Westwood Shipping News

Swire Shipping announced that Westwood Shipping Lines, a niche vessel operator it acquired in June 2022, has changed its name to Swire Shipping.According to Sire, the rebrand—which took effect February 1—will help Westwood to leverage synergies and capabilities in containers, networks, and projects across the global Swire Shipping network to better serve customers throughout North America, Japan, South Korea and China.“The integration of Westwood Shipping Lines reflects our continued investment and expansion in the North Pacific.

Longtime Maersk executive Jack Mahoney has been named president and CEO of Westwood Shipping Lines, Inc., a Puyallup, Wash. based independent conbulk liner carrier in the north Transpacific trade. He succeeds Guy Stephenson who is retiring after 13 years in the role. Stephenson will continue in a support role as Executive Advisor/General Counsel.Mahoney’s recent posts with Maersk include three years as President of Maersk in Canada and, more recently, he has been Vice President of the Automotive Industry in Florham Park…

Westwood Shipping’s final call to Oregon’s Port of Portland will be May 21, signaling the exit of the last remaining container shipper making regular calls to the port’s Terminal 6. The shipping company stated in a letter to customers that economics of a single call per month do not justify continued service at the port. The Puyallup, Wash.-based Westwood Shipping called Terminal 6 with container service since July 2010, but suspended regular calls in April 2015 following  the exit of Hanjin and Hapag-Lloyd in March 2015. Westwood then returned with monthly export calls in July 2015, taking about 150 containers of hay, grass seed, dried fruits, other mixed agricultural goods and paperboard for export to Japan.

Container barge service is back on the upper Columbia and Snake rivers.The Up river Container Barge-Rail Shuttle will help importers and exporters in eastern Washington, Oregon and Idaho move containerized agricultural products to markets in Asia. An informal partnership including Northwest Container Service, Tidewater Barge and the ports of Morrow, Lewiston and Portland helped facilitate the return of this service. The first barge is currently loading at the Port of Lewiston this week and expected to get underway Thursday. The new service would address key issues driving up the cost of transportation in the wake of losing direct carrier service at Terminal 6 in Portland earlier this year— loss of barge service, container availability and cost of trucking to Puget Sound ports.

Hapag-Lloyd has notified its Pacific Northwest customers that it has ended its service to Portland because of “schedule integrity” problems. The last vessel to call at Portland as part of Hapag-Lloyd’s MPS was the 4,250-teu Seaspan Dalian (built 2002) which sailed on 28 March. With the Hapag-Lloyd exiting its operations on its Mediterranean Pacific Service (MPS), Portland has lost its second container shipping company. Earlier this year, South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping announced it would stop servicing Oregon's only deep water port terminal, too. The two carriers made up almost all of the terminal’s business. The only remaining line now calling at Portland is Westwood, with only one call per month.

The arrival of the 'M/V Westwood Pacific' at the Nanaimo Port Authority’s Duke Point terminal marks the first such berthing at the Port’s facilities and will provide a direct link to Asia. Westwood Shipping Lines operate a dedicated break bulk and container service to Asia and have been evaluating the Vancouver Island market for some time. This trial call, with express service to Japan, Korea and feeder service to other Asian ports, is expected to lead to a regular service, providing Vancouver Island manufacturers the option to ship their goods from Nanaimo. The Nanaimo Port Authority (NPA) has been working with terminal partner, DP World Vancouver…

Port Metro Vancouver is proud to honour 11 recipients of its Blue Circle Award for 2010. Launched last year, this award recognizes the most eco-friendly vessels that call at the Port. The Blue Circle Award acknowledges industry commitment to Port sustainability by recognizing the extraordinary environmental achievements of ships that participate in Port Metro Vancouver’s EcoAction Program for Shipping. The program offers a financial incentive for cruise and shipping lines to reduce ship emissions.

Scheduled for a September 2003 release, the next major revision of the 3-D product modeling software for shipbuilding and offshore platforms from Albacore Research Ltd., ShipConstructor2004, will include a full Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning module (HVAC). HVAC is a fully integrated member of the ShipConstructor suite of Structure, Automatic and Manual Nest, NC Code generation, Outfit, Pipe, Fairing, and Lofting tools. To facilitate automatic report generation, HVAC makes full use of ShipConstructor's SQL Server product database. As with all ShipConstructor modules, HVAC is a full 3-D modeling package; this reduces drafting errors and time-to-production. With ShipConstructor, HVAC ducts are full-featured AutoCAD entities.

Not all stability software is made equal. Even if all commonly available stability programs were of the same quality, virtually all of them are designed first and foremost for conventional vessels - and it's no secret that the unique characteristics of offshore platforms demand capabilities not usually required for ships. Rig stability is a very critical issue, and it can also be quite complex. What rig operators need is software that can constantly monitor and predict stability in any combination of circumstances; but what they don't need is an interface as complex as the problem. Enter Autoload Rig. Only recently released, yet already installed on more then 15 platforms, Autoload has also been chosen for the biggest floating rig ever built: Thunderhorse.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta announced the successful completion of a test of new technology that will help to secure cargo containers entering ports and border crossings throughout the United States. The test, carried out through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) program, involved the use of electronic seals (E-Seals), a radio frequency device that transmits shipment information as it passes reader devices and indicates if a container has been compromised. “This new technology will help to enhance the security of our nation’s transportation system by enabling us to track cargo shipments into the United States,” Secretary Mineta said.

Open-hatch bulk carrier technology, championed by specialist operators in the North American trade, is to be taken an important stage further through the adoption of deck gantries promising gains of up to 50 percent in cargo handling productivity. Whereas a 40-ton lift capacity is the norm for the traveling cranes fitted on such vessels, which are typically heavily involved in pulp and paper transportation, each of a new series of 48,000-dwt bulkers is to be equipped with a pair of Konecranes-Munckloader gantries plated at 68-tons apiece. Designed for optimized handling and stowage of a wide range of unitized forestry goods, industrial cargoes, and containers, with the hatchways opening out to the full width of the holds, the latest newbuilds have been ordered from Oshima Shipbuilding.