UPS Turns To Tugboat & Barge To Bring Packages To Nantucket

It turns out UPS may be able to deliver your package to Nantucket this summer after all.

A new tug and barge freight service from New Bedford to Nantucket has applied for licenses to begin operating as soon as next month. Its first customer? UPS.

The shipping giant has been scrambling after dropping the ball on booking reservations aboard the Steamship Authority ferries for the summer. UPS typically sends two to three trailers to the island on a daily basis including time-sensitive packages like medication and food, as well as the bulk of the Amazon packages destined for Nantucket. While the Steamship has already voted to prioritize UPS on the waitlist and give it any available reservations that are left, it was unclear whether those measures would be enough.

A tug and barge freight service, it appears, could be the solution UPS needs. The marine company that UPS wants to partner with, 41 North Offshore LLC, already operates tugs and barges out of New Bedford. It hopes to bring its 130-foot flat, steel-deck barge called “Thing 2” to Nantucket as many as 70 times this summer, which could include up to three tractor trailers of packages on each trip.

According to the proposal, UPS is still without guaranteed Steamship reservations for 150 to 200 of the trips to Nantucket it needs for this summer. But 70 barge trips with one or more of its trailers would cover those missing reservations.

“While discussions with the SSA were ongoing, UPS contracted 41N to discuss alternative contingency solutions to provide transportation for UPS’s freight to Nantucket on one of 41N’s barges,” the company said in its license application. “Discussions between 41N and UPS about a potential freight service to Nantucket led to the full development of the service proposed by this pilot (program).”

But 41 North Offshore is looking beyond the UPS situation. Its manager, Jonah Mikutowicz, said the new service would improve the transportation of materials and other items to Nantucket that may not necessarily fit into the Steamship Authority’s operation very easily. It had started exploring the concept in late 2020, well before the UPS debacle.

“We do view this as a great opportunity for the island and for the Authority to explore a different option for transporting different materials that may not necessarily move on the Steamship Authority ferries as efficiently as they could on a barge," Mikutowicz said on Tuesday.

According to its license application, “The Pilot is designed with a focus on two things; first to determine if a tug and barge freight service between New Bedford and Nantucket is a viable transportation method that could supplement the existing SSA ferry service between Hyannis and Nantucket; and second, to solve the immediate need of a critical transporter of products, medicine and supplies to Nantucket (UPS), that is not able to meet all its Nantucket transportation needs using the SSA during the busy Nantucket summer season. The goal of the pilot is to determine if, as the service develops, other SSA customers that cannot reserve a guaranteed spot with the SSA will participate in the service. The service is not designed nor intended to take customers and freight traffic away from the SSA, but rather supplement the SSA at times when the SSA cannot offer a guaranteed reservation."

Mikutowicz and 41 North Offshore LLC have made the necessary applications to the Steamship Authority to license the operation from mid-May 2022 through mid-October. The tug and barge freight service would include up to 70 round trips, each carrying an average of three tractor trailer equivalent units. Loading and off-loading would happen at the Fish Island Terminal in New Bedford Harbor, and at Steamboat Wharf on Nantucket. In its application to the Steamship, 41 North Offshore LLC identified UPS as its “initial seed customer.”

The proposal was reviewed by the Steamship Authority’s Port Council Tuesday morning, and Nantucket’s representative on the council Nat Lowell gave his endorsement, and emphasized that it goes well beyond the UPS situation.

“I see this as a fantastic, 21st century solution to things that happen off the cuff,” Lowell said. “This potential partnership with Jonah is something like what we have with the Hy-Line and Seastreak. It’s not an alternative to the Steamship. It’s an organized way to do the business that just doesn't work well traditionally - mobilization- things that are unusual and don’t have time sensitive requirements. Some of the crazy stuff like the tank farm work. This is a way for a company to fill a niche that’s materialized over time. There’s a lot of things happening over here now that can’t happen by truck, that are not traditional. It’s a way to organize the chaos of unusual, oddball necessities.”

The barge would not allow any passengers during the 70 trips this summer, and UPS would meet the trucks and trailers at Steamboat Wharf on Nantucket to offload them from the barge.

The Steamship Authority’s Board of Governors will consider 41 North Offshore LLC’s license request at its meeting on April 19.