It will take five to six days to load the mountain of wood chips, produced from logging truckloads of birch trees from private and government acreage throughout the Matanuska-Susitna area, said Marc Van Dongen, director of Port MacKenzie.

The Keoyang Majesty, which arrived at the new port before dawn Jan. 31, was to be loading wood chips for five to six days, said Van Dongen and officials of NPI LLC, a company that manufacturers and exports woodchips.

A large shipment of spruce woodchips is scheduled for export at the end of March to a paper mill in Japan, and NPI is working on markets in China, Van Dongen said. "We originally planned on six (shipments) for this calendar year, but now are guessing at 10 or 12," he said. Van Dongen earlier had estimated having a ship loading wood chips every four to six weeks, year-round.

Van Dongen, a retired deputy commander of the Alaska District office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, estimated that each vessel carrying wood chips would generate $50,000 to $55,000 in wharfage and dockage fees. Borough manager John Duffy earlier estimated that net income from those vessels alone would initially be $80,000 to $100,000 annually.

"This is a big deal for us," Van Dongen said, on the eve of the arrival of the Keoyang Majesty. "We've put $20 million of effort into the port out there. This is the start of something big."

Weather is a big factor in manipulating the Panamax-sized vessels around at the port, as they take on tons of wood chips.

"The hardest part, most critical, is moving it while it's at the dock," Van Dongen said. The ship will have to be moved five times in the course of loading its cargo.

"We have a heavy current there," he said. "We will use 24 lines to tie the vessel to the dock. There's a lot of force between the current and the ice."

Loading the wood chips is the first test of the newly completed NPI conveyer system, which comes from the stockpile area 120 feet down a bluff to the dock.

The port's facilities include the recently constructed new dock, which extends out 485 feet, with more than 60 feet of draft at its 1,200-foot face. There is a 100-foot-by-110-foot turn-around area in the center, where the trestle meets the dock. The only other structure at the port site is a barge dock, 500 feet wide, which extends out 850 feet from shore.