A Visit From The World's Biggest Emma
Over the weekend the World's largest container ship, the Emma Maersk docked at Felixstowe to unload containers of goods from China. She is a quarter of a mile long (that's equivalent to four football pitches), 200ft high and as wide as a motorway. She can carry 11, 000 20ft containers and her anchor alone, weighs 29 tons. And all this can be operated by just 13 crew.
So what is in the 3,000 containers it took 6 giant cranes to unload? Apparently there were 17 40ft containers filled with nothing but Suduko games, nursery rhyme books, soft toys and jigsaw puzzles. There were 1.8 million christmas decorations, 40,000 rechargeable batteries, 12,800 mp3 players - 138,000 tins of cat food, thousands of frozen chickens and 150 tonnes of New Zealand lamb. The big thing for the British Christmas looks as though it's going to be dancing gorillas and electronic dinosaurs.
Did we go and see her? Of course we did, twice. We popped down the viewpoint after the firework party to see her at night time when there were a lot less people than Sunday morning. By then, the local and national radio and telly had made quite a fuss over her that the queue to get down to Landguard went all the way up Port of Felixstowe Road (not sure how long that is, but it's quite a jam). It didn't help the queues that it was market day but we were incredibly lucky to keep moving for most of the time and to find not one but two slots to choose from to park in. Because she's so big, she had to be at the end of the docks and I guess we could have got a better glimpse of her if we'd hopped over to Shotley, but just the anticipation of the hundreds of people at the Viewpoint (and those waiting to get down there) was fabulous - a vampire that feeds on anticipation would have dined well! What we find funny is that a lot of the big ships don't look so big when they are at the cranes, especially when viewed side on. There are always people looking uncertainly at the ships, wondering which is supposed to be the biggie and then getting all excited when a completely different ship, but obviously huge comes into port - makes us giggle anyway *WEG*.
Below is a photo of the MSC Benedetta, the ship people thought was the Emma Maersk.
Benedetta is 13 containers across - in the background is the Emma - which is 22 containers wide.
Emma is due to leave Felixstowe at 3 am tomorrow, and I bet there will be quite a few there to say goodbye.
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It is scary when you think of how much we import from other countries. Looking at the Emma made me wonder if we'd have to cancel Christmas if (and I hope I am not tempting Fate here!) she went down.
I do love being at the beach or the View Point and watching the ships come and go though - I know they are for the main not very enviromentally friendly, but there is a kind of serene calmness watching them - even when you watch the lorries and cranes on the go -you know it's really busy, but it's peaceful for the viewer.