SAECS helps cut delays from 80 to 18 hours

Poor response from hauliers RAY SMUTS FEARS OF major bottlenecks due to the near-simultaneous arrival of vessels at Cape Town container terminal in the period leading up to and during Easter were largely averted thanks to some proactive moves by the SA Europe Container Service. Sapo planning manager Derek Goetze suspects it has something to do with an e-mail he sent to the powers-that-be at SAECS explaining that if the consortium’s larger new vessels arrived virtually on top of one another with their bigger call sizes, delays would be inevitable - not only to SAECS schedules but to other vessels as well. Come Monday morning (March 28) average per vessel waiting time was 18 hours compared with 80 hours in January and February and only one vessel, the Sofala, lay at anchor. Goetze expressed pleasure at how “well managed” the situation had been over Easter “because SAECS are sorting their vessel schedules out even though they are not working within their window slots”. He was however disappointed at the poor response to Sapo calls on hauliers to remove boxes from the terminal in good time. “We are bursting at the seams, holding 1 100 import boxes where we usually have 300, and 994 export boxes instead of the usual 1 500.” Fourteen ships were worked immediately before and during Easter for a total of around 3 800 containers, including two SAECS newbuilds, the Lars Maersk (1 510 boxes loaded and discharged, delayed for 5,9 hours) and Safmarine Nokwanda (620 loaded and discharged, delayed for 8 hours) while a third new SAECS vessel on her maiden voyage to Cape Town, the P&O Nedlloyd Livingstone, was on berth on Monday morning, taking on 1 124 containers and discharging 175. “All of a sudden, within the past 24-36 hours, we have seen a change in the arrival pattern of the vessels. I think SAECS realised there was a problem so they readjusted their scheduling.”