By Paul Scott Abbott, AJOTNew services and enhanced facilities are being added at ports along the Sunshine State’s Atlantic coast, largely to serve a growing Florida consumer base. The state, with a population now of more than 18 million, is adding residents at a pace of some 1,000 a day. Looking one-by-one at Florida East Coast ports, starting just South of the Georgia border and heading southward to greater Miami: Port of FernandinaFlorida’s northernmost seaport, the Port of Fernandina, is augmenting services in both breakbulk and container segments. The new breakbulk liner service of Kent Line International Ltd. now calls the Port of Fernandina monthly to discharge forest products. Gearbulk Shipping then loads much of the cargo on its vessels to South America while the Kent Line vessel continues to Central America. Also serving Fernandina with breakbulk ships are Bertling Line, Maybank Shipping and Star Shipping. Ecuadorian Line, a 17-year customer of the Port of Fernandina, has expanded its twice-monthly container and breakbulk service to serve the Ecuadorian ports of Guayaquil and Bolivar on a weekly basis with regular Sunday sailings. King Ocean and Somers Isles Shipping also serve Fernandina with single containership strings, while Seaboard Marine Ltd. offers two such strings. Containerized cargo activity at Fernandina reached 35,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units in 2006, up 16% from the previous year and the port’s highest such figure since 1998. The Port of Fernandina is slated to take delivery this month of two additional rubber-tired gantry cranes for its container yard, which has undergone a $500,000 improvement. Port of JacksonvilleThe Jacksonville Port Authority continues to move forward toward a projected Fall 2008 opening of a new container terminal for Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd. (MOL) and its terminal operator, TraPac. The operation will establish direct container service between Jacksonville and ports throughout Asia. Ground has been cleared at Blount Island for the TraPac Container Terminal, and construction is expected to begin by late Spring. The terminal is to include a pair of 1,200-foot-long berths, six post-Panamax container cranes and related infrastructure. MOL cited several reasons for choosing Jacksonville, including available land and the region’s excellent intermodal connections, specifically the new terminal’s proximity to State Road 105 (Heckscher Drive) and State Road 9-A, leading to interstate highways as well as Jacksonville rail yards. JAXPORT also is engaged in two separate harbor-deepening efforts. One, to deepen a final river section to 40 feet, has been approved and awaits federal funding, while the second involves a US Army Corps of Engineers preliminary analysis, due by year-end, examining the potential to deepen the harbor even further. On the personnel front, Nancy Rubin, a local television journalist and media consultant, has just joined JAXPORT as director of communications and public relations. Robert A. Peek shifts from communications director to the position of director of marketing development. Port CanaveralAt Central Florida’s Port Canaveral, projects moving forward, at various stages, include a $50 million fuel tank farm for Vitol S.A., Inc., a $40 million widening of the port’s western turning basin and Ambassador Services Inc.’s $27 million addition of five warehouses to afford a combined total of 300,000 square feet of space. Also, the rebuilding of South cargo piers continues. Terminal operator Ambassador Services has completed a 2,200-foot conveyor system that now ferries limerock, sand and base rock from the cargo dock to a storage site in Cape Canaveral. It reduces unloading time to about 20 hours from as many as four days for aggregates destined for road and building construction. The Canaveral Port Authority is continuing negotiations with surfing gear giant Ron Jon to bring a tourist destination with a hotel and conference center to 26 acres of port-owned lan