The Seaway closes January 5: plan your December steel now

Fission Logistics trucks steel, aluminum and pipe off Great Lakes and coastal ports and delivers it to plants in Ontario and Quebec. Every year the busiest port weeks are the last ones before the Seaway closes. The freight is the same. The calendar is tighter.

The dates

These are the Seaway's published target dates. Ice decides the rest. Last winter, 11 ocean ships were still above St. Lambert the night before the January 5 closing, against 1 the year before, and the Welland Canal did not close until January 13. An ocean ship that wants to get back to the Atlantic plans to discharge well before the end.

Why December gets tight

• The last ships land together. Lots for Hamilton, Oshawa, Cleveland, Toledo, Burns Harbor and Chicago stack up in late November and December. In late 2025 the Cleveland terminal alone had 8 ships due between October 24 and November 30.
• The holidays cut the working days. Christmas and New Year's Day both fall on a Friday this year. Many plants run short hours or close between them, and the terminal's free time keeps running by its own rules.
• Winter roads. Coil and aluminum ride through road salt and wet snow. Plan tarps or a Conestoga for anything that has to arrive clean.

The math on one lot

Take 1,320,000 lb of coil off the last ship of the season.

Inside Ontario a 6 axle cuts the truck count almost in half. That matters most in the weeks when every carrier on the dock is short a truck.

How we plan the last ships

1. Send the vessel now. Name, ETA and piece count as soon as you have them. We book trucks against the week the ship discharges, not the day the arrival notice comes.
2. Get the last free day in writing. From the terminal or your forwarder, for your commodity. We plan backward from it.
3. Have the customs side ready. From a US port the steel moves to Canada in bond. Fission files the 7512 under our own US Customs bond, or your customs broker files it under our bond. From Hamilton, Oshawa or a Quebec port your broker clears it with CBSA. Either way it is filed before the truck reaches the gate.
4. Tell us your holiday hours. If your plant closes from December 24 to January 1, say so when you book and we set delivery days around it.
5. Size the fleet to the window. We run 80 trucks and 140 trailers, tandem and multi axle, so a 30 load lot in December is planned, not scrambled.

After the Seaway closes

Steel does not stop in January. It comes in through the ports that stay open. Montreal has been open all year since 1964, with Coast Guard icebreakers keeping the river clear, and Trois-Rivières and Sorel-Tracy work through the winter too. On the coast, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Camden, Gloucester, Wilmington and Port Newark take ships all year. We run every one of them to Ontario and Quebec, so a winter lot is the same phone call as a summer one.

What to send us

The port and terminal, the vessel and its ETA, the piece count and weights, the delivery address and your plant's holiday hours, your customs broker's contact, the last free day, and whether the cargo is in bond or already cleared. Dispatch names the trailer with the price within 1 business hour. See every port we run on the port trucking page, or go straight to the Port of Hamilton, Burns Harbor, Cleveland and Toledo or the Port of Montreal.

More from the yard

• How to avoid port storage and demurrage charges on steel
• Why a 6 axle moves 86,000 lb when a tandem stops at 45,000
• How a Conestoga trailer works, and why shippers ask for one

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