Still More and More Boxes

 The continuous stream of ships at PSA Halifax Atlantic Gateway continued today with little let up. The COSCO Shipping Himlayas sailed last evening and this morning another similar sized ship arrived. APL Sentosa (built by Hyundai Samho in 2014) is a regular on the joint Ocean Alliance, CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen, OOCL service. Although not a record setter for Halifax, its 151,015 gt, 150,936 dwt and 13,892 TEU still rates as among the larger callers. Its first call here was April 10, 2020.

Again all but the very highest of the cranes had very little room over the deck load.

Also at the south end terminal was Oceanex Sanderling which used Pier 42 for containers then moved to Pier 36 for RoRo. The ship normally uses Pier 41 (which has a RoRo ramp, but also has the largest cranes). It usually sails on Fridays for St.John's but is now scheduled to sail  late this evening  (Saturday, October 1).

As soon as Oceanex Sanderling cleared Pier 42, Eimskip's Vivienne Sheri D was inbound from offshore anchorage. That leaves ZIM Yokohama still at outside anchorage waiting its turn.

The Vivienne Sheri D is a gearless 10,965 gt, 12,640 dwt vessel built by Naval Gijon SA in Spain in 2009. It has a capacity of 925 TEU including 200 reefer plugs. Intially named Pictor J it became Pictor in 2020 and has been a regular caller for Eimskip on its Rekjavik, Halifax, Portland, Argentia, Green Line service. 

In 2021 the Canadian company Doornekamp Shipping Ltd of Odessa, ON acquired the ship with the intention of operating it for their own fleet once the Eimskip charter elapses. Doornekamp also owns the Peyton Lynn C which runs on Spliethoff's monthly Cleveland Europe Express (CEE-Way) liner service from Antwerp along with Spliethoff ships.

In the non-commercial port activity CCGS Sir William Alexander moved from BIO to Pier 9C then to the SMRT Atlantic buoy off Herring Cove, before returning to BIO. See previous post from August 22.

The ship still looks fresh from its recent refit.

Also from BIO the visting British research vessel RRS James Cook (see previous post from September 27) moved over to Pier 9C. I expect it will be loading some specialist equipment there - I see a huge winch and spools of wire and a crane setting up on the dock.

I neglected to mention in my last post that this is not the ship's first visit to Halifax. It was also here December 22, 2019.

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