Lighter aboard ship

It was developed in response to a need to transport lighters, a type of (usually but not always) unpowered barge, between inland waterways separated by open seas.

[1] During World War II the United States Seabees developed a pontoon assembly for moving cargo from transports to assault beachheads that met the needs at the time that was the forerunner to the LASH system.

Acadia Forest, commissioned in September 1969,[2] was the first LASH carrier - the ship could take up 75 standardized lighters, with about 376 metric tons of total loading capacity.

Aboard the carrier ship, the lighter is simply a large cargo container, but in the seaport and on the inland waterways it becomes a vessel.

While barge carriers and lighters are a technologically interesting sea transport system, they are economic only under certain specific conditions of traffic and economy.

[3] [4] On 15 December 2007, Rhine Forest,[5] ex-Bilderdijk of the Holland-Amerika Line, entered the Port of Rotterdam for the last time, prior to being withdrawn from service because of low utilization on the New Orleans/Rotterdam route.

The LASH lighter with registration p. CG 6013 was donated to De Binnenvaart, an inland-shipping museum in Dordrecht, where it is now part of an exhibit.

Several other designs, differentiated mainly by the shape of the lighters and the loading mechanism, were proposed, but the LASH system found the largest range of applications.

The host vessel is sometimes purpose-built or modified with a door at the waterline, to allow the payloads to be loaded and unloaded without special lifting equipment.

An example would be SS Cape Florida (AK-5071) (originally LASH Turkiye), built at Avondale Shipyard for the American shipping line Prudential Grace, and later transferred to the Ready Reserve Fleet.

The dual function of the ship is noteworthy, as it had storage tanks with a capacity of nearly 36000 m³ volume built into its sides and the unusually large double hull, allowing it to be used also as a product tanker.

Finnish state-owned shipbuilding company Valmet built two barge carriers largely based on the Sea Bee system for the Soviet Union in Vuosaari Shipyard in the late 1970s, Yulius Fuchik and Tibor Szamueli.

Of these, Yulius Fuchik was featured in a prominent role in the novel Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, where it was modified to masquerade as Doctor Lykes.