Anyone noticed the Travelling Gantry crane on the dock in the foreground, looks like one of those that was removed from some comntainer ships later in their careers to increase the deck-carrying capacity.

@ REG
YOU FORGET ONE IMPORTANT PART,
Lykes had also contracts with the US gov to have ships at the ready at a moments notice by the gov to be used as troop/troop equipment transporters which meant they were constructed that they could load/discharge very versatile cargoes and for that a lot gears/cranes in various outlays and shapes were needed. As "jaeger" pointed out they converted some but some they could not. When you go further, the downfall of Lykes and also Sealand came when the US gov decided to make a own shipping division for that,,the Military Lift Command and cancelled the contracts therefore with Lykes and Sealand. Suddenly those managers at both companies, who never lerned how to manage with budgets were at the end of the flagpole and toppled like dominoes. Same we could/can see in german schipping to a degree,,the german KG system flushed the companies with such enormous money that managers really did not think anymore how to run ships,,they only knew how to order them to be build,,until the money dried out and the managers had to manage,,where this lead to we can see daily in Germany when companies went/going bust.

True, Lykes was slow to acquire fully cellular container ships, but to be fair, in the early '70s they did convert 13 of their Gulf Pride class break-bulk ships into Gulf Pacer partial cellulars. Lykes' barge-carriers also regularly carried containers atop their barges, and later, instead of barges, but they were definitely not as efficient as cellular ships.

"Leaky Brothers" was later than most shipping companies to get into containerization. They stayed with break-bulk ships far too long. They also invested in barge-carriers, which proved to be a costly mistake. In the mid 1980s they finally saw the writing on the wall and began to invest in container ships. However, instead of purchasing new state-of-the-art ships, they bought old second-hand ships. They chartered three old re-converted container ships that had started out as Moore-McCormack freighters, and also bought three old Hapag-Lloyd container ships built in the late 1960s, including the one shown here. The exp-Mormac were placed on their West Coast of South America service, while the ex-German container ships operated for many years between the U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe.