The Salty Barrister

Let’s face it, we've all been assigned a serial number in the form of a social security number.It seems everywhere you go these days, someone's asking for your "social." I guess that soft lexicon aims at trying to make it seem less Orwellian. How you wonder am I going to segue into something salty? Try this on for size, your boat has its own kind of "social".

A vessel manufacturer must identify each boat produced or imported with a hull identification number. The HIN, as it's called, must consist of twelve characters. The first three characters identify the manufacturer, characters four through eight are the manufacturer's serial number, characters nine and ten typically indicate the date of certification or manufacture, and characters eleven and twelve indicate the model year (i.e., "82" for 1982). Characters nine and ten can be decoded by understanding that character nine will be an English letter of the alphabet with January being "A", February being "B", etc. Character ten must be the last digit of the year of manufacture or certification. A visual guide to decoding your boat's social can be found below.

You can decode a portion of your social security number as well so as to learn the date and state of issuance. There's probably a clever observation to be made between a vessel's HIN and a person's social security number, but nothing's coming to me at the moment. Writing about social security numbers makes me feel like I've turned out of the harbor and into a gray sea scudded with chop and pressed low under a dark sky. A sense, I guess, of something unpleasant making its way ashore.

Underway and making way.

--- JKF

I'm in the midst of an office move -- same building, different floor.  Still, that's got me shuttling around like a spider crab fleeing a seagull! At any rate, we'll be back to jawing out some maritime issues in a day or so. Next up is the Jones Act. What is it, and does it apply to that tactician fellow you pay in your never-ending quest to win the Club's Wednesday night racing series? Good stuff.

Underway and making way (kind of).

--- JKF

I had my feet on a cooler, and something advertised as "frost brewed" in my hand. It was a Saturday afternoon and the five of us were sitting on the dock, talking nonsense and critiquing the boats pulling down the channel to one of the three marinas to our south. It was a Hatteras that got us on our feet. He'd cracked off a plane, but with bow high and a wake you could've surfed, powered down the channel. We waved and hooted at him to slow up, but he wasn't having it.

It was Billy's boat that got the worst of it with impact damage to the bow where the wake had driven it into the dock. It was fixable, but it'd be a week-long repair and a couple of thousand bucks. Billy wasn't too happy, but he settled down when I explained to him that the maritime law was on his side.

You see, that wake that rolls off the back of your boat and rushes away is generally your responsibility. In other words, when your wake causes damage, it's quite possible that you're going to be on the hook because a passing vessel typically owes a duty of reasonable care to appreciate the reasonable effect of its wake. So Billy took some pictures, wrote down the names of some characters who'd seen the event (aside from us), and filed it away as next week's project.

Later on, one of us got talking about how the choices you make in life have consequences. That's when Billy chimed up. He's right, I guess, that little maxim does get visibly manifested when a boat's wake chases its way to shore.

Underway and making way.

--- JKF

The first day of the blog.  I have an image of wooden blocks being tugged free, blog tilting toward channel, and then a hurtling rush ending with a spray of water.  In other words, we just got launched and we're bobbing cheerfully next to the pier.
I'm a maritime attorney with a practice in New York and offices up and down the East Coast.  In fact, we're just opening an office in Newport, RI.  I grew up in Rhode Island so I have a soft-spot for its coastline, Del's, Johnny-Cakes, the whole bit.  I like driving boats and did so commercially up through college.  I still keep my license current in case one day, as I tell my wife sometimes after a couple of beers, I decide to leave the office life behind!  My thanks to Safe/Sea for inviting me to post my occasional musings, and my aim is to share some of the legal oddities that the maritime law offers and which make the practice interesting.

-Underway & Making Way,
JKF