In a trade afflicted with sustained decline and a diminished ocean carrier service base, a fortnightly service from Houston’s Jacintoport terminal is offering an alternative to traditional Jacksonville-to-San Juan sailings.
Torey Presti, president of San Francisco-based National Shipping of America, said he believes his company’s M/V National Glory furnishes an option that efficiently gets cargo from west of the Mississippi to the island commonwealth of Puerto Rico without having to move through Northeast Florida.
“The Puerto Rico market has been on a slide since about 2008,” Presti said, “but we at NSA think we are offering a service that fills a valuable niche, through a Houston terminal that provides labor and gate flexibility advantages and other benefits.”
Seven days after leaving Houston’s Jacintoport terminal, National Shipping of America’s M/V National Glory steams into San Juan’s harbor.
The National Glory, a Jones Act vessel with a capacity of 570 twenty-foot-equivalent units and 96 refrigerated plugs, leaves the Jacintoport terminal every other Wednesday loaded with such goods as rice, beer, industrial lubricants and petrochemical resins. The latter good, which is largely a product of Texas industry, has been coming in handy of late in the making of water buckets of particular use as Puerto Rico battles drought conditions that have only served to exacerbate the island commonwealth’s economic woes.
Slow-steaming on low-sulfur fuel, the National Glory arrives in San Juan the following Wednesday, to be loaded with such items as household goods, scrap metal and beverage concentrates for its weeklong return journey.
As has long been the case, the trip north from Puerto Rico provides scarcer volumes than the southbound leg, and the discontinuation of U.S. federal programs that had incentivized pharmaceutical production and other industry on the island hasn’t helped even this imbalance, Presti noted.
The NSA service, which recently entered its third year, not only has carried containers but also out-of-gauge cargo, from mining equipment to yachts to airport passenger boarding bridges, according to Presti, who cited the capabilities of Jacintoport docks for loading such cargo.
Presti said the Jacintoport terminal, which is operated by Seaboard Corp. unit Jacintoport International LLC under long-term lease from the Port of Houston Authority, afford other benefits as well.
In addition to on-dock rail, he said, the Jacintoport terminal provides transloading capabilities, including for beans that come down by rail from the Midwest in boxcars and are loaded into ocean containers at the port.
Presti also noted Jacintoport’s on-port bagging facility for resins, its abundance of refrigerated plugs and its recent addition of a second, higher-efficiency crane.
While NSA and Jacintoport do provide an alternative, the trade between the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico continues to primarily move via Jacksonville, where, after the pulling out in late 2014 of Horizon Lines, operations are maintained by Crowley Maritime Corp., Sea Star Line LLC and Trailer Bridge Inc.
For more than a quarter of a century, Paul Scott Abbott has been writing and shooting images for the American Journal of Transportation, applying four decades of experience as an award-winning journalist.
A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, with a master’s magna cum laude from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Abbott has served as president of chapters of the Propeller Club of the United States, Florida Public Relations Association and Society of Professional Journalists.
Abbott honed his skills on several daily newspapers, including The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Richmond (Va.) News Leader, Albuquerque Journal and (South Florida) Sun-Sentinel, and was editor and publisher of The County Line, a weekly newspaper he founded in suburban Richmond, Va.
A native Chicagoan, he is a member of American Mensa and an ever-optimistic fan of the Chicago Cubs.
