BAYONNE, N.J. – With the sun gleaming off the Manhattan skyline in the distance, the massive ship passed slowly underneath the Bayonne Bridge on Thursday morning, tooting its horn to the delight of about two dozen onlookers on the bridge deck hundreds of feet up.
Even by the standards of ocean carriers, the CMA CGM Marco Polo is a behemoth: three-and-a-half football fields long — standing on end, it would be roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower — it can tote more than 16,000 20-foot-long containers, of the sort tractor-trailers carry one at a time.
It's the largest container ship ever to call on the East Coast, and its visit this week to New Jersey; Norfolk, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina underscores both the