Rare stern mooring at Paranaguá

On September 3rd, workers who were on duty at the docks at the Port of Paranaguá paused to watch the Maestro Universe dock. It wasn’t the size or the type of vessel that was surprising. What captivated onlookers was the way the vessel maneuvered and “parked”: perpendicular to the primary strip, that is, it docked from the stern to receive the load.

“It’s been years since we’ve seen a stern mooring around here,” says foreman Rubens Borges da Cruz, a port employee since the 1980s.

The operations director, Luiz Teixeira da Silva Júnior, explains that the characteristics of the ship itself allow this operation to be flexible. “It has a ramp at the stern, through which the cargo can be loaded or unloaded”, he says.

The maneuver was in Berth 215, which is right on the border with the Container Terminal. The operation was carried out by the Marcon company, which specializes in loading and unloading general cargo, especially vehicles, buses, and project cargo.

The ship Maestro Universe is of the Roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) type, in which the cargo enters and leaves rolling by the ramps. This vessel often passes through the Port of Paranaguá. This year alone, it docked five times, but all via the conventional method: parallel to the pier, with unloading and loading via the ramp on the side.

The stern mooring was necessary for the loading of one of the cargoes: large parts of a mobile asphalt plant (one of those almost 20 meters long) that was being shipped to the Port of Luanda. In Africa, it will transship to reach its final destination.

In addition to the parts of this project, the ship also carried 109 Marcopolo/Scania and Caio/Man buses.

Once the shipment of special cargoes was completed, the ship docked in the conventional way to complete the operation.

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