Lighter Aboard Ship, LASH, was a crazy idea but it worked for a while. My involvement was buying a LASH feeder ship in the late 1980”s. It was supposed to collect the lighters in small Spanish ports, carry them to Bilbao, where a big LASH ship would carry them to America, etc, etc. My ship had never carried a lighter anywhere and was laid up since 1983. But we bought it and converted it into a container ship and named it Eastgate and later Westphalia. It worked fine until the company went bankrupt and I did other things.
The ship looked like this in the end. When I operated it she was painted red!
The windows in the side are in fact holes in the deck house! The ship was just a selfpropelled floating drydock with a deck house/bridge/swimming pool up top front. The accommodation was very good. She served in the Gulf after the first US war on Iraq transporting ice cream to the US forces at Kuwait.
I always wonder what happened to her. It seems she was still trading 2017 as EIDE TRANSPORTER as a heavy lift ship. Good! All my container cell guides have been removed.
