Boatnerd Discussion Forum

As someone who has been involved in buying and selling obsolete tonnage for shipbreaking (my last deal was the Capt. Ralph Tucker), permit me to say that it is the norm that a company does not want to sell to a competitor, but arrangments can and have been made on many occasions to change all that. For example, the buyer guarantees the seller that the vessel in question will not trade in conflicting traffic patterns. Further, it's also common that obsolete tonnage is sold for what is termed "non-transportational use", but the clause sometimes literally gets overlooked in the sales agreement! That's what happened with the Algocen. Lastly, I can assure you that the main reason why a scrapper hesitates to buy a ship expressly for non-transportational use is because the hull and engines are in such good shape and the scrapper has plans of reselling it for a tidy profit.

I was told that American will not sell any of their vessels for use by a competing company. They had inquired about scrapping some ships with the contract stating that they will not be sold for use. The scrap company would not buy them under those rules. There aren't too many ships out there for sale that are any good for anything other then scrap. It may come to a point where the old vessels will have to be repaired and updated to get another decade out of them.

I think there could be the odd tug/barge conversion (i.e. LLT/GRT buy the American Fortitude and convert her to a barge), but I find most companies run to where the big money is and that often means larger ports. The big boats (i.e. Algocape and even Algosteel) will likely be replaced by existing ocean bulker carriers that can be converted to self-unloaders, or, replaced by new builds like the new Canadian Mariner. Algoma has already effectively replaced the Algontario, Algoisle and Algocen with the Algoma Discovery, Algoma Guardian and Algoma Spirit. CSL has ordered 5 ocean self-unloaders for Great lakes/St. Lawrence service (i.e. sort of replacing Tarantau, Manitoulin and Halifax) and 5 deep sea self-unloaders strictly for ocean service.

As the fleet of the smaller self unloaders ages ex Algorail,Algoway maumee,manitstie etc when and what type of vessles willl replace them? I ask this becuse some of the ports these type vessles unload at saginaw,cleveland,st joes can only handle smaller ships. Just curious if they willl build any new smaller ships or just build tug/bardge combos.
Thanks
Daniel