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Some container lines and their importing customers are looking for alternate paths to get around bottlenecks at the main U.S. trade gateways in Southern California, where an armada of cargo vessels is anchored offshore at the congested seaports. Shipping lines have started moving some operations to smaller ports and have canceled some sailings altogether to avoid the backups that have tied up dozens of ships and hundreds of thousands of containers stuffed with goods off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. France’s CMA CGM SA, the world’s fourth-largest container operator by capacity, said it was replacing a weekly six-ship service from China to Los Angeles with a separate sailing to Oakland, Calif., and Seattle. “The new Golden Gate Bridge service does not include L.A. because of the congestion,” a company spokesman said. The backups have tied up inventories for weeks in some cases as ships wait to reach berths while cargo that has been offloaded sits for long periods at packed freight terminals, where operations have slowed as dockworkers have coped with an outbreak of coronavirus cases. The supply-chain stresses are rising as a backup of ships waiting to get into the neighboring Southern California ports has grown beyond the number that were anchored during labor strife in 2014. Stacking Up Monthly inbound container volume, in 20-footequivalent units, into the ports of Los Angelesand Long Beach over the past two years. Inbound containers Source: Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach According to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which monitors ship traffic at the state’s ports, 37 container ships were anchored off the sprawling Los Angeles and Long Beach complex on Feb. 2, while 27 vessels were at berths, loading and unloading cargo. In the first week of February a year ago, the group counted one ship waiting offshore and 17 at the docks. Paris-based shipping research group Alphaliner estimated the ships waiting offshore at the start of this month had capacity for 336,500 20-foot shipping containers. “The waiting time to dock is up to seven days on average, depending on the ship type,” said Mario Cordero, executive director at the Port of Long Beach, which handled a record 2.4 million containers in the fourth quarter of 2020, up 23% from the year-earlier period.