What is FOSS ATLANTIC in Jacksonville?

I see Foss Atlantic in Jacksonville advertising for mariners.

What is the story on Foss Atlantic?

Is this just Foss following TOTE and Crowley to Jacksonville?

Is another good, over 100 years old, Pacific Northwest tugboat company on its way to becoming another Southern Joe Bawss company?

Is the difference between the real Foss and Foss Atlantic going to be like the difference between TOTE Alaska and tote Jax?

What market opportunities is Foss hoping to exploit that have apparently been overlooked by Crowley, Moran, McAllister and all the other east coast companies?

Or is this just a little side venture for Puerto Rico reconstruction?

This is probably to do with the new LNG barge that will be bunkering the LNG Tote vessels in Jacksonville.

They tried in Boston and failed. Ended up selling the boats to McAllister. Maybe looking to make a run at Navy work on East Coast?

Just out of curiosity, how and why did they fail in Boston?

Foss is a large company over 100 years old with good equipment, good people, and access to lots of capital.

My understanding was that they couldn’t get any long term contracts that Boston Towing has, I don’t think they had any docking pilots either.

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They’re taking over the Trailer Bridge run and they’re going to be manned by SIU.

Hmm this may be of interest to me.

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Trailer bridge run?

Tug & barge outfit running Jacksonville to Puerto Rico primarily but also serve the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands.

I gotcha , are they taking over the run from Crowley , or this is there own gig they have going on. The Crowley units have been slowing down coming in and out of philly

Similar to Crowley’s setup, triple deck RO-RO barges and all but separate operation. They are a part of Seacor.

I gotcha

45 day hitches, wow. I wonder if that’s equal time? I wonder if the boats will be newer, comfortable equipment or junk? I wonder if you need an oceans license, I would suspect you would.

45 days is good. Probably even time. Of course an Oceans license is required. Foss will be fussy about who they hire as Masters. Probably senior guys with a lot experience on that run with the same or similar barges. Otherwise they will send in their longtime masters from Seattle. Foss has a lot of older boats, but they don’t run junk. Very strong safety culture.

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Interesting. Crowley has their two new ConRos coming into that market though it seems like they’re running late on delivery from Halter. Saltchuck seems to be going after a big chunk of the PR business, seeing as they own TOTE, Foss and Tropical. Wonder if this was on the works before they got outmaneuvered by Pasha in Hawaii?

It does seem odd that Seabulk would hire competitor TOTE to do Seabulks Towing.

Foss Boston or formerly Constellation Maritime, was actually doing fairly well, they were doing better each month than the previous up until they shut down in Boston. The contracts from the west coast would transfer to the East coast, including Cosco and Kirby, so it was a decent load of work. Word on the street was BTT was getting nervous that Foss was taking more and more of the work. They did have 2 docking masters on call, with talk of hiring a third. I heard someone in corporate wanted to focus more on the big ports and cut out the smaller ones, therefore ports like Boston and Portland got cut.

As far as Foss in Jacksonville, I have no clue but perhaps they want to try breaking into the east coast market again.

I’ve already explained what they’re doing in Jacksonville.

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Just stating that I don’t know what their endgame is, overall

Foss has very little work in the winter and a lot of boats tied up. Probably looking to diversify and obtain some winter work