Continental routes booming for ferries at Rosslare

STENA LINE SEEKS TO INCREASE CAPACITY TO CHERBOURG, WHILE SAILINGS ARE CUT AND STAFF FURLOUGHED ON FISHGUARD ROUTE

AS brand new vessel the Stena Embla docked at Rosslare Europort on Thursday morning, it told its own story about the significance that the port now carries. Built in China and initially bound for the Belfast-Liverpool route, the decision was taken to bring the ship, the longest to ever dock at Rosslare Europort at 215 metres, further south to service the Rosslare-Cherbourg route while the Stena Horizon is away for essential maintenance.

As well as offering cover for the departing Horizon, the Embla critically also offers more capacity for trucks looking to reach the continent. It’s 40% bigger in terms of lane metres than the ship it replaces, with a capacity for 190 trucks, 120 cars and 1,000 passengers. While this replacement is said to be temporary, Stena Line are set to replace the Horizon with the Embla’s sister ship the Estrid to bolster capacity, with the Horizon moving to the Dublin-Holyhead route. The company is also set to unveil a new route between Dublin and Cherbourg to take advantage of demand.

That demand is significant. Last week, a total of some 60 trucks lined up to board the Stena Horizon to Cherbourg. The reality, however, is that they could have taken double that amount. A by-product of Covid is an insistence on single occupancy cabins for truck drivers, to allow for social distancing rules. This is a box that the Embla and the Estrid would also tick - the larger vessels have 175 cabins compared to the Horizon’s 110. The demand for cabins also tells us a bit about the kind of goods that are being moved through the port, as drivers only attend to accompany perishable freight. The conclusion is that a lot of food products are currently moving through Rosslare.

Since the turn of the year and Brexit’s arrival, things have been moving at breakneck speed. All operators are constantly monitoring the situation and implementing changes day to day, or ‘hour to hour’ as one Stena source laughed.

‘Currently, we are trying to decide what to do in the long term,’ a spokesperson for Stena Line said. ‘We are assessing the level of demand and bringing the Estrid onto the Rosslare Cherbourg route is one of the things we’re looking at. However, it’s not just a matter of swapping ships. There’s a lot of logistics behind making a move like that too.’

While Stena Line scrambles to increase capacity, there is a sense within the company that things will calm down eventually too. While all operators are seeing huge demand for continental crossing, sources within Stena feel that eventually some of this trade will drop off and return to using the landbridge as teething issues in the customs system are worked out.

Those working the Rosslare-Fishguard can only look on greenly at the increase in traffic that colleagues on the French route are seeing. It’s extremely slim pickings on the Welsh route, with some sailings carrying as little as 4 trucks and less than six passengers. In fact, freight levels overall are said to be down around 75%, with a similar inevitable fall off in passenger travel.

One doesn’t have to be a polished economist to realise that this is unsustainable in the long term and as a result, the company took the decision to cut sailings to Fishguard by 50% and furlough up to 30 staff until things pick up. The latter is a decision which has put the company at loggerheads with the workers’ union - RMT. Management, however, painted a grave picture in circulars issued within the company last week, stating that ‘we are fighting for our survival right now’.

While things look grim for the long established Fishguard route, Stena Line emphasised that they have no intention to cut it from their offering. While the company had looked into the possibility of suspending the service and moving the Stena Europe onto the Cherbourg route, this move was rebuffed, bureaucracy proving a stumbling block. The company believes that the reasons for the fall-off on the UK route are three-fold - teething problems and delays caused by customs; trucks seeking to avoid the landbridge and go directly to the continent and the level of stock-piling that went on before Christmas ahead of Brexit (the 7 weeks before Christmas were said to have been some of the busiest for the route).

‘I suppose the Fishguard route was never our strongest route,’ a Stena spokesperson said. ‘We’ve had to cut back on sailings because it’s simply not viable to send them over and back near empty. The company hasn’t stayed in business for 58 years by sending out ships for four trucks.’

When asked if Stena were considering a cull of the Rosslare-Fishguard route, the response was firm, however. ‘Absolutely not. We own the ports of Fishguard and Holyhead and there is a commitment there long term to those interests. We’re also conscious of the benefits these routes have to their local economies. Another factor is that there are very few travellers currently as a result of Covid. We would hope that this market will pick up and that freight levels will pick up again too.’

There was, however, no promises that sailings to Fishguard wouldn’t be cut further as the company seeks to ride out the storm on one route and take advantage of smooth seas on another.