Container ship to call in Portland

PORTLAND – A container cargo ship will begin making weekly stops in Portland in April, eight months after another cargo ship stopped making port calls when it was seized in Canada because of a financial dispute between the ship’s owner and a subcontractor.

The 416-foot Westerkade, which can carry about 350 40-foot cargo containers, will travel to Portland each week as part of a loop that also connects Boston, the Port of New York/New Jersey, and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The service will be operated by Eimskip USA, which will operate the service as a common carrier serving multiple steamship lines. The ship is scheduled to make its first port call April 11.

The new service should lower shipping costs for Maine companies and generate $1.5 million in direct and indirect economic benefits to the area, officials said. But it’s unclear exactly how the arrangement will work because the port has never had common carrier service before.

“It’s so early in the game,” said Jeff Monroe, Portland’s transportation director. “All this has to shake out.”

Hapag-Lloyd, a global shipping line based in Germany, has been the only company moving cargo through Portland’s terminal for 15 years.

But the port hasn’t been served by a container ship since July 24 after Canadian authorities seized the previous vessel, the K-Wind, that served Portland.

Since then, Hapag-Lloyd has moved cargo using a barge service operated by Columbia Group. The barge is scheduled to stop at Portland every two weeks, but it doesn’t operate in bad weather and in recent months the service has been irregular.

Portland is the state’s only container port, and for many Maine businesses the return of container ship service will lower shipping costs.

Kassbohrer All Terrain Vehicle, a Lewiston company that sells German-made snow tractors to ski resorts, has had to send a truck to New York rather than Portland to pick up container shipments, said Harry Turgeon, a branch manager.

Last year’s loss of regular container service hurt the company’s bottom line because the manufacturer wouldn’t pick up the additional costs, he said. The lack of container service escalates shipping costs from $500 to $2,500, he said.