Ships in the shop window
Posted on | December 16, 2009 | No Comments
There was a certain grim pathos in a picture taken from the shores of Scotland’s Loch Striven, where half a dozen of Maersk’s finest containerships are rafted up together, with not a container in sight.
These are some of the fastest babies in the business, 4,200 teu apiece, but their only function for the foreseeable future is to afford a useful perch for seagulls and gather guano on the acres of steel decks, while annoying the inhabitants of the lochside villages inordinately, with the noise of their generators and bright lights.
What can you do with a flotilla of express ships, at a time when everyone is boasting of their sustainability, crawling around at 14 knots, and scarcely emitting a whiff of greenhouse gas? Even if there is a sudden demand for their services, you cannot surely, with a clear conscience, weigh their anchors and crank them up to their maximum 28 knots again.
What you could do, of course, is to sell them en bloc to the US government, who could stick a couple of heavylift cranes aboard, carve a big ro-ro ramp in the side and equip itself with a complete fleet of nearly new maritime pre-positioning ships at a bargain price.
Military Sealift Command, which must be getting a trifle worried about the age of its existing fleet, would be delighted no doubt, and while there would be the usual angry remarks from US shipbuilders, they would have lucrative conversion contracts to work on. Let’s face it, there is an excellent precedent in the ex-commercial ro-ros bought from Maersk and other quality operators in the 1980s, but which cannot be kept going for ever.
These joined barge carriers, Seabees, and even the fleet of SL-7s which were the fastest cargo ships the world had ever seen and represented Malcom McLean’s first great miscalculation.
So, come buy. A boat trip from Dunoon is a pleasant excursion, with the ships conveniently ready for inspection. One would suggest that no reasonable offer, especially at the present, will be refused!
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