After carrying freight to and from the Channel Islands for almost 80 years, latterly with a two-ship lift-on/lift-off operation from Southampton and Cherbourg to Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney by Huelin Dispatch and Huelin Endeavour, St Helier-based Huelin-Renouf filed for bankruptcy in late August. This meant the loss of nearly 100 jobs, 40 of them in Jersey, with the remainder spread between Guernsey, England and France.
Back in the mid-1980s Huelin Renouf joined Brittany Ferries and Mainland Market Deliveries to set up Channel Island Ferries to compete with Sealink for passenger, car and ro-ro freight traffic to Guernsey and Jersey using Corbiere, the former Baltic ferry Apollo (1990/4,328gt), which had served Brittany Ferries as Benodet, thepartnership ending in 1994.
With Grant Thornton appointed as Huelin Renouf liquidators, other operators were not slow in making offers to take up the cargo slack, Condor Ferries saying they have spare capacity equivalent to four times the traffic handled by Huelin Renouf.
Condor group freight director Ken Soar added that ro-pax ferry Commodore Clipper and ro-ro Commodore Goodwill, running from Portsmouth to Guernsey and Jersey, could be adapted to take containers, while Bruno Kay-Mouat, managing director of combined company Channel Seaways/Alderney Shipping, said that it would be able to maintain freight shipments to Alderney. RP
