Lake tanker

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Under Lake tankers , including Lago tankers , Maracaibo tankers or the Mosquito Fleet , understood to be the fleet of small, inserted between the 1920s and 1950s, especially for the shuttle service to the Lake Maracaibo constructed oil tankers .

details

In 1917 oil deposits were discovered in Venezuela at the eastern end of Lake Maracaibo. Starting in 1923, the extracted oil was transported in small, particularly shallow oil tankers to top up larger tankers outside the lake or for further processing to the Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell refineries in Aruba (Lago Oil & Transport Co. and Eagle) and Curaçao (Shell ). The reason for this procedure lay in the migrating sand bars in the strait of the Canal de San Carlos , which connects Lake Maracaibo with the Gulf of Venezuela and the Caribbean . Initially, dredging was used to reach water depths of around four meters; in the years between the two world wars, the fairway was deepened to around 5.7 meters. The end of the mosquito fleet was on the horizon in the late 1940s, when the construction of oil pipelines to the deep-water port of the Paraguaná Peninsula and the deepening of the fairway began. The last lake tankers were decommissioned in 1953 and sold or demolished.

The basic construction of the lake tankers was largely similar to that of contemporary oil tankers for sea operations, but they had a smaller draft and a relatively larger width with a maximum load capacity of 5500 to almost 6000 tons. Some of the ships used, especially those from the early years before the first dredging of the canal, were also considerably smaller. The first lake tankers were built in Great Britain in 1923 for the shipping company Andrew Weir Shipping , and later (especially in the following two world wars) numerous units from various shipyards were used, including many from Harland and Wolff .

literature

  • Laurence Dunn: Ship Recognition: Merchant Ships . 3. Edition. Adlard Coles Limited, London 1961 (p. 28).

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