By Leah Leach and The Associated Press
PORT ANGELES — The biggest container ship to enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca — and perhaps the entire United States — will be piloted into Seattle on Monday by Puget Sound Pilots boarding in Port Angeles.
Three pilots — Capt. David Grobschmit, a lead pilot and an electronics pilot — will board the Benjamin Franklin container ship at 3 a.m. Monday and direct it into the Port of Seattle by about 7 a.m. that day, said Grobschmit, who is president of Puget Sound Pilots.
It will return Tuesday, traveling past Port Townsend to Port Angeles, he said.
“It is the biggest to come here,” he added, “and I believe anywhere in the U.S.”
The container ship is more than 1,300 feet long and nearly 180 feet wide.
It displaces 240,000 tons of water, Grobschmit said.
The pilots who will guide the ship toward its berth at the Port of Seattle are excited by the opportunity, Grobschmit said.
“We’ve been waiting for this our whole seagoing career,” he said.
“It’s a pilot’s dream to get this assignment.”
See it in PT, PA
Although the ship will leave in the dark Monday, it will return in daylight Tuesday, Grobschmit said.
It will stay in port in Seattle for 24 hours, leaving at about
8 a.m., and return to Port Angeles by about noon Tuesday, he said.
He expects it to pass Port Townsend at about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.
The Puget Sound Pilots organization has been training senior pilots in a simulator to practice bringing the gigantic ship into port.
“We had three different simulator high-intense courses of roughly 20 hours total with 25 different job scenarios,” Grobschmit said.
The job scenarios deal largely with different wind-load factors, he explained. Wind applies forces to container ships that are measured in tons based on the speed of the wind.
Although the Benjamin Franklin can hold 18,000 containers, it won’t carry that many into the Strait, Grobschmit said, although he didn’t know how many it would have on board.
“It was fully loaded in Los Angeles and Long Beach [Calif.],” he said. “From there, it went to Oakland [Calif.], and then it comes here.”
The ship unloaded 13,000 containers at the Port of Long Beach, KING-TV said.
“That’s more than twice the size of a typical container ship to call in the large California port,” the television station said.
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Peninsula Daily News Executive Editor Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3530 or at lleach@peninsuladailynews.com.
