TEFC Lumber Carrier 2

This vessel–Mozu Arrow– intrigued me about two months ago, but I never saw it.  I’m grateful to Mike Abegg for these photos then.

I followed it on AIS, thinking maybe it’d lead to some Equatorial places, maybe to load tropical woods…  but instead, after hitting lots of US East Coast ports, it headed to Europe.

G2 Ocean has quite the diverse fleet, including some TEFCs, totally enclosed forestry carriers.

So when I noticed they were back in Red Hook–from Europe!!– I decided to take a boat ride.

Notice the two side hatches on the port side.

And, inside that RORO-like space, cranes operate, here discharging 10 bundles at once.  In high school I had a job offloading lumber, board by board, standing on the truck handing one board down to my boss–on a kiln rail car, as a furniture factory rep put down spacers so that air could get between the planks.  He also measured or scaled each plank, making notations on his clipboard to determine how much my boss got paid and to create an inventory of how much wood they’d put in the drying kiln.

Here, that’s all been done, so the pace is faster. 

But I still wondered where all this wood was coming from.  In the past, wood might come from the tropics but in the form of logs, forest giants, their buttressed roots cut off,  that might have fit only one log to a trailer.

So here’s the clue, and you can be sure I looked it up, especially when there’s an “over the top” slogan . . . perfection in timber.  Where might this be coming from?

It turns out this is European wood from forests and mills in central and eastern Europe, especially Romania.  I have to be honest . . . I’m not thrilled.  I know they likely buy our stuff, but don’t we have forests and mills in the US?  I’m guessing it’s planed timber, but there may be other products here.

All photos and sentiments, WVD.

As of yesterday evening, Mozu Arrow departed Red Hook for Baltimore.