Maersk Karlskrona

The container ship Maersk Karlskrona departed the Port of Seattle about 8:30 AM today, bound for Vancouver, BC.  Built in 1996, she is 318 meters in length and has a maximum capacity of 7908 TEU (6000 TEU at 14T).

A TEU is a twenty-foot equivalent unit used to describe the capacity of both container ships and container terminals. It is based on the volume of a 20-foot-long (6.1 m) intermodal container, a standard-sized metal box which can be easily transferred between different modes of transportation, such as ships, trains and trucks. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit. Most intermodal containers in use today are 40 feet in length (or 2 TEU's), meaning that the Maersk Karlskrona's true capacity is about 4000 individual containers (or 3000 containers using the 14T assumption). Even at the smaller number, that's 30 trains, each with 100 railcars carrying a single container. Or 3000 tractor rigs pulling a single container on the highway.

TEU capacity is often expressed two ways, with both a maximum capacity and a smaller capacity based on the assumption that each container weighs an average of 14 tons (14T). The largest container ships in the world have a capacity of almost 15000 TEU's, or nearly twice the capacity of the Maersk Karlskrona.

The Maersk Karlskrona departed the Port of Seattle about 8: 30 AM this morning. Within three hours, she was at the Port Angeles, WA pilot station, where her Puget Sound pilot would have disembarked. See http://www.pspilots.org/. She then crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the station near Victoria, BC, where her British Columbia pilot would have boarded. According to the marine automatic identification system (AIS), she arrived at Roberts Bank, BC about 4 PM this afternoon. See http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/default.aspx?mmsi=636091606&centerx=-123.1535&centery=49.01713&zoom=10&type_color=7.

As recently as March 20, she was reported by AIS to be in Rotterdam, and on March 28 she was in the Strait of Gibraltar. She had reached Singapore by April 15 and arrived in Seattle on May 7. See http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/datasheet.aspx?datasource=ITINERARIES&MMSI=63609160.

Just another day in the life of a mid-sized container ship.