Field notes
What a week of Poti gate records actually shows
Discharge can look finished while the truck is still a rumour. Gate-out is the first honest inland clock — if you bother to keep it.
Poti is not a spreadsheet. It is a sequence: vessel, yard stack, release, gate-out, and then the East–West clock that Tbilisi planners treat as if it started at berth. A week of gate records, read beside the inland appointment book, usually shows a quieter story than the shipping line’s circular.
Discharge completion is a terminal fact. It is not a truck. We keep finding inland bookings set to the discharge rumour, then surprise when gate-out sits six or eleven hours later because a hold, a missing document, or a stack shuffle never entered the warehouse chat.
One week we read last spring, the median gate-out looked respectable. The tail did not. A handful of boxes ate the next day’s dock in Tbilisi because nobody had drawn the tail — only the median. The stores felt the tail. The KPI felt the median.
If you run a Poti-fed yard, ask for gate-out timestamps as a habit, not as a special project. Pair them with the first door time inland. The hours between those two stamps are the corridor. Everything else is commentary.
We cannot stand on the quay for you unless you hire the walk. We can tell you whether your own records already contain the picture and you have been averaging it away.