The Ellen McAllister

After our Board of Directors meeting this week we boarded a working tugboat, the Ellen McAllister, for a tour of New York harbour. This was more a tour of our competitors' facilities as opposed to a tourist style dinner cruise, if you know what I mean. It was a warm evening and the seas were calm. It was an unusual way to see the harbour, but very educational.

After the obligatory sail by the Statue of Liberty and view of the Manhattan skyline, we headed down the Kill van Kull, the strait separating Staten Island from New Jersey.

The third picture is the Bayonne Bridge. Dating from 1931, the Bayonne Bridge is the fourth longest steel arch bridge in the in the world. The span presents a difficult obstacle to large container ships passing under it on the way to and from the port complex in Newark. Many of the larger vessels require 175 to 200 feet of clearance and the Bayonne Bridge has only 150 feet of air. This problem will become more serious after the Panama Canal expansion is completed in 2014 that will allow larger ships to pass through. This is good news for us because our company operates the ONLY container terminal outside the Bayonne Bridge, and we are the only game in town for large vessels. Location, location, location!

The next picture shows Maher Terminal on the left and PNCT on the right. The Maher brothers sold in 2007 to Deutsche Bank for $1 billion or so and then promptly lost $400 million of it with Lehman Brothers. Easy come, easy go, I guess. Maher also operates the tiny terminal in Prince Rupert. PNCT was one of the terminals bought by Dubai Ports in 2007 that caused such a commotion in the press about Arabs owning critical port infrastructure...it was subsequently sold to a US based company. PNCT is the only container terminal in New York owned by a US company.

My last photo shows part of APMT (the blue cranes) and part of Maher Terminal. APMT is a sister company to Maersk line, based in Denmark.

We ended the tour at our other facility, NYCT, on Staten Island, but it was too dark for a picture at that point.