The fourth quarter¡¯s unexpected cargo rush keeps causing problems in many container ports around the globe. With berths often running at capacity, there is nowadays very little buffer in the transport chain and vessel delays, once they occur, to have more and more knock-on effects. In recent weeks, port congestion has worsened in many places, but the United States¡¯ West Coast and ports in the United Kingdom have been particularly affected.
At the ning of this week, some 30 large container ships had queued-up in the San Pedro Bay, waiting to dock at Los Angeles or Long Beach.
The situation is especially bad in California, because there are quite a number of Transpacific services that only have a single USA call, where the ship is completely emptied and reloaded before heading back to Asia. Unlike in Northern Europe, where a deep-sea loops typically serve four or five ports, many California services realistically cannot just skip a call or move a port up and down in the call sequence to have some operational flexibility. Even in normal circumstances a large container vessel might take two or three days to fully disge and equally long to load. That means some ships sp five or six days in port and it is not uncommon for an outbound ship to meet the vessel that offers the next inbound sailing on the same service just a few miles outside of the port limits. At the ning of this week, vessel positions on the COSCO Group¡¯s ¡®SEA¡¯ (OOCL: SC2¡¯) weekly peak season service illustrate the situation with two ships in port simultaneously, the 9,403 teu JOSEPH SCHULTE at anchorage, and the 5,086 teu CORNELIA I slow-steaming toward Long Beach, where she is due to arrive mid-week. Of course, other carriers and alliances are similarly affec
