- quality/services
- Each year when short-sea shipping advocates gather to raise the dead, the chant remains the same:
-- Short sea removes trucks from highways, saving lives and reducing congestion.
-- The Jones Act and the Harbor Maintenance Tax add insurmountable costs to an already costly concept.
-- Ships must be built at a U.S. yard and manned by U.S. crews.
-- Ships must pay HMT fees if they carry cargo from one U.S. port to the next.
-- Shippers require reliability, which means a regular weekly rotation. That requires a small fleet of at least four vessels.
-- No U.S. company can afford to begin a Jones Act short-sea enterprise by building or buying coastal freighters and hoping for customers.
-- Even if a shipping line could afford four new vessels, there are no yards in operations in the U.S. that custom-build economical coastal freighters.
All of this was true until recently when G&G Shipping of the Port of Dania decided to build its own vessels at its newly leased shipyard outside of Palatka, Fla., on the St. Johns River.
The project, St. Johns Shipbuilding, involves the revitalization of an existing 98-acre shipyard that had endured hurricane damage. It still offered the grid of tracks and the foundations for sheds to construct steel vessels up to 260 feet with a 70-foot beam.
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