We all agree about this statement, weather has a huge impact in our business. When on one side, Duluth is welcoming is first « saltie » of the season, on the other side Australian Coal plants will surely face hard time in the next weeks to recover from The Debbie Cyclon. As far as we understood port facilities did not suffer too much from the Cyclon to the contrary inland logistic and rails are out of order for 2 up to 4 weeks from now. More details here. This Debbie is surely somehow having an impact on the capes index going down, eventhough Coal Shipments from Australia to China are not keeping busy the whole capes fleet, still 70 ships are in the line up in Queensland to wait for their cargo. As you can see the volume is significant enough to put pressure on the big mammas. For the 6th session in a row, lost 526 points from 2,755 on 29th march to today at 2,229. BCI could come up again fairly soon as Chinese seems now to be planning to source their coal from USA. (If Mister Trump’s managing to be pragmatic while receiving Mr Xi Jinping -meeting to start tomorrow). See more info here . If these movements becoming concrete, no doubt the Capers index shall manage to go up again. Waiting for such upward to occur, the BDI is losing some of his momentum but this has not impacted other sizes followed by the BDI. The trends perceived in the last days seems to remain in force. Logically the USG origin keeping going down the HS2 (from Skaw pass to USG) is gaining momentum. Logical is ending right here as HS3 (ecsa to skaw pass) is gaining again close to 150pts today, when the HS1 (skaw pass to Ecsa) is also gaining +155. Easy conclusion would be therefore to state Baltic Continent managing to be quite firm and until any change, the more charterers wait the less concrete is the chance to repeat last done or come close to it. Unless some of the cargoes seen being not that firm or in other words not in urgent needs to be picked up. In this case usual poker game to back on the table.
Finally, moving goods from port A to port B is one thing, understanding the nature of the commodity and chemicals reaction, can be a question of life or death. Here what may have happened to the Iron ore cargo on board Stellar Daisy which sunk this week-end with more than 2O crew members still missing: liquefaction
regards
Jerome
drybulkpelagos 