CMA CGM Marco Polo - the world's largest container ship - visits Hamburg on its maiden voyage

The 16,020 standard container capacity of the CMA CGM Marco Polo would equate to a line of heavy goods vehicles around 138 kilometres long. 

In the early morning hours on Wednesday, December 12, the CMA CGM Marco Polo, the world's largest container ship, with a capacity of 16,020 standard containers, arrived in Hamburg on its first visit to a contintental European port. The 396 x 53,6 m mega-ship left Southampton two days earlier on its maiden voyage.

Both ships and they way they are loaded/unloaded have developed a lot during the last few decades. It's not SO long ago, when busy ports looked like this:

The French CMA CGM has two other ships of the same class as Marco Polo, in the pipeline for April next year. 

However, the CMA CGM will not hold the largest container ship title for very long. Danish Maersk, the largest container ship operator in the world, will already next summer take delivery of the first ship in the so-called Triple-E series, with a capacity of 18,270 containers.

The competition between the two major operators, Maersk and CMA CGM, tightens. Let's hope there are enough full containers for them to carry on the Seven Seas! 

We are not going to see giants like the CMA CGM Marco Polo here in the Sound - they are just too big. Instead one can hope that they will bring more work opportunities for feeder ships - like the one pictured below - which carry containers from Scandinavian ports to Hamburg and the other big continental container terminals.