Newbuild Containerships Delivered to Rickmers
The Rickmers Group informs it has taken delivery of the first two in a series of three 9,300 TEU newbuilds acquired by the group in April while already under construction.
The containerships were built at the South Korean STX shipyard and are on long-term charter to CMA CGM.
The first of the three ships is the seventh vessel to carry the name R.C. Rickmers, which can trace its heritage back to the founder of the Rickmers Shipyard, and is a reference to the history and shipping tradition of the Rickmers family. Rickmer Clasen Rickmers opened a shipbuilding workshop in Bremerhaven in 1834.
Dr. Ignace Van Meenen, Rickmers Group CEO, said, “The seventh R.C. Rickmers, a newbuild that has just been delivered, is a modern, large and energy-efficient containership. The new R.C. Rickmers represents the state-of-the-art in shipbuilding technology, as her six namesakes did in their day.”
The first R.C. Rickmers was launched in 1870 and immediately felt the shifting winds of German history. As the tall ship arrived in Cardiff harbor in August 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and it had to remain berthed there until January 1871.
The second R.C. Rickmers represents the shipyard’s last timber construction and marks a change in shipbuilding.
The third R.C. Rickmers was completed in 1906; on August 4, 1914 the five-master with an auxiliary engine was confiscated by the British in Cardiff harbor as Great Britain declared war on the German Reich on that very day.
The fourth R.C. Rickmers, a steamship, was built during the Weimar Republic in 1921. Arriving in Japan from Shanghai on September 6, 1939, six days after the German attack on Poland and the start of the Second World War, it was seized by the German Reich and given into Japanese charter.
The fifth R.C. Rickmers was launched in 1957 as a motor vessel. From the mid-sixties she sailed the world’s seas for the Rickmers-Linie.
The Szczecin shipyard (Stocznia Szczecinska) had newly-built the sixth R.C. Rickmers in 1992. After many years of service for the Rickmers Group she was sold in 2012 and has since been sailing the Asiatic seas as feeder ship under a new name.