Now, of course, we did not predict the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But as the world was recovering from the pandemic and the global need for mobility was on the upswing, we felt there was more upside to the market, and certainly more than what the going time charter rates were pricing in at that time, set us to pivot from a more defensive position to more market exposure. We will now look at some spot voyages in a bit more detail to give you a better sense of how our business works and how we trade our ships. I will show you three case studies starting with Slide 25. Before we look at this slide, remember the base case for a tanker. Base case is every late leg, there is a ballast leg, meaning a ship loads a cargo at the refinery, travels across the ocean to the consumer, then unloads our cargo or as we say, discharges for cargo.
Then she travels empty to the next refinery to load her next cargo. For instance, a ship brings gasoline from the Netherlands across the Atlantic to New York. And she either goes back empty to Europe or empty down to Houston. That’s okay, and we do those voyages too. But to outperform the market, you have to look beyond the base case. So case study number one shows some very long-haul global trades combined. In red, ballast legs or empty voyages. In green are the latent voyages, or you could say, paying voyages. In this case, the vessel is coming from Asia, and a very long haul voyage to Africa. Instead of going empty to your next typical load area, all the way up north to Europe. He only has a short ballast and she picks up an export cargo from West Africa, straight down to Argentina.
From there, she could ballast to the U.S. Gulf or to Europe, but in our case here, she has no ballast at all. A matter of fact, she immediately picks up an export cargo from Argentina back to the east. These voyages combined yielded a 30% premium to average market rates over nearly two quarters. So if your base case is for every laden leg, there’s a ballast leg. Here you can see that for nine laden days, there was only one ballast day. Let me also state that it is not unique to Ardmore to look for ways to combine voyages more creatively. Some of our competitors do as well. But we have worked hard on this, and we believe it shines too in our results. Slide 26 shows the next case study. Also here for every ballast day, there are nine laden days.
In this case, we are looking at a combination of the whole range of successive cargo categories, all products, edible oils and chemical cargoes. Over nearly two quarters, these voyages produced a 45% premium to the market. These great crossover trades can be quite complex. We need the broader organization capability to do these voyages well and profitably, including ship-to-shore. It took us many years bringing this expertise and do forgive me for not going into a whole lot more detail here. But going back to how I described our commercial strategy at the start and back to generating trading options, you can see why this is so important that enables us to combine the right voyages, to not only think about the next voyage, but to already sketch out next follow-on voyages and the rationale behind combining them.
