Coastal trading vessel

Coastal trading vessels, also known as coasters or skoots, are shallow-hulled merchant ships used for transporting cargo along a coastline. Their shallow hulls mean that they can get through reefs where deeper-hulled seagoing ships usually cannot (26-28 feet), but as a result they are not optimized for the large waves found on the open ocean. Coasters can load and unload cargo in shallow ports.

For European inland waterways they are limited in size by the navigable dimensions of those waterways. E.g. ships on the French waterways are limited to the Freycinet gauge of 38.5m length, 5.05m breadth, and 2.5m draft.

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