The Containerships Aila is a fourteen-hundred-TEU feeder built in 2018 at the Wenchong shipyard in Guangzhou. She is two hundred and ten metres long, rated ice class 1A, and works a fixed weekly rotation between Hamburg, Gdynia, Klaipėda, Riga, Tallinn, Helsinki, and Kotka.
She is one of about eighty feeder vessels that maintain the European container network between the deep-sea hubs at Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Bremerhaven and the smaller ports of the Baltic Sea.
The feeder trade is the unglamorous middle of the container business. The deep-sea ships bring the boxes from Asia to the North European hubs. The feeders distribute them to the smaller ports. The trade is run on tight margins by a small number of dedicated operators.
Containerships, a Finnish company founded in 1966 and now part of the CMA CGM group, operates fourteen feeders on the Baltic routes. Its principal competitors are X-Press Feeders, Unifeeder, and Team Lines.
The Aila sailed from Hamburg on a Sunday afternoon in late February. The winter had been a cold one. The northern Baltic was choked with ice from Helsinki to the Bay of Bothnia, and the Aila would, at her northern call at Kotka, require an icebreaker escort to reach the berth.
Her master, Captain Jukka Salonen, was a Finn from the western coast town of Pori. He had been at sea since 1989 and on the Aila since her delivery. He had worked the Baltic feeder trade for the entirety of his career.
He had a relaxed bearing and a slow Finnish speaking style that did not change in any weather. He kept his bridge tidy, his uniform neat, and his coffee cup full.
The Aila moved through the southern Baltic at fifteen knots on a southwesterly swell that was building. The forecast called for a small low pressure system to cross the central Baltic on Tuesday with winds to thirty-five knots from the northeast.
Salonen had seen worse weather many times. The feeder schedules in the winter were built with weather margins, and an extra ten hours on a leg between Gdynia and Klaipėda was absorbed by reducing port time at the next call.
The Aila reached Gdynia at 02:30 on Monday morning. Her chief mate, a Pole named Marek Kowalczyk, supervised the discharge of about three hundred containers and the loading of about two hundred and seventy. The work took five hours.
She sailed again at 07:40, bound for Klaipėda, which she reached at 22:15 the same day. The wind had risen to twenty-five knots from the northeast.
On the bridge during the Klaipėda approach Salonen worked closely with the local pilot. The port of Klaipėda has a narrow entrance and a strong current that runs across the channel during northeasterly winds.
The Aila came alongside at 23:40. The discharge and load were completed by 04:30 on Tuesday morning. She sailed for Riga at 05:00.
By Tuesday afternoon the low pressure system had reached the central Baltic. The Aila was working through forty-five-knot gusts and four-metre seas off the coast of Latvia. Salonen reduced her speed to ten knots and altered course to ride the swell more comfortably.
She reached Riga at 03:00 on Wednesday morning, six hours late. The port absorbed the delay without difficulty. The Aila completed her Riga call by 09:30 and sailed for Tallinn.
The Tallinn-Helsinki leg, the shortest of the rotation at about a hundred and twenty kilometres, brought the Aila into the iced waters of the northern Baltic. The Finnish ice service had reported the Gulf of Finland as light ice with patches of medium first-year ice.
Salonen had taken the Aila through ice many times. The ice class rating allowed her to operate independently in conditions up to about thirty centimetres of level ice. Anything beyond that required an icebreaker escort.
The Aila reached Helsinki on Thursday morning, worked her cargo through the day, and sailed for Kotka at 19:00. The ice between Helsinki and Kotka was heavier than the forecast had suggested.
At 23:40 the Aila reduced speed to four knots and called the Finnish icebreaker Polaris, which was working the eastern Gulf. The Polaris responded that she could provide an escort beginning at 02:30.
The Aila held station for the intervening hours, drifting slowly with the wind. The Polaris arrived on schedule and broke a track through the heavier pack. The Aila followed at five knots and reached the Kotka pilot station at 06:15 on Friday morning.
She came alongside at HaminaKotka Mussalo terminal at 07:30 and began her final discharge of the rotation. By 14:00 she had completed her cargo work and was loading for the southbound run back to Hamburg.
Salonen, on the bridge wing as the lines came aboard, looked at the ice in the harbour and the lights of the terminal in the early winter dusk and said that the trade had been better and that it had been worse and that the Aila would sail in two hours either way.
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