16 | September | 2008 | tugster: a waterblog

I learned a new term today . . . parcel tanker. According to Poten & Partners, it’s a “ship fitted to segregate a large number of products.Some …, called chemical carriers, can handle more than a dozen materials simultaneously.Most of these ships have tanks made of stainless steel or lined with inert, easily cleaned coatings.This equipment permits carriage of high-purity or corrosive materials, or simply the use of tanks for a succession of assorted materials without contamination problems.The trade likes to call these flexible vessels ‘drugstore ships’.”

But does anything alarm you about the foto below?

Low as it seems, Stolt Helluland didn’t add oils and drugs to the waters of the KVK, however. But look at these other shots here, showing her less heavily loaded. Here also.

So I imagine this vessel offloading in Port Newark: orange juice in silo 37, walnut oil in 66, sulfuric acid in 07, yes–bowsprite–chianti in 22, oil of olay in 65, cheap whisky in 99, foodcolor red 8 in 08, and somewhere goes the cod liver oil, molasses, and honey. And then a fleet of trucks arrives to haul the goods to a collection of factories, groceries, liquor stores, and pharmacies somewhere north or south of I-80.

But I hope no tempests come up before Helluland gets to port. So is this vessel unusually low in the water? And where is this parcel tanker’s namesake? Answer below.