Pondering the Ships at Sea

 

Massive cargo ships daily enter and leave Charleston’s harbor near Sullivan’s Island. 

This beach is truly and literally the intersection of commerce and recreation. 

Charleston’s state-of-the-art ports are among the busiest in the nation. 

And tourism, especially the thousands of people who flock to the fine and family-friendly Atlantic Ocean beaches in the area, is another key to the region’s economy. 

The container ships look close enough to touch as they seem to hug the beach here at Sullivan’s. To me, there’s a mystery and romanticism to these voyaging vessels. 

I always try to photograph the ship’s name and home port, which is written on the back of the ship, or stern to use the correct nautical term. 

By getting the name and home port I will often google the info later at home. There are usually lots of websites and postings about individual ships. Marinetraffic.com and Vesselfinder.com are two that usually come up first.  

By online searching this vessel Norderney out of St. John’s in the Caribbean, for example, you can learn what type of ship it is, its size (108 meters or 354 feet- that's longer than a football field!), when it was built (2012), its current and recent locations, and ports of calls. What is not usually revealed online is what the ships are carrying in the 20 and 40-foot containers carefully stacked by the thousands for transport to other ports around the country and world. Security is probably the concern there. TMI! (too much information).

There are a handful of shipping lines that frequent Charleston’s ports. They include Evergreen, which is short for Evergreen Marine Corp., a container transportation and shipping company headquartered in Taiwan. 

The Ever Living, homeport in Singapore, looked fully loaded with containers as it steamed out of Charleston on Sunday, July 31. 

Sailing under the flag of Singapore is another way to reference the place written on the stern. 

The Ever Living was bound for New York, which is where it is docked as a write this on Tuesday, August 3 at 6:30 p.m. 

OOCL is another major container shipping company. The letters stand for Orient Overseas Container Line. This one is based in Hong Kong. Atlanta is the name of this vessel and its homeport is Hong Kong, OOCL’s headquarters. 

On the OOCL link for this ship you can learn that the Atlanta was built in 2005 and that it can carry 8063 TEUs. This stands for twenty-foot equivalent units, meaning it can carry that many 20-foot containers. 

What is it like to work and travel on one of these super ships? My curiosity was satisfied somewhat after finding and viewing a 30-minute video about Atlanta. It’s broken up into two parts on YouTube. Here are the links: Part I and Part II. And here is what seems to be a variation on that documentary that is 47 minutes. 

The crew is 22 strong (I've always wondered about how many people are onboard), according to the video, which was produced in 2013. the Atlanta was considered a "megastructure" when it was built 16 years ago. But more recently constructed vessels are much larger with greater TEU capacity. 

That is the Evergreen Ever Living behind me heading out to see. On a business trip to Australia years ago Alesia brought me back this nice Aussie hat. 

Evergreen shipping has a couple dozen "L Class" container ships with "Ever" beginning each ship's name: Ever Lasting, Ever Lawful, and on and on. 

The ships were built by Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korea and CSBC Corp. in Taiwan. That's big business for sure! 

Here are some more photos from our last day of July Sullivan’s Island visit. Station 17 is our favorite spot. 

I was admiring this shade device a man set up. The brand name is Solbello. It lists for $159 online. I’ll have to put it on my wish list. There was a lot of wind on this day. On a still day, I guess it wouldn’t provide much shade. 

The Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse is still a working 24/7 beacon to guide and protect ships at sea.