Leaving port

 It’s 19:30 and it’s raining, no not raining, teeming down. The sort of rain that comes at you at an angle and you are wet overall. Well, well a good start to my first action on the ship. Report to stations for leaving port and my station is aft, apparently called the poop deck!

I stepped outside and down the ladder to the after deck trying to avoid all the rubbish and dunnage still lying on deck. As it was dark, and the deck lights were somewhat dim it was not easy.

I am glad Colin told me to put on my oilskins on over my uniform to protect it. So, with these sticky oiled cloth waterproofs I gently steered along the after deck.

Suddenly I tripped over a wire and went “arse over tit” careering along the oily wet deck on my stomach. My brand-new uniform cap with its white cover went spinning into the darkness. What a start.

Then I heard a voice, “Here it is sahib” and there in front of me grinning from ear to ear was an Indian man with bright white teeth! What is this. So, I retrieved my cap, now somewhat less than white and accompanied this person to the poop deck. There were more Indian crew. They were chattering away in a language I could not apprehend. How an earth am I going to cope as a junior officer and communicate with them.

On the poop deck I searched for the Second Officer who was in charge of the after end of the ship.

“Oh nae, not another snot nosed new apprentice, just my luck”, said the officer in a strong Glaswegian accent. Well, it looks as though my luck is out, not only Indian languages but also a Scottish accent to deal with. Oh well.

“See that silver-coloured telephone on the bulkhead over there? That is your station to relay messages to and from the bridge, understand”? Yes sir, I replied eying a box on a wall. So, bulkhead is a wall, I must remember these terms.

Open it, you idiot! Oh, I see there was a clip holding the lid on revealing a telephone handset and a big silver button. “If it rings, you pick it up and repeat the message and then relay it to me. To ring, you press the button and then speak into the handset, OK”?

Yes sir, I replied, somewhat awed by the responsibility placed on my shoulders. Nothing compared with this, being rugby captain in the under 16 team was not a patch on being part of a communication team moving a 10,000-ton ship out of a dock into a river at night. Very exciting!

Water started to seep down inside the neck of my oilskins but what could I do about it?

Eyed the telephone and as though I had wished it, it rang. I picked up the handset and voice that appeared to come from another world, much worse than those train station announcements said; “Single up”. What an earth does that mean but dutifully I repeated it to the caller who then hung up. “Single Up” I shouted to make myself heard to the Second Officer in the rain and wind. OK, he said, then complete turmoil it seemed to me as the crew ran here and there as ropes were moved to the steam winch which let out great clouds of steam before gathering speed and making any conversation impossible! After been slacked off the ropes were hauled in dripping wet and coiled down on deck. Finally, the noise abated, and I noticed that we had only one rope over the stern to the shore and on the main deck one wire leading forward to a bollard on the quay. So, this what singled up means.

“Singled up aft”, shouted the Second Officer. I lifted the phone and repeated the message. No reply! What did they say, said the Scottish second officer? Nothing, I replied. “Did you press the button first”? Sorry sir, I forgot. “Jesus Christ, well do it”. Dutifully followed orders and received acknowledgement of our status aft.

A tug appeared on the starboard side and the crew secured a wire rope to a set of bitts on the main deck. What is this for I wondered?

I did not know was that the ship was in the Vittoria dock in Birkenhead and needed to navigate through the dock and out through a lock into the river Mersey. The Vittoria dock was built in the first part of the 1900’s as part of the larger Birkenhead dock system. The dock was named after the Battle of Vittoria in 1813 when Wellington led an army to take back the Spanish peninsula. However there has always been confusion over the name and many calls it the Victoria dock in reference to Queen Victoria.

All the major liner services from Liverpool used the dock including, Blue Funnel, Clan Line, City Line and Brocklebanks.

The Vittoria dock was one of the innermost docks in the Birkenhead dock system and required the ship to pass through other docks before reaching the lock into the river Mersey. It was going to be a long and wet evening!

Then the telephone rang again. “Let go everything” from this ethereal voice so I relayed it to the Second Officer. Frantic activity with the steam winches clunking away bellowing steam until finally the stern rope and the main deck spring wire were on board.

“All gone aft”, bellowed the second officer a few minutes later. After having confirmation of the message from the bridge the whole stern of the ship started to vibrate and over the side the dirty dock water was churned up into a frothy stream. The propeller was turning, and the tug gave a single blast on its whistle and started to pull us from the dockside.

Wow I am on first voyage, what next? Well, I was soon to find out!

For a period of about an hour we were pulled and pushed gently down through the dock to the lock separating the dock system from the river. We entered the lock without our tug, the inner lock gates closed, and the ship descended as water was pumped out of the lock. Once we reached the same water level as the river the outer lock gates opened and a new river tug connected to our bow to assist us in turning in the river.

The rain continued to sluice down and by now not only was I wet through, but I was shivering from the cold. Not liking this at all, I thought.

Once in the river and the ships bow turned seawards, we let go the tug, disembarked the dock pilot, and took on a river pilot. This all happened with the use of a ladder made of rope with wooden steps that was slung over the side of the ship from the main deck. So climbing and descending rope ladders down a ships side looks like being a new experience!

The telephone rang. Finished with stations aft was the message and the Second Mate shouted that we were finished with our work on leaving port. Turing to me he said, “laddie, get back to your cabin, dry yourself off and have a nap because in an hour and half you start watches with me on the bridge”. Sounded like good advice as I scurried forward to our cabin on the boat deck.

 

Shipping for dummies - containerisation

 

Globalisation and Containerisation

The birth of the container

Background

Technology has always brought about changes in transport and shipping is no exception. It was the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800’s that brought us steel and the steam engine that enabled the birth of the steamship. The creation of the general cargo liner and its scheduled voyages brought secure and regular services globally.

This lasted well into the 1950’s when again technology changed the face of international shipping. The general cargo liner provided a custom transport service at a price. It was labour intensive and very slow with many disruptions of delivery from producer to consumer. Delays in the port because of port congestion did not help.

Deregulation

After the Second World war nations tightly controlled their economies using trade and tariff tools to boost income and setting transport prices nationally and regionally. The result was that transport and shipping costs were high and production and manufacturing of goods and services was relatively local. British cars were produced in the UK with British finance for a British market. Export of cars was relatively low.

It became clear in the 1960’s that this approach was restrictive and not boosting nationally economies as planned.

So, deregulation of trade and tariff barriers allowing market forces to take effect under GATT (The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and WTO (The World Trade Organization) control came into being.

It also enabled services such as finance and transport to operate globally. Thus, a bank could offer financial services in another country and freight rates were opened to market forces.

The result was globalisation. Manufacturing and production now were free to locate wherever the cost regime was favourable to their enterprise. Nissan opened car production in the UK. Honda opened the first Japanese owned car assembly plant in the USA in 1982 and shocked competitors with its ability to organise the timely delivery of engines[1].  The notion of physical location of manufacturing with nationality was broken. -Today we are unaware of the location of many parts of production.

China, now a member of GATT and WTO, could offer low-cost production across a wide range of goods and services and we know the outcome. Western Europe and the USA lost a major part of their manufacturing industries.

Car making is one of the most complex activities with many levels of inputs with supplies crossing national boundaries many times. Many parts are plastic originating in the movement of crude oil and its refining into plastic resin and then into bumpers, steering wheels, and audio consoles, all manufactured in different location and dependent on a global logistics chain to ensure the parts arrive “just in time” for assembly.

As a result, containers carried less of finished consumer products and more of the parts and materials for production.

Unitisation

Assembling production items into larger units reduced handling and transport costs. Whether it be bottles, boxes or chests, bottles of orange juice, boxes of wine and chests of tea it changed the method of handling both on land and for maritime transport. However, the focus was on the producer and the transport firm and shippers had to deal with a variety of units and handling methods to transport the goods.

It was only later when the discipline of logistics came into being that a systems approach to production, transport and delivery of goods placed the transport requirements within a global logistics chain. The concern was not only about ship arrival in port but whether the goods train or lorries could meet their deadline to deliver the goods to the ship on time.

This brought about the need for a standardised unit load across all forms of transport. Herald the start of a process of specialisation in the shipping industry.

Specialisation

Technology can be seen as a response to a market need and so it is in the shipping industry. To lower operating costs, improve cargo handling methods, exploit the economies of scale in large scale volume unit ships and meet the specialised demands for the carriage of some goods spawned a whole new range of shipping services. Stopford[2] argues that specialised ships are an identified niche market covering five categories of shipping through lowered operating costs that undercut other ships such as bulk carriers. It can be argued that specialisation covers a wider spread in the shipping market. Oil tankers, container ships and dry bulk carriers are also specialised ships based on the cargo they carry or the standard unit of carriage. So, specialisation has been a recurring feature of shipping development over many decades so that today the notion of break bulk cargo and the general cargo ship is no longer an important feature in the shipping market. Containerisation is one such specialisation that has radically changed seaborne transport.

The birth of the shipping container

[3]The origins of the use of containers to ship goods can be traced back to the late 18^th century in England when an enterprising man designed wooden boxes to haul coal by horses from the coal mine to canal barges for further shipment.[4] Since that time there has been many attempts both on land and at sea to use unitisation to reduce handling costs of cargo. However, it was not until 1955 when an American trucking company owner Malcom McLean built the first intermodal container as a steel box with corner twist lock fittings that standardised ship transport became a reality. He converted a 2^nd world war T2 tanker to carry containers on deck whilst also carrying oil.

From this small experiment in shipping technology exploded the birth of global containerisation.

[5]The first container ship carried 58 containers in 1956 whereas today the largest container ships carry around 20,000 TEU’s. The exploitation of the economies to be gained in scaling up the size of ships and reducing the unit cost of transporting

containers started a competition between shipping companies. It started with Maersk and the E class Emma Maersk built in 2006. The biggest ship ever built in its class with a gross tonnage of 171,000 GT, a capacity of 14000 TEU driven by a giant diesel engine producing 81MW. McKinsey in its report of the future of containers suggest the peak of container ship capacity has not been reached and 50,000 TEU ships may come in the future.

[6]The competition responded and the size of vessels increased to over 20,000 TEU. In 2021 the largest container ship in the world is the Ever Ace from Evergreen shipping of Taiwan with a capacity of 23,992 TEU. With a length of 400 metres, a beam of 62 metres and a draft of 13.4m it is a giant ship.

A consequence of this competition was a series of mergers that reduced the number of container shipping companies. Today the five largest companies control over 60 percent of the world’s container trade.[7]

The weak link

A global supply chain is only as good as its ability to function effectively. Larger container ships demanded new and larger port facilities. Large land areas adjacent to the quayside utilising fully automated handling equipment both at the quay side and in the storage area radically changed the demand for dock labour. Less manual work with fewer dockers with skills to operate container cranes and stackers became the norm. Many traditional ports and dock areas were unable to meet the criteria required for container operations. As Professor Bird noted in his book “the march to the sea” was the inevitable result of larger vessels with deeper drafts.[8]

These larger ships also demanded improved seamanship to manoeuvre such high unwieldy ships at low speed. Many port pilots needed further training to meet these new demands.

The COVID effect

Nobody could anticipate the effect of this global virus on the global supply chain, but it has left its mark.

Firstly, the outbreak of the virus in China shut much of the production in that country and reduced the demand for container ships. As the virus spread, so isolation and quarantine of individuals around the world and especially in Europe and the USA changed the pattern of consumer spending. No longer able to travel their surplus money was used on consumer products and home projects. So now there was a massive demand for materials and services that could not be fully met. A classic example was the production of computer chips that reduced manufacturing capacity for smartphones, computers, car parts and consequently delays and price rises resulted. Once production came on stream again, the supply of containers could not meet the demand and the freight rates for a container more than quadrupled[9] and container ships were fully employed. Now, the ports could not handle the massive increase in traffic and as of September 2021 there is the biggest congestion of container ships in American and European ports producing further delays in delivery.

The question now is whether all the goods will arrive as planned!

 

 

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[1] Levinson, Marc: Outside the box: How globalisation changed from moving stuff to spreading ideas:

[2] Stopford, Martin (Maritime Economics,3^rd. edition) page 470

[3] Courtesy of MobilBox UK (https://www.mobilbox.co.uk/history-shipping-container/1472)

[4] Ripley, David (1993). The little Eaton Gangway and Derby canal (2nd ed.) Oakwood Press. ISBN 0-85361-431-8

[5] McKinsey & Company: Container Shipping: The next 50 years, 2017

[6] Courtesy of the Taiwan English News August 8^th 2021

[7] McKinsey & Company: Container Shipping: The next 50 years, 2017

 

[8] Bird,J.H: Seaports and seaport terminals: 1971

[9] The Economist; September 18^th-24^th 2021: page 61