Mongla's Berths, Buoys and Anchorages, Laid Out in One Place

Mongla's berth layout is less complicated than Chattogram's, but it's spread out enough on paper, jetties, private terminals, numbered buoys, multiple anchorages, that a first-time caller benefits from seeing it laid out in one place rather than piecing it together from a chart and a pilot's verbal briefing. Mongla planning remains vessel-specific: use the latest MPA movement order, berth schedule, pilot advice and tide window rather than a historic single draft or transit figure. Confirm current Mongla Port Authority particulars for draft, berth and traffic before the call.

The two main jetties

Commercial cargo today concentrates at Jetty-8 and Jetty-9, both rated to 170 metres LOA and 7 metres draft. These are CPA-operated and handle the bulk of breakbulk, container and general cargo that moves through the main quay.

Private berths

Three private operators run dedicated berths alongside the public jetties: Kleenheat, MCML, and SKF. Each handles specific cargo streams tied to its owner's business, these aren't open-access berths in the way the main jetties are, so an agent needs to confirm well ahead of arrival whether a vessel's cargo and consignee actually line up with one of these facilities before assuming it's an option.

Mooring buoys and anchorages

Beyond the jetties, Mongla runs six numbered mooring buoys for vessels that don't need to go alongside, plus a set of anchorage areas suited to different stages of a call: the Base Creek and Harbouria anchorages, the Akram Point anchorage, and the outer anchorage zones CO-A and CO-B, which take vessels up to 230 metres LOA with draft to 12 metres, considerably more generous than what the jetties themselves can handle, which tells you where the real limiting factor in the system sits.

Why the jetty draft is the actual bottleneck

A vessel can sit comfortably at the outer anchorage with 12 metres of draft and still face a genuine draft shortage trying to get alongside Jetty-8 or 9 for jetty berthing, since those top out around 7 metres. That gap is exactly what the Pasur channel dredging project, approved by ECNEC in January 2025, about Tk 1,538 crore, running under Bangladesh Navy supervision, is meant to close, targeting an extra 0.5 to 1 metre of usable draft at the jetty once the work is done. Separately, ongoing dredging on the Mongla-Ghasiakhali channel has already started letting larger vessels reach the jetty directly rather than relying on a lighterage vessel to bring cargo in, according to port officials.

How busy it actually is right now

Mongla isn't the sleepy second port it was a few years back. The port handled 17,387 TEUs of containers in just the first half of FY2025-26 (July-December 2025), already most of an entire prior fiscal year's total, with 440 international vessels calling in that same six-month window. Cargo throughput for the half-year ran past 6.3 million tonnes of imports. None of that changes the physical jetty limits, but it does mean berth availability at the two main jetties is tighter than it would have been even two years ago, and planning a call with some lead time matters more than it used to.