At 05:12, the Andrew Foss tug sails out to meet the Hapag-Lloyd container ship, Rotterdam Express. The Rotterdam Express is 965 feet long and 105 feet wide, with an overall container capacity of 4,890 TEU (twenty foot equivalents, in other words if the ship carried only twenty foot containers, it would carry 4,890 of them) and 370 reefer plugs for refrigerated containers. Built in the year 2000, its top speed is 24 knots or 28 miles per hour, its port of registry is Hamburg, Germany. On this morning it is underway to offload at Terminal 18 on the east waterway of Harbor Island. A Vancouver, B.C. photoblog has a beautiful post about another cargo vessel calling port there, it is worth a look here.
Thats a lot of containers! Seeing this I can understand how containers can get washed over the side in heavy weather.
This type of ship is so much more colorful with all the various bins stacked on deck compared to the one I saw. It’s actually interesting to think a minute on how much transportation goes on that we never think about. I bet society is very reliant on these ships, but nobody really knows how they work or what they carry etc.!
Thanks Kat for your thoughtful comment… I think most people never give it a thought, just like they never really think about where their food comes from either!