Maersk drydocks a container ship in India for the first time
How many days will the ship spend away from her service?
The trade press covered the partnership, and this covers the schedule arithmetic behind the job and the date that will show whether it worked.
Maersk has sent a small container ship to a shipyard near Chennai, India, for its first planned drydocking in the country. The survey was due anyway, so the test is how many days the ship spends away from her service. The date she leaves the yard, and whether another ship follows, will show if it works.
Maersk has put one of its own container ships into an Indian shipyard for a planned drydocking for the first time. The Maersk Chattogram is a ship of about 2,700 TEU. She arrived on 20 October at Larsen & Toubro's yard at Kattupalli, on India's east coast just north of Chennai, for her 10-year special survey. The companies gave the arrival date but no departure date, and the departure date is the one that matters.
It matters because the docking itself was never optional. A ship delivered in 2016 owes her class society a second special survey in 2026, and that deadline moves very little. Maersk had to dock her somewhere this year. The only choice was where, so time is the real test of that choice.
For a line, a docking costs the yard invoice plus the days the ship spends outside her rotation while someone covers her slot. Those days come in two pieces. One is steaming to and from the yard. The other is time in the yard.
On paper, the steaming favours Kattupalli. The Chattogram trades around the Bay of Bengal, and Kattupalli is on the same bay. How many days that saves depends on where she left her rotation and where she rejoins it. Neither has been published.
The yard time is less certain, and on a first job it carries most of the schedule risk. A 10-year survey looks deeper into the steel than the 5-year one. How much plating gets renewed is only known once the thickness gauging is done in the dock.
She also arrives with one known item. In May she collided with a feeder at the outer anchorage of Chattogram, Bangladesh's main port, and the collision left a long gash in her starboard quarter plating. If it was only patched in Bangladesh, the steel package here gets bigger.
The team adds a third unknown. Maersk's technical teams, L&T and Indian subcontractors have never docked a Maersk ship together. The yard's best-known foreign repair work has been on US Navy and Royal Navy ships. A liner ship brings a different deadline, which is the service she has to rejoin.
Whether she meets that deadline can be checked from outside. AIS will show the day the Chattogram leaves Kattupalli and the day she next calls in her service. Compare that with the yard days Maersk planned. That one figure will say more about drydocking in India than any statement from either company.
