Welcome to Carisbrooke Shipping.

We are a privately owned shipping company based in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight (the heart and soul of UK sailing) and located about 10 miles south of Southampton, 20 minutes door to door by regularly served fast catamarans. The company has evolved into a worldwide shipping operation from relatively modest origins dating back to the 1960's, trading barges and small coasters and supplying general cargo to the Isle of Wight.

We are currently owning/operating around 60 modern dry cargo vessels, ranging from 3,000 dwt upto 20,000 dwt and have actively been modernising our fleet in the recent past with an average age today of around 3 years. Further complementing this modernisation, we have a new building order book which will add a further 15 units until the year 2010 from shipyards in Spain, China and Japan.

Our focus since our first new building program back in the 1990's was the European 5,000 dwt coaster market where we already held a presence servicing various trades between North Europe-UK to the Mediterranean and Black Sea and vice-versa carrying multiple commodities but principally grain, fertilizers, coal and steels. The vessels operating since then have shared a multi-purpose open-hatch and box-shaped hold commonality enabling them to carry various types of cargoes including containers, palletised cargo, forest products and project cargoes such as pipes, wind mill blades and leisure yachts.

In order to meet both customer demands and new developing trades, we upgraded our initial 5,000 dwt new-building program into a deep sea trans-oceanic version increasing the sizes to 10,500 dwt and 20,000 dwt and fitting them with heavy duty self-sustained cranes and tweendecks. The success of this subsequent program helped us in tailoring future new designs of geared 8,000 dwt bulkers, 12,400 dwt MPP-Tween and grab-fitted 13,400 dwt bulkcarriers which are now the backbone of our deep-sea trade.

Although our headquarters are located in Cowes, we have a network of support technical and commercial offices located in Rotterdam (Soetermeer Fekkes), Leer (Carisbrooke Shipping Management), Montreal (Salient Maritime) and Singapore (Carisbrooke Shipping Ltd - Asia Pacific rep. office). In addition to commercial and technical ownership and management (including crewing), we also perform shipbroking, agency activities and third-party ship-management.

Ian Walker, Managing Director