Posted at high sea, or how to send a letter from a yacht

You've probably heard that you can send a postcard from a ship without a postage stamp, or with a stamp of your own country. If not, then learn the correct methods of sending High Sea Mail.

Even though fewer and fewer postcards are being sent, a large number of friends who sail with me ask how to send a postcard from a foreign voyage stuck with the postage stamps of our country. And can you send one without a stamp and will it arrive? Indeed, you can.

In 1897, the handwritten term Paquebot was used for the first time to mark a letter posted from the deck of a ship sailing on the open sea. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) agreed on the right to pay for letter mail with the stamps of the country under whose flag a given ship sailed. The condition, however, was that such a letter be posted on the open sea, in international waters.

The initially handwritten Paquebot turned into rectangular or round stamps, impressed on the ship's deck by a postal clerk or a deck officer assigned to this duty. Since it wasn't precisely defined what such a marking should look like, and they were used all over the world, many variations on the theme appeared:

• Packet Boat
• Ship Mail
• Loose Ship Letters
• Paketboot
• Schiffsbrief
• Paquete
• Paquetboat
• Posted at the high seas
• Posted at high seas
• Posted on the sea
• Posted at sea

More such markings and scans of such letters can be found on the website paquebot.info.

Today, when we have access to the Internet, and the prices of postage stamps don't differ significantly across many countries, this kind of stamping serves merely to keep an old tradition alive. Post offices in seaside countries very often honour letters posted this way.

How did this custom reach us? Back when the People's Republic of Poland was in place, the average wage was 20-30 dollars. The cost of a postage stamp, especially abroad, was very expensive. That's why we very eagerly reached for the old regulations, which allowed us to communicate by means of letters.

It's also worth taking a look at what the law tells us on this subject, namely: the Regulations of the Agreement concerning postal payment services, the Letter Post Regulations and the Regulations concerning postal parcels, drawn up in Bern on 11 November 2008.

How do you correctly send a High Sea Mail postcard?

1. After mooring in port, go to the post office of the given country,
2. Buy a postcard and the postage stamps of the given country, and don't be a #cheapskate,
3. Fill in the postcard and drop it into the posting box.

Today the prices of postage stamps, especially within the European Union, don't differ significantly from one another. To keep the tradition alive, mark such a letter with a stamp next to the correctly affixed postage stamps that you bought.

Of course, if you don't affix a postage stamp, or you affix our country's postage stamp, such a postcard will in most cases reach the addressee anyway, and that's solely thanks to the courtesy of the post offices. But for the sake of those few złoty, is it worth coming across as a cheapskate?