We have just lived through a seemingly interminable period of fragile finance and the flaccid freight rates that go with it. All this has, as one might expect, taken its toll on shipping, at its best a volatile business not well suited to the faint-hearted. In particular, the events of the last few years have led to a plethora of cases of charterers dropping charters as if they were hot potatoes. No wonder, then, that the remedies available to owners left in the lurch by such conduct have in turn become extremely significant, and lawyers who know about such things correspondingly in demand.