Reefer Polar Ecuador. The original yard model of the Polar Ecuador, built at the Christel Stührmann Workshop in a scale of 1:100, is part of the historical Estate of the Company Hamburg Süd, and now displayed in our reefer section on deck 6. This section has been built thanks to the sponsorship of the Dr. August Oetker KG, Bielefeld.
The Hamburg Süd company had a good experience with ship automation on the ships Polarlicht and Polarstern. This pioneering ships, built in the first half of the 1960s, had shown that a centralised control of the refrigerated chambers was possible. This proved to be safer in keeping the cold chain unbroken than the individual controls that needed to be regularly carried out aboard traditional reefers before. Based on this new technology, Hamburg Süd ordered a full class of six new state-of the-art ships from the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg.
The first ship and namesake of the class was the reefer Polar Ecuador, delivered on 21 October 1967. She was the 35th ship built by Blohm & Voss for Hamburg Süd. But most of all, she was the largest and fastest reefer to sail under the German flag. Their sleek design (148,2 m long and 19 m wide) and powerful two medium-speed four-stroke diesel engines with cylinders in a V arrangement allowed them a top speed of almost 23 knots with a capacity of 5617 GRT. The whole was operated by a crew of 31.
The six Porlar-Ecuador-class ships were a success. The only initial trouble was that a new, experimental system to allow the refrigeration to be powered by the main engines limiting the use of expensive auxiliary engines for that task did not worked as planned. The problem was solved through refits at Blohm & Voss and the Polar-Ecuador-class ran smoothly from them on. Still, already in 1971, a new chapter in the transportation of refrigerates goods was to be written. We will soon write about that next step.
The original yard model of the Polar Ecuador, built at the Christel Stührmann Workshop in a scale of 1:100, is part of the historical Estate of the Company Hamburg Süd, and now displayed in our reefer section on deck 6. This section has been built thanks to the sponsorship of the Dr. August Oetker KG, Bielefeld.