April 13 - It is well known that project forwarding requires plenty of out of the box thinking to operate successfully.
For Spanish forwarder, Coordinadora Internacional de Cargas, tasked with shipping six reactors from Yokohamato the Al Jubail refinery in Saudi Arabia, that meant overcoming natural and man-made challenges, as well as the problems presented by OOG cargoes themselves - with weights between 311 and 688 tonnes, each some 37 m long
For the ocean transport, Coordinadora chartered a new ship, Beluga Stavanger offering a combined lifting capacity of 1,400 tonnes - something necessitated by the large lifting distances that the reactors would have to travel from barge to ship in Yokohama
With the vessel due to load in Yokohama on March 13, Coordinadora personnel arrived on March 9, only to be caught up in the problems caused by the huge earthquake which hit Japan on March 11.
Despite the earthquake, Beluga Stavanger commenced loading March 14, and then Beluga Chartering filed for insolvency on March 16. Loading operations stopped, and did not resume until March 25 when the ship sailed for Saudi Arabia.
The ship is currently in the Indian Ocean having left Mundra earlier today and Coordinadora says it expects the cargo to arrive in Saudi Arabia next week.
