Despite the recent drop in vessel queues outside Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach, a new Sea-Intelligence report said this is set to start growing again — to a level worse than what was seen last May.

"The vessel queue outside of Los Angeles/Long Beach (LA/LB) recently dropped to 66 vessels from 100-105 vessels. While this does look like a light at the end of the tunnel, the data from Sea-Intelligence’s Trade Capacity Outlook (TCO) database shows otherwise," the maritime analyst said.

Sea-Intelligence noted that it calculated the cumulative change in the number of vessels arriving at the port complex using the fourth quarter of 2021 as a baseline, assuming a transit period from Asia of 2½ weeks.

"If we take 2021-Q4 as a baseline, we can calculate the relative cumulative change in the number of vessel arrivals. As the TCO database is forward-looking, we can do this out to May 9th, 2022," it added, noting that compared to the fourth quarter baseline, 60 fewer vessels would arrive in the first week of March.

That forecast predicted a 60-vessel queue, while the current queue is at 66 vessels.

It should be noted that in Q4, the queue outside LA/LB grew from approximately 80 vessels in October to 105 by the end of the year (a cumulative increase of 25 vessels).

"What is more worrying, is that the data would therefore also imply that if there are no other changes, then the queue will be 25 vessels larger than the baseline by the end of May 2022," said Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.

"The baseline, in keeping with the queue growth in 2021-Q4, would imply a queue of 145 vessels. Adding the additional 25 would bring the queue to 170 vessels," he added, noting that "this is extremely unlikely to happen – simply because there are not that many vessels to be had."

"What will happen instead, is that the sheer shortage of vessels will lead to many more blank sailings," Murphy continued.

"What we saw during January appeared to be a kind of steady-state balance, between the desire to operate the required vessels and the need to blank sailings due to the vessels being unavailable. Hence, more realistically, we might simply be back to the 100-105 vessels in the queue, by the time we get to April."