Seems that the Clearing and Forwarding team just cannot get away from getting involved in projects!

In Cape Town the team has been presently busy with managing the protocols and procedures for refit and refurbishing of a high-tech stern trawler. There is a ton of red tape that we were responsible for in order to secure customs’ permission to handle this project. Needless to say that we were successful and the vessel is currently in port for her dry docking and refit.

We also have had to cope with trans-border meat exports. This is an extraordinarily complicated and time consuming task. Our team needs to be present at each loading which takes several hours.

Further afield we handled granite blocks for export from Saldanha. Although this is old hat to us, we have, for the first time, had to deal with snow in Pofadder. Now that seems unlikely but if this were Ripley’s believe it or not – this incident would have featured! Trucks got so badly stuck and delayed that services of additional truckers were required. All’s well that ends well as all the blocks were delivered to Saldanha on time.

In Johannesburg, our team secured the account of a blue chip granite re-worker and have already exported in excess of 35 containers of polished slabs of cut granite for the overseas market. Obviously this has its own set of peculiarities. It is not unknown to happen on occasion that the factory has cut slabs out of sync to container specifications and hence the slabs have to be re-cut! This means that we need someone at the factory to oversee the loading of the containers. Quite time consuming, but once again we are up to the task at hand.

The team in Durban had their hands full with NUTS and more NUTS. In actual fact so many NUTS that we have over supplied to the warehouse and in desperation had to find alternative premises, which is, not easy at all in Durban. Over and above that Trade Ocean’s Durban office can now officially be called the “Meat Guys”!!!