In the 1960s, the American shipbuilding engineer Jerome L. Goldman developed the LASH system and founded the Lighter Aboard Ship Corporation to market the patented system . The background to the development was the very long port lay times that were customary at the time, which should be shortened with the high throughput of the LASH system of over 1000 tons per hour. The owner companies Moslash Shipping Company and Mosvold Shipping Company from Kristiansand ordered the first two LASH ships Acadia Forest and Atlantic Forest from Uraga Heavy Industries in Yokohama in 1968 . Uraga merged with Sumitomo in 1969, so that the two ships, each costing about ten million US dollars, were built at the Uraga shipyard of the Japanese Sumitomo Shipbuilding & Machinery Company . The deliveries took place in 1969 and 1970. The ships had five holds with 14 hatches. Up to 83 standardized barges with a loading capacity of around 370 tons and an additional 10,000 tons of tank loads could be transported in side and deep tanks. The cargo was handled with a gantry crane with a lifting capacity of 465 tons that can be moved on deck . Around three to four barges were handled every hour.
Were used Acadia Forest and Atlantic Forest in a long-term charter of the shipping company Central Gulf Lines from New Orleans on the route between New Orleans and Rotterdam . Three sets of LASH barges were used per ship, of which one set was in New Orleans and Rotterdam for loading, while the third set of barges was transported on the ship. After Bremerhaven was also called at in September 1970 , Central Gulf Lines expanded its LASH services in the mid-1970s with further ships of the MARAD Design C9-S-81d , whereupon Acadia Forest and Atlantic Forest also offer other services from the US Gulf to the Red Sea and to the Far East.
In 1977 the ships were transferred to the companies Special Carriers Incorporated and Lash Carrier Incorporated in Monrovia and continued to operate under the Liberian flag. Both ships were passed on several times within Liberia in the following years. In 1992, the US shipping company Waterman Steamship Corporation took over the Atlantic Forest for service in the Military Sealift Command , where it was used as Jeb Stuart (AK-9204). On October 12, 1999, the Acadia Forest arrived in Alang for demolition, almost two years later, and on July 7, 2001, the Jeb Stuart finally arrived in Alang for scrapping.
literature
Günter Hähnel: LASH ship "Acadia Forest" (USA) in the yearbook of shipping 1971, Berlin, 1970
Hans Jürgen Witthöft: Piggyback across the sea. The barge carrier family . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-7822-0275-9 .
Alfred Dudszus, Ernest Henriot, Alfred Köpcke, Friedrich Krumrey: The big book of ship types , Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1995, ISBN 3-89350-831-7 , part 2, p. 29
