Of 24 hours. Such an expression may be used in the description of a “working day” and taken by charterers to mean that it comprises 24 hours, which may not be consecutive.
Thus, a charterer could attempt to show that if a port’s normal working hours in any calendar day are only eight, then three calendar days would be necessary to make one working day of 24 hours. He could argue that the insertion of “24 hours” gives him a fixed period of 24 hours per “day”, irrespective of when those hours occur. This would mean that if the gross number of actual hours on which cargo operations were carried out was 48 over six calendar days, the charterer had used up only two “days” of his laytime. An alternative meaning is that a working day of 24 hours means a period of 24 hours from the time of readiness but this period is subject to any exception to laytime. This is a conventional “day”. In a conventional “day” the normal “working hours”, including overtime, count rather than actual working hours.
