dear sailors,

If you have planned to ship your boat with “sevenstar Yacht Transport”, I think you should read the following advices.
I shipped my sailing boat 6 months ago. The story of the shipment is so long and I had so many problems with sevenstar that I will not tell the full story now (If you want I can give you the details by email).

If you want to avoid all the problems I had, You should follow these advises:

-Always be on board the cargo ship to oversee all the boat handling/chocking operations during loading and offloading (The best should be to make a movie of all the handling operations): sevenstar loading master can really do big mistakes and damage your boat even if you gave all necessary informations about how to handle your boat before loading. Remark: because of “safety reasons”, we were forbidden to be on board the cargoship when loading.

-Always make a survey of the boat at loading: if your boat is not new and is damaged during transport, sevenstar will say that the boat was damaged before loading even if they obviously did some mistakes during handling.

-Modify the transport contract between you and sevenstar: this contract has been made by sevenstar’s lawyers: it means you have no rights. You should read all the contract before signing and try to modify all that you can.
You should try to add to the contract a date of delivery and penalties for sevenstar in case of delay. If you don’t do that, as soon as your boat is loaded, sevenstar can do exactly all that they want, and you can only wait…
You should modify or cancel the clause n°9 “liberties”: Due to this clause, the cargo ship can deviate from his initial route and call at any ports for any reasons even if carrying your boat.
Due to this clause, your boat can be offloaded in any ports, stored and reloaded on another cargoship: this is transhipment.
Sevenstar is not supposed to inform you of the risk of transhipment.

I hope it will help you

have a safe trip

pah”