Without any of the publicity that accompanied previous record-breaking ships, a container vessel capable of handling 12 562 twenty-foot containers slipped into Durban harbour last week.
|||Without any of the publicity that accompanied previous record-breaking ships, a container vessel capable of handling 12 562 twenty-foot containers slipped into Durban harbour last week. She was the MSC Fabiola, a German-owned vessel with the capacity to carry 1 000 more containers than the previous record holder, the 11 660-TEU (twenty-foot container equivalents) MSC Luciana.
As with the previous very large container ships, MSC Fabiola came in not fully loaded, because the port still lacks a berth deep enough to accommodate a fully laden ship of this size. This is despite the widening and deepening of the harbour entrance channel more than three years ago.
MSC Fabiola looks set to become a regular caller at Durban, having been deployed on the MSC pendulum service between Singapore and north Europe which has a port rotation of Singapore, Durban, Ngqura, northern Europe, Cape Town, Ngqura, Durban, Singapore.