Actually I could call this random ULCVs 16, since I haven’t done one of these in over a year.  However, I prefer to call this “random ships” because what I called by that title a generation back in 2007 and 2008 all looked very different.  And, for containerized cargo, ULCVs are not as unique as they were a few years back.  Here are a few from the past few months, starting in February with a welcoming name YM Warmth, built in 2015.

Ever Fine was built in 2021.  Here’s an image of her under construction.  She’s the Ever F- class, of which Ever Forward became well-known for a while, actually 35 days of infamy, not 15 minutes of fame.

Wan Hai A10 is a product of 2023.  Check her out soon after launch here, high out of the water.

ONE Stork dates from 2018.  Here’s more of the bird class.

Thalassa Axia dates from 2014.   Sister ship Thalassa Pistis appeared here a few years ago.  Here’s the class.

Ain Snan Express, curiously named for an Iraqi minority that view John the Baptist as the final prophet, has been in service since 2012.

All the above ULCVs I saw before March 26, 2024, the date Dali took the Key Bridge down,  A few days ago, Cezanne–a ULCV virtually identical to Dali–came into port, and it gave me pause.  I remember clearly checking the time on my phone that night and seeing the unbelievable headline about Dali and that bridge, especially since a few days earlier Dali had been in the sixth boro.

I think of ships a little different these days.  They are remarkable machines, and they are instruments that make our lifestyles possible, but they are immense and bulls in china closets.  Maybe I need a better simile, porcupines in a balloon shop or some such.

Not all container ships in the boro are ULCVs.  Savannah Express clearly is a ULCV, but MSC Samirah III, which dates from 2009 and has its own cranes, is a feeder vessel, running between smaller ports and larger ones like NYC/NJ.  Her capacity is just over 2500 teu.

CMA CGM Zephyr is among the newer ULCVs shown here.  As large as Zephyr–and others of her class like Osiris, Apollon, Adonis,  are at 15k+ teu, six times greater than MSC Samirah III, but much larger ones carrying almost 10k more teu sail the seas.

As of a few months back, the largest capacity ULCVs were over 24k!!

All this brings me to Norwegian Getaway.  If you subscribe to the Attlantic, check out this hilarious Gary Shteyngart article about his week on Icon of the Seas.  His first sentence contains the following words:  vertigo, nausea, distress.  A very different review of a very different cruise–on a Jones Act small ship plying US waters– can be read here.

All photos, any errors, WVD, who’s off the grid a few days and the blog is in the charge of the wordpress robots deep in the tugster bilge these days, unless they descended deeper in the tugster Trieste-replica bathyscaphe named Tristesse.  We’ve gone not high-tech but deep-tech.

Somewhere in the past few days I’ve read about plans to further deepen the boro’s shipping channels.  Here’s lots of info at the USACE site.