Tug fleet gathers for final exit of Maersk ships from Loch Striven

The last two Maersk container ships laid up in Loch Striven are scheduled to leave tomorrow (1st July 2010). Maersk Brooklyn and Maersk Bentonville are to leave together, each in the control of two Svitzer tugs.

The operation is not straightforward and is wind dependent. The ships can only be moved at under 25 knots and katabatic winds are an obstructive characteristic of Loch Striven. These are winds that come barrelling down hillsides from the top – and Loch Striven has long hills on each side. Obviously when such winds hit the water level they bend across its surface, seizing hold of any objects on it – and ships offer great windage.

The tugs are the central key to an operation of this kind.

Moving both ships at more or less this same time requires four tugs.  Two Clyde-based Svitzer tugs are in the fleet – Anglegarth and Milford. Two more have come in from other ports.

Svitzer Maltby is from the Tyne – taking passage north and through the Pentland Firth to reach the Clyde. She arrived in the Clyde yesterday (29th June).

Today (30th June), the three were joined by Svitzer Musselwick, coming up the west coast from her base at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire in south Wales.

Musselwick is one of the so-called ‘Wick’ class, essentially a stretched version of the ‘M’ class to which Milford, the first of the class, delivered to Greenock in late 2004 and Maltby, the third of the line, belong. Maltby arrived in Britain in November 2005 and was on duty in the Tees by December that year.

The ‘M’ class were built in Lithuania and the ‘Wick’ class in China. The ‘Wicks’ – there are three in the class – are 3.3m longer and have a extra deck in their superstructure. They had a tough delivery voyage from China, including having to take a longer route to take them clear of pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden.

When they got to Europe, all three had to have lengthy voyage repairs and modifications in Vigo in northern Spain before joining the nine-strong tug fleet in Milford Haven in early 2009.

So this is the international team of powerhorses assembled to see Bentonville and Brooklyn safely out of Loch Striven and up to the Tail of the Bank anchorage off Greenock tomorrow.

We will be there with our film unit on one of the ships and a stills photographer on the shore.

Captain David Johnstone has been brought back from leave to see this delicate operation through. Already one of Maersk’s most experienced Captain’s, he knows the B-class well, having brought some of them out of the German Stralsund shipyard where they were built – and his experience of this raft, of its arrivals and departures and of Loch Striven, covers its entire life cycle in this still and secret Argyll loch.

Kate Sanderson will also be on board. She is the member of Maersk’s London-based PR team who has led the company’s mutually productive engagement with the Loch Striven community, its donations to a wide range of local charities, community and conservation projects and a series of visits to the ships by people from the community and by local and visiting journalists.

She and Captain Johnstone have rather become honorary Argyllachs and we hope to keep in touch with them.

There is something momentous about tomorrow, even in anticipation. Let’s hope we can comprehend it before we need – very soon now – to write about it.