Fleet Transport June 2020

fleetMaritime: IRISH SHIPPING & FREIGHT
MARITIME I | 21
Volume 15, No. 3 Summer 2020
Compiled by Howard Knott
Edited by Jarlath Sweeney
email: maritime@fleet.ie
There’s something familiar about: Stena Nordica
Stena Line took the Stena Estrid out
of service on 1 May and replaced
her on the Dublin-Holyhead route
with the veteran Stena Nordica. The Stena
Estrid, completed in China in late 2019 and
introduced on the Irish Sea in January,
had suffered some teething problems,
putting one of her engines out of action.
Stena Line decided to take the opportunity
to take her out of service for a few weeks
and undertake substantial work on the
matter. While the Stena Nordica offers
less passenger and freight capacity than
the new vessel, the COVID-19 collapse
of passenger business and reduction in
freight, meant that the Line continued to
offer adequate capacity to meet demand.
The Stena Nordica was built as the European
Ambassador and delivered in 2000 to
P&O Ferries. She was one of three similar
vessels built for P&O by Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries in Japan, all of them for Irish
Sea services. The European Highlander and
European Causeway went directly into the
long-established Larne/Cairnryan service
on which they have remained ever since.
The European Ambassador sailed to Dublin
and P&O used her to open a weekday
service from there to Mostyn. This port, at
the mouth of the River Dee estuary on the
North Wales coast, and with good access
to the British motorway system, did not
previously have a history of operation as a
ferry terminal, even though its location, close
to the British Aircraft Corporation factory
at Broughton which manufacturers aircraft
wings for Airbus, maintains a steady traffic
flow through the port.
The European Ambassador also opened
a weekend Dublin to Cherbourg route
for P&O, supplementing that company’s
Rosslare/Cherbourg route. This was to be
a forerunner of Irish Ferries’ deployment of
the Epsilon on the same route over several
recent summers.
In 2004 P&O closed its Mostyn and
Cherbourg routes and the European
Ambassador was sold to Stena Line where
she was renamed Stena Nordica. Apart from
a brief period in 2015-16 when she sailed
as Malo Seaways for DFDS on the English
Channel, she has been operational on Stena
services ever since.
In 2019 she stood in for the Stena Europe on
the Rosslare/Fishguard service while that
vessel underwent a major re-fit at a Turkish
yard. While her freight vehicle capacity is
much greater than that of the older ship, her
passenger capacity of 400 is significantly less
than the 1,400 on Stena Europe.
In early June, on completion of her standin
duties running between Dublin and
Holyhead, Stena Nordica will again move
to the Rosslare/Fishguard route, enabling
the Stena Europe to undertake her annual
re-fit. She is then scheduled to return in
early July to her established route linking
the Polish Port of Gdynia with Karlskrona
in Sweden.
FLEETMARITIME | Summer 2020