Delays on delays

It's been a while since the last update, and fortunately I can say with a lot of relief that our camper has finally made it to the USA, and also cleared customs! It's now legally in the country!

I really need to reflect back on that positive note a lot more than I have been. Because prior and after that big event, I probably got way more involved in the process than was needed.

From a "how-to" perspective I would say that if your import broker is capable, you shouldn't really have to do much of anything after the vehicle has been exported. There is a bit of a hand off between the auction broker and import broker that you need to be involved in, if only to make sure things are going smoothly.

One key thing to pay attention to at this stage is the contents of the bill of lading. You want to make sure that the "Manufacture Year", if it's at all captured on there, is very much correct!

For our camper, which was indeed manufactured November 1994, the bill of lading mistakenly had listed "1995". The vehicle is technically a 1995, but it's not helpful to advance the manufacture year by a whole year! This could have proved disastrous if US customs decided to play hardball. The camper was slated to arrive at port in February, 2020. This at the very least put it in the right year if "1995" was taken as the gospel.

In conjunction with that, the export certificate (the very official document that's basically the next best thing to a title) showed the first date of registration as March 1995. With that in mind, it really meant that there was only a single month of "grey area". The vehicle could not be any newer than March 1995, and I was importing in February 2020. Meaning that one might suggest it could have been manufactured in February 1995 and there would not be any proof otherwise.

This leads into a broader discussion of how all US ports are different. The same set of laws govern all of them I suppose. But how they are all interpreted, and to the severity of which they are interpreted, varies from port to port.

My broker is used to working with the Port of Tacoma. Apparently they are quite notorious for cracking down on importers of Japanese vehicles. It makes sense given that they are a thoroughfare for them, being one of the quickest ports to receive vehicles from Japan. So it was very reasonable then for my broker to raise issue with the date mismatch. They didn't want the vehicle to get caught up in customs purgatory.

Unfortunately, after the vehicle has departed Japan there is nothing which can be done. I attempted to have the bill of lading corrected, but I could not do so. At this point, I had a limited number of days to get all of my evidence in order. The only real counter-action to this issue was trying to produce some convincing paperwork which illustrated the date of manufacture.

There are a few services for that, but they really only produce some PDF document which doesn't hold much weight. I opted to use one since it was only $40, and it honestly made me feel better to have regardless. According to my auction broker, there are more official services in Japan which cost a lot and can dig into vehicle history to produce official documents.

There are also another "option" of looking at the seat belt tag. I haven't confirmed this myself, but some Japanese vehicles have a tag on the belt which is date coded. It is usually only off by a month or two. So it could have helped convince customs that the vehicle was nearer the intended November 1994.

Right, so with the resolution of that on the backburner until it did arrive at port, I spent my remaining time buying parts (of course) and tracking the movement of the camper on marinetraffic.com. I learned a bit after it left Japan that the location beacon (as I called it) only functioned when near land. Otherwise it was up to GPS. But for GPS location of certain ships you have to pay a fee. Not needing to do that, I checked in every day or so until I saw a new position.

I believe it was Hoegh's own website which indicated an arrival date of January 19. That wasn't accurate as far as arrival in the US, but actually indicated when it would show up at the first port of destination. In this case it was the Panama Canal!

Because it was literally up against land during this transitional period, I was able to watch it for a few days in a row. Eventually it made it through and sailed on. I expected it to carry on to the US, but it made an unexpected (to me) stop in Jamaica of all places.

From there, it traveled north and I wondered if it would stop again. Certainly it did, in Florida, and possibly even elsewhere. I sort of stopped watching after a point.

Finally, it had completed its lengthy journey and arrived at the Port of Baltimore.

Here is where some more learning occurred!

As I was saying earlier, all ports are different. There was much insistence from my import broker on the arrival packet of documents being physically presented and stamped by the customs authority during vehicle retrieval. This is true at some ports, but not all. As it turns out, the Port of Baltimore opts to electronically process the whole document packet. There is no physical stamping of the packet as you'd find in Long Beach or Tacoma. That certainly made things easier albeit the amount of angst I underwent was a bit much.

I don't have all the details of what went down, but I think the overall process was something like:

1. Import broker compiles all the needed documents, with signature (recall they had power of attorney).
2. Document package and pickup order is submitted to the driver doing the pickup.
3. Driver gets vehicle, shows the packet to the customs folk, and drives away!

Simple! If I had known it was this way, I would have kept my mouth shut and not gotten involved.

Getting a driver to pull the vehicle from the port was another effort unto itself. I had the help of a shipping company to find said driver. We were up against the "free storage" clock, which was a total of 5 days, not including days the port was closed (Sat/Sun). 5 days wasn't a lot, but we couldn't plan pickup earlier because you don't really know when the vehicle is ready for pickup until after customs releases it. It's just hard to time.

So with 5 days on the clock, we soon found that getting a driver who:

1. ...could drive stick (!?!?)
2. ...had a TWIC card and understood basic port pickup procedure
3. ...had a transport that could load our camper 

...was unlikely. Therefore my shipper opted to split up the responsibility. We just wanted the thing out of port before it started racking up storage fees.

Apparently my shipper had a guy with a TWIC card who could easily move it from the port to a separate storage facility (at $10/day). Some communication snafus meant we'd be running a few days late, but they managed to get it out of the port and into storage. Great! It was nice of them to also shoot me a few photos of it resting in the storage facility (though honestly it just looks like a parking lot with a fence?).

So close...but so far...

Someone wrote all over the windshield! :)

From there, we needed to get the long-haul driver set up. The challenge there was still to find a carrier who would drive so far and also have a trailer able to load the camper. Most long-haul car transports are only meant for regular sized vehicles, being those standard double-decker trailers you see on the road.

At the time of writing this, our current driver proved to be unreliable and never picked up the vehicle. Now the hunt is on for another. I hope the transport price will be a bit less as well because we aren't rushing necessarily to get a driver to move it.