October/December 2015
Shipping from Europe to the US
aka: A Slow Boat to Jacksonville
After six full seasons of traveling in Europe it was time to bring our Tiger motorhome back across the pond to begin preparing it for other adventures. Being fairly experienced by now, this being the fourth time we’ve shipped the Tiger somewhere, the process was neither daunting nor difficult for us, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t still have some surprises ahead and some lessons to learn about the shipping game.
The Lesson for this year was this: Don’t assume you already know all the answers!
As we’ll cover below, our shipping process went smoothly and concluded without any serious problems. We dealt with nice people on both ends of the route and had no difficulties in either dropping off our vehicle in Southampton, England or in picking it up later in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. The problem was the 8 1/2 weeks that passed from the day in October we said goodbye to the Tiger in England to the day in December when we were ultimately allowed to pick it up in Florida. This is a crossing that is normally done in about eighteen days, so as you can imagine we were not pleased by the turn of events. Fortunately, while inconvenient, the delay did not create any serious problems for us as they might have on other journeys.
The Arrangements:
We started well in advance of our desired shipping date by going online to solicit shipping quotes from various sources. We knew that our Tiger would need to ship on a Ro/Ro (Roll on, Roll off) vessel due to the fact that it will not fit in a container. We got quotes from three shippers. Two of the quotes were $3,900 and $4,050, while the third was much lower at $2,500. Prices are shown here in USD, but were actually quoted in GBP (British Pounds) as the three shippers were based in England. Actual quotes for future reference were £1,672, £2,489, and £2,585; exhange rate at the time was $1.57 USD to the Pound. For comparison, our Tiger is on the small side at 6.3 meters long, 2.8 meters tall and 2.2 meters wide; volume is about 39 cubic meters. A van conversion would be less while most motorhomes would be more.
All three quotes promised delivery in the US in three to four weeks from shipping. Not surprisingly, we chose the lowest quote, which came from The Wainwright Group in Southampton, who are the British agents for Seabridge of Baltimore, the company we had used before when shipping the Tiger to Europe. Seabridge is well known and has been used by many travelers. Interestingly, Seabridge will give you a direct quote for shipping TO Europe, but when shipping FROM Europe will refer you to a European agent suitable for the port of departure. This confused me at first, but I sent three different emails directly to different contact people at Seabridge and got the same reply from each. Note: as mentioned elsewhere, there is a Seabridge company based in Germany that is very popular with European travelers; this is a different company from the Baltimore based Seabridge used by many American travelers.
By the way, we elected to ship from Southampton solely because of our Schengen Visa limitations. We would not have been able to remain on the continent long enough to arrange shipping from Belgium or another euro port. We also would not have been able to return to the continent for shipping until we had spent a full ninety days out of the Schengen area. This would have meant remaining in Britain until Christmas and we did not want to do this. We had hoped to ship the vehicle between the 1st and the 10th of November but in the end there were no November sailings with the line we had chosen and we had to take a ship scheduled for departure on October 11th.
The Shipping:
Having committed to the October 11th sailing we made hotel and flight arrangements for getting back to the US. We needed to drop the Tiger off on Friday the 9th, only two days before the intended sailing, which we thought was very generous of the shipper. Later we were informed the ship would be delayed a few days, but we had already made our arrangements so we dropped off on the 9th anyway.
As to payment, since we were in a foreign country, we couldn’t just mail or deliver a check to our agent to cover the costs, and credit cards are not accepted. We would need to either use a wire transfer from our bank (with a fairly hefty service charge for International transfers), or make payment in cash prior to delivering the vehicle. We chose cash, which necessitated five trips to an ATM on consecutive days in order to gather the funds. Our shipper would have also allowed us to pay it all in Jacksonville in USD, but the exchange rate used did not make this attractive.
We had the normal discussions with our Shipping agent regarding what could be left in the vehicle. As I’ve covered in the general shipping page on this site, the shipper will usually tell you the vehicle is supposed to be empty when shipped. This is understandable from the point of view of the shipping company, but would create a large inconvenience and expense for the customer. We basically say that we understand the instruction and the reasons for it but that we do not intend to comply. We secure the connection between the driving area and the living area with a solid partition and do not provide a key for entry into the living area. So far this has worked for us and for other travelers we know. Of course, we leave nothing of value in the coach.
One thing new for us, although we know others who have run into it before, was that we were required to have the propane (LPG) tank emptied by an LPG dealer who had to certify in writing that this had been done. Our shipping agent helped us locate a shop who could do this, but it was a hassle and cost us $120. One of many regulations that seems to be experiencing increasing enforcement.
At any rate, everything got done in time, our agent helped us with the paperwork, a rather grumpy Friday afternoon supervisor OKed the vehicle and we were gone. Once again, no one ever looked inside the vehicle.
The Arrival:
We shipped our Tiger into Jacksonville from Buenos Aires in August, 2009. We shipped out from Jacksonville to Europe in March, 2010. Now once again we ship into Jacksonville from England in December, 2015. We Like Jacksonville. It’s a small, well organized port; easy to find and easy to get in and out of.
But things have changed in six years. In 2009 we did not need a Customs Agent in order to pick up our vehicle. K-Line let us handle it ourselves, the paperwork was very simple and no escort was required to enter the port. All of those things have changed now, and probably it is a good thing. Now some of the paperwork is basically unfathomable, particularly something called an ISF. There is now a Power of Attorney form and just all kinds of other things. I don’t see any way a normal person could handle it all by themselves. Also, you now need an official escort to lead you into the port and to where you can pick up your vehicle. So, an additional cost of $400 for customs clearance and port fees and $50 for the escort had to be paid, in cash, before we could get into the port for the pickup.
Still, everything went smoothly, the escort helped us get a jump for our dead batteries. The truck was otherwise undamaged and once we were up and running we were free to go. Once again, no Customs inspection was involved.
Oh, Yes… The Delay:
So, the problem with this particular shipping experience was that our car took much longer to make the crossing than it should have. In our particular situation this was not really a problem, but it could have been and if we had asked more questions in advance perhaps we could have avoided it.
We knew that the Atlantic crossing should take three weeks or less because we had done it before. As noted above, each of the three quotes we received said between three and four weeks in their initial information. When we were actually committed to a particular shipping date we were told the planned arrival date in Florida and it was five weeks from the shipping date. We were a little surprised, but this was OK with us because we needed to fly to the western US to pick up our US motorhome and then drive it back to Florida to get the Tiger. The added couple of weeks to do this sounded good to us. Well, in keeping in touch with our shipping agent and, later, our customs agent in Jacksonville as the planned arrival date neared we later discovered that our vehicle was actually on a different vessel than expected and would not arrive for another two and a half weeks! We weren’t happy about this, but there was nothing to be done. In fact, when we dropped our vehicle off in Southampton we did not even know that it would be transferred to a second vessel. We needed to ask more questions!
What we eventually learned was that our vehicle was initially supposed to go from Southampton down the coast of Europe, making several stops along the way, to Tangier, Morocco, where it would change vessels for the actual crossing of the Atlantic. For whatever reasons, the ship it was supposed to change to was diverted somewhere else so our vehicle stayed in Tangier for awhile before being loaded onto a third ship. Once you have the name of a vessel, it is easy to track the position of that vessel online so naturally I did that. I was immediately dismayed to watch our Tiger retracing its steps from Tangier back up the coast of Spain, stopping again at the same ports it had already visited; making its way back to northern Europe. I could not bring myself to follow it along to see if it would actually make another visit to Southampton a month after it left, but it may have. To make a long story short, our vehicle was in and out of probably a dozen or more ports around Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and finally Mexico before finally arriving at its destination after nearly two months of travel. Add in the days after we had to drop it off before it sailed and the days after arrival before we could pick it up and it was out of our hands a total of sixty-one days — well over twice as long as we’d expected!
In the end, our truck was fine and undamaged (almost - more on this later) and we were not overly inconvenienced by the delay. BUT, we should have known better to begin with and should not have agreed to the arrangements without asking far more in the way of questions about the actual schedule of the ship(s) carrying our vehicle and why it was initially supposed to take five weeks to make a three week crossing. We were too accepting and too easy going and not curious enough.
The Details:
The shipping line for this trip was Hoegh, www.hoeghautoliners.com/
Our agent in Southampton was Shu Burford at Wainwright Brothers, sburford@wainwrightgroup.com; also info@wainwrightgroup.com
Seabridge in Baltimore can be reached through their website, www.seabrdge.com/. Note the spelling; there are different Seabridge companies in different countries and they cannot all have the same web address.
We could have used Seabridge as our Customs Agent to handle the arrival paperwork. We chose instead to use Sims-Waters because they are located in Jacksonville. Our agent was Linda Yarbrough, linda@sims-waters.com
We obtained a separate quote through www.autoshippers.co.uk/. This quote was provided by Graeme Webb, graeme@shipit.co.uk/
The third quote we mention above was obtained at our request from K-Line by Shu Burford.
Conclusion:
We had good service from both Shu Burford in Southampton and Linda Yarborough in Jacksonville and would not hesitate to contact either of them again. The same goes for Seabridge.
We also have no real problem with our experience with Hoegh as a shipping company despite the scheduling issues we encountered on this trip. The problem was that we did not ask nearly enough questions about the route the ship would take and the number of ports it would stop in. We have always been told that once a vessel leaves port things can change and arrival dates can be altered; we just hadn’t experienced it before. If we had asked and had learned that our vehicle would stop in a dozen or more ports along the way we almost certainly would have looked for a different vessel and perhaps a different shipping line. We didn’t ask the right questions; and we should have. Next time we will.
Actually, in some ways our experience on this trip was encouraging. I have always felt based on our experience that Ro/Ro shipping is a very safe way to ship your vehicle. This is due to the fact that the ships are modern and the ports are well secured and guarded because of the value of the cargo on every single ship. While we were dropping off our humble Tiger in Southampton we saw at least a half dozen McLaren sports cars being loaded on another ship; these cars have a base price of $265,000. So, on this trip our vehicle sat on the dock in Tangier for about two weeks plus made stops at at least a dozen other ports including in the Caribbean and in Mexico with no damage done and no break in attempted. The worst thing happened in terms of increasing exposure to possible theft or damage… and nothing happened.
Oh...
I did allude to some damage to the coach. Actually there were two things. The first was entirely our own fault. When we cleaned out the cab we forgot to remove the nice screens we use to close off the front windshield and these did disappear. The other thing that happened is kind of a quirky little thing that we have actually experienced on each of our four shipping journeys. Our Tiger is well adorned with stickers we gather as souvenirs of our travels. On three of our four shipping experiences we have lost one or two of those stickers and we did this time as well. As we’ve said before, we almost look at this as a compliment to our choices. We visualize the dock or ship workers standing around the Tiger admiringly and then one of them sneaking back later to carefully scrape off a sticker that has caught his/her eye.
It’s OK, we don’t mind sharing.