Savannah Welcomes First Vessel of Maersk Sealand Service

The Maersk Sealand TP2 Service via Savannah commenced this week with t
he inaugural call by the Sealand Voyager at the Georgia Ports Authorit
y Garden City Terminal on Tuesday, July 11, 2000.
The weekly service is expected to carry in excess of 20,000 containers
through the Port of Savannah annually. The fleet for the TP2 string c
onsists of ten U.S. flagged vessels, each with a capacity of more than
2,800 twenty foot equivalent units (TEU), a standard by which contain
ers are measured in the shipping industry. Maersk Sealand repositioned
the southeastern port call for the all-water Far East service to Sava
nnah in June.
The string rotation is HongKong/ Yantian/ Shanghai/ Kwangyang,Korea/ B
usan/ LongBeach/ Manzanillo,Panama/ Savannah/ Norfolk/ Manzanillo,Pana
ma/ LongBeach/ Oakland/ Dutch Harbor,Alaska/ Yokohama/ Nagoya/ Busan/
Naha/ Yantian/ HongKong.
Savannah network of distribution centers and expanding port infrastruc
ture were important consideration in our port rotation decision, stat
ed Jorgen Theisen Schmidt, vice president of Pacific Services for Maer
sk Inc., based in Madison, NJ.
The Sealand Voyager has an overall length of 845feet (257.49 meters) a
nd a carrying capacity of 2,829 TEU. The vessel has a gross tonnage of
32,629 tons and a maximum draft of 32.88 feet(10,022 meters).
Maersk Sealand, the container shipping division of the A.P. Moller Gro
up of Copenhagen, Denmark, operates more than 250 vessels worldwide wi
th a total container carrying capacity in excess of 600,000 TEU. The s
hipping line made more than 20,000 port calls worldwide in 1999, or ap
proximately 55 calls every day. Maersk Sealand has 325 offices and a w
orkforce of over 10,000 employees in more than 100 countries worldwide
.