Boatnerd Discussion Forum

Yep - in my experience the phrase "taking a delay" or "took a delay" was used in the office.

Does it really matter? 🙄call it what you want.. trains buses trucks planes etc get delayed. If I had a $ for every “ delay” in my 38 yrs sailing I could give my pension to charity and still live very very well.

Thank you for the detailed response. Your explanation pretty much confirms what I thought about it. From looking a little deeper into this, it appears that much of this use of terminology began on a social media page concerning Great Lakes shipping and has made its way to other websites, including this one as well. The problem is that things such as this will undoubtedly begin to appear in books and other publications and become widely accepted by those not attached to the industry as an official term.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree, I've worked with five different lake fleets and that term is common parlance. As you say it is not official but it is used to describe delays. And we absolutely have delays, you don't need a ferry schedule to be delayed. There is a boat ahead at the lock/dock, that's a delay. Unloading system breaks down, thats a delay on us. The dock loader breaks down, that's a delay on them. Can't sail because of weather, that's a delay. Can't start the load/unload till cleared by customs, that's a delay. Can't sail because the guys are over hours, that's a delay etc. etc. Every delay we take is recorded. We need to know these delays to calculate demurrage owed to us by docks because of their delays and the docks do the same to the ships. Also it is a metric for determining efficiency of the ship. If you don't account for delays you have can't track operational cost losses and gains. Most fleets have a numeric system that categorizes delays. So many reasons to keep track of delays. As far as the term "take a delay" I have no earthly idea why somebody would get worked up over this phrase. It's just a saying.

[quote=Guest post_id=256091 time=1696199093]
"Taking a delay" is not official terminology. The phrase is likely the outcome of shore-side observers who publish publicly-available shipping traffic reports/forecasts trying to come up with a phrase that doesn't hit a nerve with the powers that be in private shipping companies that might be acutely sensitive to the general public being made aware of instances in which their ships have to stop to make repairs, etc.

I'm not aware of anyone who works in the industry using the phrase "take a delay." From the viewpoint of people working on board ships or in shipping company offices, the term "delay" implies that there was some sort of set/expected timetable in the first place, which in the big picture isn't really an accurate way to think about the operations of a cargo-carrying freighter.

We can think of it this way: a boat or ship that serves as, say, a passenger/car ferry could be reasonably expected to adhere to a pre-determined/published timetable with some degree of reliability, so if a ferry fails to make those appointed arrival/departure times, it would be fair to say the term "delay" would apply. In stark contrast, cargo ships such as those on the Great Lakes don't necessarily operate on a ferry-style timetable and aren't really expected to. So from the point of view of a sailor or a dispatcher at the home office, if a ship has to stop for maintenance or repairs, so be it. If there's a line of ships waiting to load at a certain dock and those ships go to anchor or tie up at a lay-by berth to wait their turns, so be it. ; Everyone involved wants to avoid such things as much as possible and/or wants to keep those pauses as short as possible, but stopping to make repairs or waiting in line for a dock is part of the cargo carrying business in a way that renders the word "delay" more or less non-applicable.

Regardless of whether one thinks it makes much sense for a shipping company to be sensitive about repair/maintenance information being made public, one can understand that the people who publish shipping reports/forecasts want to avoid any overly negative interactions with shipping companies, etc. and "taking a delay" is likely the results of efforts to avoid mentioning specific info about ships experiencing damage, stopping for repairs, etc. Ironically, those efforts seem to have created a term that strikes a lot of people in the industry as a bit odd, to put it politely.
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You take a break, but a delay is something that you endure.

"Taking a delay" is not official terminology. The phrase is likely the outcome of shore-side observers who publish publicly-available shipping traffic reports/forecasts trying to come up with a phrase that doesn't hit a nerve with the powers that be in private shipping companies that might be acutely sensitive to the general public being made aware of instances in which their ships have to stop to make repairs, etc.

I'm not aware of anyone who works in the industry using the phrase "take a delay." From the viewpoint of people working on board ships or in shipping company offices, the term "delay" implies that there was some sort of set/expected timetable in the first place, which in the big picture isn't really an accurate way to think about the operations of a cargo-carrying freighter.

We can think of it this way: a boat or ship that serves as, say, a passenger/car ferry could be reasonably expected to adhere to a pre-determined/published timetable with some degree of reliability, so if a ferry fails to make those appointed arrival/departure times, it would be fair to say the term "delay" would apply. In stark contrast, cargo ships such as those on the Great Lakes don't necessarily operate on a ferry-style timetable and aren't really expected to. So from the point of view of a sailor or a dispatcher at the home office, if a ship has to stop for maintenance or repairs, so be it. If there's a line of ships waiting to load at a certain dock and those ships go to anchor or tie up at a lay-by berth to wait their turns, so be it. ; Everyone involved wants to avoid such things as much as possible and/or wants to keep those pauses as short as possible, but stopping to make repairs or waiting in line for a dock is part of the cargo carrying business in a way that renders the word "delay" more or less non-applicable.

Regardless of whether one thinks it makes much sense for a shipping company to be sensitive about repair/maintenance information being made public, one can understand that the people who publish shipping reports/forecasts want to avoid any overly negative interactions with shipping companies, etc. and "taking a delay" is likely the results of efforts to avoid mentioning specific info about ships experiencing damage, stopping for repairs, etc. Ironically, those efforts seem to have created a term that strikes a lot of people in the industry as a bit odd, to put it politely.

In recent years, I have seen the term "taking a delay" becoming commonly used in association with ships tying up at a location to await the opening of space at a loading dock, etc. Is that the proper term used today in the Great Lakes shipping industry for this? I have an uncle that sailed for many years until the late 1990s and he claims to have never heard that term used not to mention that he finds the term somewhat aggravating for some reason (well he is somewhat grumpy nowadays).