Import of 12-metre boat is not plain sailing

Dee and Doug Kemsley watch the boat being offloaded from the Safmarine Gonubie in Cape Town. ALAN PEAT IT IS not plain sailing if you want to ship a 12-metre boat from the US to SA, according to Doug Kemsley, chief executive of Topcar and TopTV – whose first charter vessel, Sirius, has just been safely offloaded from the Safmarine Gonubie. To solve the logistical challenge of moving the boat from Jacksonville to North Charleston, and shipping it to Port Elizabeth, Kemsley called in Paul Zunckel, manager of Safmarine’s logistics activities. “At 13 foot 3 inches wide and 19-ft 9-ins high, the vessel was too large to go over the road, so it had to be brought to North Charleston via the water,” explained Zunckel. Safmarine employed the services of a US transportation consulting and cargo brokerage firm to handle the first part of the move, and this company in turn had to hire a specialist company to perform the lifting and lashing operations. To complicate matters even further, a cradle had to be custom-built in Miami and transported to Charleston where it would be used to lift the boat out of the water with a gantry crane. The boat then had to be placed the cradle and secured onto a flat-rack. Minimise costs To minimise personnel and storage costs and risk to the client, a tight timetable (2-3 hours) was designed – matching the arrival of the boat from Jacksonville, the cradle from Miami, and flat-rack from Wando Terminal in Charleston, to the time it was ready to be loaded on to the Safmarine Gonubie. The luxury 10-ton cruiser is now safely moored at the Halyards Hotel Marina in Port Alfred – where it will be used for up-market, deep-sea fishing charters and other marine activities. Owner Kemsley is delighted with his ‘new arrival’ and hopes this is the first of many successful boat shipments under the care and expertise of Safmarine.