The first of sealift's.

This morning a ship arrived in front of our house. This would be the first of the boats arriving for this season. Our ship wasn't scheduled to arrive till tomorrow so we weren't happy to see this ship in the bay early, and not on a church day. We went out to meet the ship and luckily this was the Co-Op's sealift, so we could sit back and enjoy until our ship arrives, possibly tomorrow.
Sealift boats come into town with everything they need to offload their cargo, that way they don't have to worry about getting town resources to assist them. This ship has 4 forklift's, 2 tug boats, 2 barge's that they will use in today's sealift. Usually as soon as the ship arrives a few guys come into town by zodiac to tell the necessary people they have arrived. Meanwhile, the crew set up the dock area by moving their office, generator's, lights, forklifts, transport trucks to the shore to await the first load's arrival. Here you see the first of the forklifts being loaded.
This is where they will set up their offloading area.
This is the first load. It contains 3 forklifts, a portable office, a fueling station, generator, and floodlights and a flatbed trailer.
This is the office being installed.
This is all the cargo from the first load.
Here the office is being hooked up to phone service and electrical service.
The fueling station for the forklifts is set up. All this prep took less than 30 minutes and while its being done the flatbed trailer is being towed around town where they are filling it with empty containers scheduled for pick-up on this trip. The entire Sealift for the Co-Op will last about 20 hours, basically about a hour a container and they should be getting about 20 containers on this sealift.The traffic starts to build up on the water as the offloading gets into full swing.
The first actual load of cargo arrives. 3 boats and 5 containers.
Hello Everyone,
well a long night was followed by a brief sleep and allot of panic. Last night I was patrolling the warehouses till about 4 am due to the fact we've been broken into 3 times this week. I went to bed in hopes of sleeping in and relaxing my Sunday away. However, I got a phone call around 8:30 am asking if that was our boat in the bay, all I knew is there was no boat in my room and no boat in my dreams, but damn... there was a boat in the bay. So I scramble around to wake up and rush out to the dock to meet the first barge and find out who it for. Thankfully it was the Co-Op.
Now I get allot of questions about the sealift and what it is. Lets try to explain it better than I may have last year.
All product comes to the store by air, which is expensive. The heavier the more expensive. So during the summer we arrange a boat to come up and deliver good by water saving about 66% of the shipping costs. There is only so much you can bring in this way however due to storage, dating and other issue's. commonly sealifted products are things such as Pop, furniture, vehicles, laundry detergents, dangerous goods (ie: propane, cosmetics), fuel for the town, dry goods etc. This means we have two pricing levels for all products, one for sealift and one for air.
These products for the stores are ordered usually in February and make their way to Montreal where they are staged for loading into containers and onto their respective ships. There are several ships that provide this type of service, I know of 2 but there must be for due to the number of the communities these shipped service.
These ships usually service about 5 communities per run and do several through the summer ending when ice starts to form in the Davis strait.
And today wasn't our day.
Take Care
CG