Container ship ‘Ever Forward’ is floating again after being stuck for more than a month in the mud in Chesapeake Bay, the bay near the American capital Washington D.C. Salvage companies led by Donjon Smit, an American joint venture of the Dutch Boskalis, managed to get the freighter afloat on Sunday. To make that feat possible, approximately five hundred containers were first taken off board by crane ships last week to reduce the weight of the vessel. Also, 65,000 cubic meters of mud around the ship was sucked away, enough mud to fill 27 inland vessels.

Captain David O’Connell, US Coast Guard Maryland commander, has described the difficulty of the salvage operation as “historic”. The Ever Forward had sailed out of Baltimore Harbour on March 13 with a draft of 13 meters and ended up outside the fairway of the average depth of 6.4 meters. After that, several attempts to get the ship to move failed.

The Ever Forward has now been towed to an anchorage for an inspection and then returns to Baltimore Harbour to reload containers. After that it can finally go back to Norfolk (Virginia) as was planned more than a month ago.