Horizon Line, Inc. announced Tuesday it will add a Jacksonville call to its southbound service between Houston and San Juan, which will continue to operate on a 14-day round trip timetable.
The schedule enhancement will offer shippers a Tuesday sailing every other week from Jacksonville to San Juan.
Adding the Jacksonville call also creates a high-speed, over-the-weekend marine option through Houston for cargo bound for southeastern destinations along the Eastern Seaboard. The company’s weekly Thursday service departing Jacksonville for Puerto Rico remains unchanged.
“This is an innovative schedule refinement that utilizes an existing in-service vessel to add a bi-weekly Tuesday Jacksonville service, as well as provide both U.S. coastal and deep water ports of call in the same sailing schedule,” said Sam Woodward, president and CEO of Horizon Lines.
The first sailing of the new service is scheduled to depart Houston on June 7, arriving in Jacksonville on June 11. There, certain cargo destined for metropolitan areas in the Southeast will be transferred via the company’s intermodal network and delivered to final destinations like Miami and Orlando, Florida, Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina and Charlotte, North Carolina.
The vessel will then load additional cargo bound for San Juan and then depart on the same Tuesday, arriving in San Juan on Friday.
It will return directly to Houston from San Juan, departing on Friday and arriving in Houston on the following Friday, maintaining the current 14-day round trip schedule.
“We are responding to (shippers’) requests for a midweek sailing solution from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico, which hasn’t been available since we discontinued our weekly Tuesday service in January. Second, we are providing shippers with an attractive marine solution for delivering cargo between two major regions of the U.S. We have received strong interest from shippers of building products, raw materials, resins, agricultural products, foodstuffs and other materials that flow through Houston to distribution centers and manufacturing facilities in the Southeast,” Woodard said.
Horizon Lines, Inc. claims to be the only ocean cargo carrier serving all three noncontiguous domestic markets of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico from the continental United States.
The company owns a fleet of 14 fully Jones Act-qualified vessels and operates five port terminals in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The company is based in Charlotte, N.C.