Hitching A Ride On The World's Biggest Cargo Ship
I started my journey at the famed Gdansk shipyard, home of Poland's solidarity movement in the 1980s. It was nearly midnight when I arrived and saw for the first time the Maersk McKinney Moller, the world's largest container ship.
I simply wasn't prepared for just how massive it is. The whole ship really can't be taken in even standing at a distance, so I gave my neck a good stretch by scanning this behemoth end to end, and up and down.
That sense of scale was reinforced when I walked up the ship's steep gangway with Mikkel Linnet, a communications officer with Maersk. The ship's third officer, Siddhesh Naik, joked that most visitors ask where the elevator is because you need to climb two floors just to get to the main deck.
Everything about this ship is big.
Each link, or lug, in its anchor chain weighs about 500 pounds. It can carry more than 2 million bicycles or more than 100 million pairs of shoes.
It sits more than 20 stories high and is four football fields long. It can hold more than 18,000 of the standard 20-foot containers — about double what many other megaships can carry. If you put each container end-to-end, the line would stretch for about 70 miles.
And that's why we were already delayed by 12 hours. It was taking longer than expected for Polish longshoremen to finish loading and lashing down the thousands of containers carrying anything from electronic goods to furniture. Throughout the night I could hear the gigantic cranes hoist up containers — many weighing up to 25 tons — and stack them on this massive vessel.
The size of the Maersk McKinney Moller can also present challenges getting in and out of port. As we left Gdansk, the Danish captain, Jes Meinertz, sipped coffee and watched a Polish pilot deftly maneuver the ship around three nearby piers and into the open waters of the Baltic Sea.
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