The Largest Cargo Ships and Their Cargoes

If there is a need to trans­port huge car­go, or just large vol­umes of car­go over long dis­tances, car­go ships are ide­al for this, despite the fact that they are extreme­ly slow. Thou­sands of car­go ships plow the seas and oceans every year, pro­vid­ing the largest turnover of goods and goods for inter­na­tion­al trade. There are also spe­cial lift car­go ships spe­cial­ly designed for very large bulky car­go such as drilling rigs, or any­thing else so big and heavy that it can’t be trans­port­ed on a nor­mal ship.

We have already writ­ten about the largest cruise ships, now we will tell you about the giants in the world of car­go trans­porta­tion. As a rule, such ships use a spe­cial plat­form that can sub­merge in water, allow­ing you to com­fort­ably load an oil plat­form or oth­er ves­sels on it. As soon as the load­ing is com­plet­ed, the deck ris­es and is ready to trans­port the car­go any­where in the world.

The first heavy­weight ship was the MV Licht­en­fels, built in 1920 by Hansa. Cur­rent­ly, the largest fleet of such ships belongs to Dock­wise, which oper­ates 19 heavy lift ves­sels of var­i­ous types and sizes. The main clients of the com­pa­ny are rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the oil indus­try. Through­out its his­to­ry, a huge num­ber of plat­forms and tow­ers have already been trans­port­ed from the con­struc­tion site to the pro­duc­tion sites. This method of trans­porta­tion is about 3–4 times faster than a self-deploy­ing drilling rig can move.

In 2004, the Blue Mar­lin trans­port­ed the world’s largest oil plat­form and 60,000 tonne drilling rig over 15,000 nau­ti­cal miles from Korea to Texas.

Many ves­sels in this class are owned by Dock­wise, includ­ing the three giants Mighty Ser­vant 1, MV Blue Mar­lin, and MV Black Mar­lin. The com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly build­ing anoth­er heavy­weight ship that will have 70% more deck space than the cur­rent largest Blue Mar­lin. The new ves­sel will be capa­ble of lift­ing up to 110,000 tons of car­go and trans­port­ing it at a speed of 14 knots.

In the pho­to below, the Dock­wise ship Swan is load­ing anoth­er ship onto the plat­form:

And here is Dock­wise Tern in the process of load­ing an oil plat­form:

Dock­wise Black Mar­lin and anoth­er oil plat­form:

The plat­form of the MV Blue Mar­lin ship is being sub­merged in prepa­ra­tion for load­ing:

MV Blue Mar­lin trans­port­ing a war­ship after she received tor­pe­do dam­age:

Blue Mar­lin and oil plat­form already loaded for trans­port

The scope and scale of such ships are sim­ply amaz­ing, let’s just admire these giants and the car­go they trans­port:

Read also about the largest ship pro­pellers in our sep­a­rate selec­tion