Route pack,
There is a good reason to keep things silent on Merchant shipping and the companies (probably among the strongest financial and political companies in the world) are not really ready to open up things. They like to keep things as tight as possible as the market in shipping is pretty hard. If some company sees a commercial/technological “hole”, they will try to fill it and avoid anyone else to benefit from their technology/ideas.
I’m interested too Turbinia 😉 What do you want to know about the container vessels?
Here are some of my pictures onboard the MSC Lucy, 324m long, speed of 27kts with a 90,000hp engine, can take around 8,800TEU, although as you know they never really take that amount.
As you can see only the three lowest containers are secured to the deck with rods, everything above it is only attached to the container below and next to it. Not really safe. You can imagine what the result is when they stack them 8 high on the deck in bad weather… They run away easily 😀
The muscle to move this thing:
And the CO2 room, all hatches are pretty well protected by this system with its sensors and gas, over 500 bottles:
Sailing them is NO fun at all. On navigation, they are too fast, you have to overtake all the others and that’s pretty annoying (although it does give some action in your watch), they also became pretty large and hence overtaking is not an easy job when you’re in Singapore Strait or other narrow passages.
The view is also very limited and manoeuvring such vessels on your own is out of the question, you always need a pilot, also because those ships have to be put very correctly in place in comparison to the cranes (can’t use automatic mooring winches either as the ship will start to run around the quay and hence will again lose the correct position).
In the old days calculations on stability etc. were done onboard. Nowadays that became impossible. The main concerns of loading these beasts are:
a) stability
b) dangerous goods (separation/stowage)
c) easy acces, what has to go out first has to get in last
With 20 or 30 containers it’s still possible, but not with 3,000!
Add to it that most of these big ships have a bunch of slots for refrigerated containers (also called reefers, taken from the old designation “reefer” as a refrigerated fruit carrier), and hence have to be taken in account too.
Another annoying point is that you hardly have a clue of what’s onboard. Some guys succeed in putting a bulldozer or steel coils in containers without lashing it correctly. It’s inside the container, so lashing isn’t really your concern. Of course when the ship gets into bad weather these goods start moving and often just bang through the container side resulting in dangerous situations.
All in all it’s a very high tech (and predominately fast and stressful) business and they have to send everything around. If a ship calls in on Shangai and afterwards heads to Rotterdam, they have to send the loading arrangement and requirements from Shangai to Rotterdam. Then they can see in Rotterdam which containers have to get moved and where they have to position the cranes to do this in the most efficient way. (this is also counts for short trades in which the ships are sometimes only hours away when the loading arrangement arrives, so they have to hurry to get everything fixed when the ship arrives)
The small straddle carriers (“elephants”) are all guided by satellite and when they receive a container from the big crane, they know exactly where to move it on the terminal.
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