It has been pretty tight for grape shippers to get their shipments moving if they want their product on shelves before Christmas, always a nervous time of year, but this year, it's been a source of huge frustration. The week of 17 to 23 November, the Cape Town Container Terminal was fully operational for only a single day, due to high winds.
"The wind has been unprecedented," says a freight forwarder. "It took us all by surprise coming on so strong, so early."
"Our information shows that during the first three weeks of November, the terminal clocked 338 hours of wind delays – an increase of 27% in comparison with 2024, and wind speeds regularly exceeding 100km/h, " says Mecia Petersen, CEO of the South African Table Grape Industry.
Grape growers have been diverting grapes to Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) and Ngqurha (Coega) to avoid Cape Town in response to vessels omitting Cape Town. There are two types of grapes to load this week. "Currently, we're loading on two vessels in PE. We also loaded out of Port Elizabeth last season," a grower says, "but only from week 51 when the volumes were starting to pick up in the Cape. This season, the wind and productivity just didn't cooperate."
There are a couple of vessels left that can take their grapes in time; one vessel, grape growers say, left behind as many as 250 containers of grapes. Transnet did not respond to various media enquiries on the backlog and the status quo at the port.
Last week the Cape Town Container Terminal was windbound for over 130 hours, working for two full days and intermittently on two others, and, at one point, while still windbound, also without network connectivity for over a day.
© Carolize Jansen | FreshPlaza.com
This weekend more RTGs to become operational
The Multi-Purpose Terminal was less affected by the wind because "she is able to operate with ship-to-shore gantries and is not as severely affected by the wind," explains Terry Gale of the Cape Town Business Chamber.
"Cognisance must be made that currently only nine new RTGs [rubber-tired gantries] are operational with another nine coming on stream on 30 November," he adds. "They have an anti-sway mechanism that allows them to operate at over 100kph. Once the terminal receives its full complement, this should alleviate some of these delays."
Climate scientists have pointed to an Atlantic seaboard increasingly affected by 'long waves', with almost imperceptible long wave lengths up to several hundred metres that are hugely disruptive to ship berthing.
