societies, you believe when you do your contracts that you're an honest person, you think you're you're going to make in a valid contract. But the reality is different. I mean, I I know a I know a guy that his life savings went into a yacht, and he was so excited about selling the yacht at the Port Lauderdal Beau show. He called it Miami. He was going to put the water in Miami, take it up to the Port Lauderdale Beau Show, and the boat never made it. It went over the side on the way. And he got$500 for his trouble. His life was put in. He actually was a genius type personality that actually had built this boat. It was so beautiful. It was a very cool vessel that he personally built in. He explained to me how he did it and his vision for this boat. It was amazing. But you meet these guys and you it breaks your heart because you just feel for them. I'm usually on the other side of the deal. Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. I don't just represent cargo interest or carriers, or I represent all of the above. But yeah, that's a good sumset of the Gotti world. Migration starts at the end of the summer toward the Caribbean. That's pretty much the way it works. They're either going into yards or going down the cruise and the Caribbean in the warm months, and then it reverses and goes back the other way. A certain percentage of those boats do, in fact, trade or are carried on carrying vessels and not on their own bottom. So I don't know what percentage.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, it's a high percentage. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:It doesn't really matter how many go on their own bottom or on a carrying vessel. It's if you are the one on the carrying vessel where your yacht was lost at sea, it means all the world to you. And I'm just amazed the phone rings and sometimes it starts with, you're not gonna believe this. And then I never thought. And uh but or it was oops.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, right, right.
SPEAKER_00:And so now you're into trying to see if you have all the lemons like you have to have at Las Vegas to win, you know?
SPEAKER_04:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00:And I can easily tell after an hour or two, you're not gonna win. You're gonna be even more frustrated at the end of the day than you are now.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. The more reason that people need to just admit that they don't know what they don't know. There's no and no disrespect, no self-beating up. I'm at a loss for words for words.
SPEAKER_00:Well, there are lawyers out there. There's no shame. There are lawyers in this world that do nothing but cargo claims. I know who they are, and there was a time in my life when I was afraid I'd become one of those guys. I was a junior lawyer in a New York law firm, and uh I had uh been assigned to defend cargo claims on the part of a very large shipping line. These cargo lawyers may not get a lot of glory, but they know that turf A to Z. They know it all. And for you, it's this unique and confusing and strange new world. For them, you go to their desk and they're stacked up and they're paid for their knowledge, and they rarely lose.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They because they know every form that's put in front of them, every contract, they know the concerns, they know all the arguments. Diane, I'm gonna leave you with one thought. It was my question when I helped write the Florida Bar exam for lawyers or board certification for maritime lawyers. I had one question. Oh, I contributed other questions, but this is the one everyone thought was funny. What is the time bar for a claim under the Carriage of Goods by C Act?
SPEAKER_03:Meaning the time it takes to resolve the case?
SPEAKER_00:You must file your claim or you are forever barred.
SPEAKER_03:No.
SPEAKER_00:I thought, well, you know, if you can't answer that question, you should not be a maritime lawyer. Or you should not be board certified as a maritime lawyer.
SPEAKER_03:Sure.
SPEAKER_00:So I will leave the listeners with this little bit of it's one year. From the day the cargo either did arrive or was scheduled to arrive, you get one year. And people, they're busy, they have businesses, priorities. You come in there one day late, you're out forever. You can fight forever and you'll never get around it. Your claim is extinguished. You can't revive it. And it's just a sad situation. If somebody sat on their hands, got distracted and meant to take it up, forgot to tell the lawyer. That's the takeaway. If you do nothing else, make sure you remember that it's a one-year time bar. Whether it's a yacht on board or a bag of coffee, it's a one-year time bar.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I think that's as good of a point as any to reinforce and to be our stopping point. Michael, this is really interesting. Thank you for your insight. And uh I am hoping that we have saved some people from a very, very expensive mistake at the end of the day. Well, thanks everybody for listening, as always. If you have a yacht law question that you would like us to address on a future episode of the Yacht Law podcast, you can reach out to Michael or me. Our contact information is in the show notes for this episode. Until next time, I'm Diane Byrne. Michael, want you so much. Thanks, everybody.
