The ships you see from land they can't hide as the big numbers are way off shore for "safety" reasons. This is the first time stacking like this has had to be used and is something new.
No matter what you might be hearing via the press the port backlogs and supply chain jams are not improving. The congestion off the West Coast of the States is having a ripple effect that will have implications on other regions around the World.
A friend of mine who works operations for one of the shipping companies informed me that just the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has 65 vessels in various pods off shore waiting to be off loaded. What everyone is being told is that the Ports are winning which is not necessarily true. All they have done is stacked ships into pods and kept them way off shore. How far as these queues are massive and as far out as 150 nautical miles up and down the coast.
Since 2020 the States has increased their container volumes by roughly 20% which has created an imbalance in the container availability market. Here in South Africa we have a truck shortage as most of the operators have been seconded to collect empties and take them to the Port of Durban. Other ports are having their empty containers sent to the main hub in order to send full ships with empty containers back to the east. No cargo on board and just empty containers as this is the next worry or disaster they are trying to avoid.
The delivery times in South Africa currently have moved out to 10 days for delivery from Port to customer for containers. This is crazy as once off loaded you were under pressure to return the container immediately and would take anywhere between 2 and 3 days. The trucking fleets are not delivering goods required for the festive season as the priority from up above is to collect any discarded empties lying around.
Those that know logistics would know that an extra week delay is in fact a knock on effect of another 3 weeks as backlogs are the hardest to catch up. If one takes into the true count of ships outside of ports we are not weeks, but months behind. Just Long Beach alone has enough work to keep them busy till the end of February if no ships arrive and join the queue in the meantime. Doing the calculations is easy as they are operating flat out receiving 900 000 containers per month. Not the biggest vessels but a decent sized container ship carries 15 000 containers so roughly 60 vessels or 2 per day offloaded.
The real figure for vessels lying in wait is more than 10 and not 50 like everyone is being told so the current timeline projection is somewhere in late February for what is already there. Noted not all vessels are box ships but the majority are.