Outside the box

Tuesday 2 February 2010

A FAMILIAR figure will be missing from next month’s Box Club meeting in Taipei. Olav Rakkenes has called time on these biannual summits and will not be attending any more.

Atlantic Container Line, which Rakkenes used to run, resigned from the Box Club at the end of last year. The Grimaldi-owned transatlantic specialist decided that it was too small to justify membership, which is restricted to the heads of the worlds’s top container lines.

Although Rakkenes retired as president and chief executive of ACL in 2002, he has continued to represent his former company at these exclusive semi-social gatherings that are held in different venues around the world every six months.

Rakkenes is probably best remembered as chairman of the Trans-Atlantic Conference Agreement, which was at the heart of a hostile and protracted feud between the liner shipping industry and the European Commission, and which ultimately led to the abolition of the conference system in Europe.

As for the Box Club, which is currently chaired by Maersk Line chief executive Eivind Kolding, will members feel obliged to make some economies or take some cost-saving initiatives at a time of such hardship for the industry? Watch this space.

Going incognito

AMONG the many ships that were bought for demolition by Indian breakers in recent months, the multipurpose vessel Madre did not attract much attention.

But the Liberia-flagged ship, which arrived at the Alang break-up site on December 2, was once very well known for being one of the few nuclear-driven merchant vessels.

Under the name Otto Hahn , the 23,190 dwt ship, which was launched by Germany’s HDW shipyard in 1968, was expected to become a pioneer of nuclear propulsion.

However, those hopes were soon squashed and the ship was converted to conventional diesel engine propulsion in 1980. In recent years, it traded mostly unrecognised between the Middle East Gulf and the Indian subcontinent.

According to Automatic Identification System data, its last port of call before Alang was Abu Dhabi.

Mother of all enterprise

AGAIN demonstrating a sense of maritime enterprise that many in the industry itself could aspire to, Somali pirates have taken to using the hijacked vehicle carrier Asian Glory as a mothership.

According to the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre, Asian Glory has been pressed into service to refuel other pirate vessels while in pirate control, and other vessels have been warned to stay clear of its position.

Asian Glory , owned by London-based Zodiac, whose St James Park is also held off Somalia, was hijacked on January 2. The IMB says the vessel has since been moved from the Somali coast out into the Indian Ocean.

Having been designed for ease of access for vehicles, Asian Glory , with its enormous freeboard, is not a natural attack craft.

However, as a supply ship it could keep a flotilla of skiffs fuelled for months.

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