MARAD Ships and the Sunny Point Terminal

Crossing the bridge over the Cape Fear River near downtown Wilmington, you may notice two large, mysterious-looking gray ships berthed on the west side of the river to the south. These are the Cape Lobos and the Cape Lambert, part of the Maritime Administration’s (MARAD) 72-ship Ready Reserve Force (RRF), an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Owned by MARAD, the ships of the RRF augment the 125-vessel Navy Military Sealift Command and come under its control when activated. While berthed in Wilmington, the two ships are maintained by a retention crew of 10 civilian merchant mariners responsible for operating, inspecting and maintaining the vessels’ machinery on a scheduled basis. If the ships are activated, the crew complement is increased to 31 merchant mariners each, and must be able to proceed to a load port within 240 hours.

Built in Canada in 1973, the ships were named Federal Lakes and Federal Seaway and were originally used to transport rolls of newsprint and coils of steel from Canada to Europe and return to Canada with about 2,000 small cars. The ships were purchased by the U.S. Government in 1988. As Roll On/Roll Off vessels, their mission is to transport wheeled and tracked vehicles such as flat-bed trailers, articulated front-end loaders, dump trucks, water tankers and Hummers for the Department of Defense.

Vehicles with a maximum weight of 30 tons can be driven aboard on either bow or stern ramps. Deck cargo area is 76,400 square feet, and there’s a cargo hatch for loading armored vehicles. Displacing 30,375 tons, the ships are 682 feet long with a 75-foot beam. They have a max speed of 19 knots and are powered by two 18-cylinder diesel engines providing 8,500 HP each.

Both ships served in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In 1994, one participated in a mission to Haiti, and both vessels last saw service in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

About 15 miles south of downtown, on the west bank of the river, is the Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal, operated by the 597th Transportation Group on 16,000 acres owned by the U.S. Army. As the largest ammunition port in the nation, Sunny Point is the Army’s principal deep-water port on the East Coast and the key Atlantic Coast shipping location for the Department of Defense.

Providing world-wide transshipment of ammunition, explosives and other dangerous cargo, Sunny Point is under the command of the 1303d Major Port Command. Supporting Fort Bragg and the 82nd Airborne Division, Sunny Point receives munitions, heavy equipment and bulk supplies for the division and its supporting units via rail and truck and reloads them aboard ships.

More than 90 percent of resupply munitions for Desert Storm, Desert Shield and Desert Sortie were transshipped from Sunny Point to support those operations, with 2.1 million tons of munitions loaded onto 186 vessels. With 80 percent of munitions arriving by train, the facility unloaded 27,000 rail cars during the operations. Sunny Point is the only Department of Defense terminal equipped to handle containerized ammunition.

Back to Marinas and the Intracoastal Waterway