Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And your first question comes from the line of Omar Nokta of Dahlman Rose.
Omar Nokta - Dahlman Rose & Co.
Good morning. Hi Joe and Fred.
Joseph Royce
Good morning.
Ferdinand Lepere
Good morning, Omar.
Omar Nokta - Dahlman Rose & Co.
I just wanted to get a sense on, just the cargo volumes during the first quarter. I know you showed that, I think volumes were about nearly 1.2 million. It looks like they are sequentially down from the 1.5 in the forth quarter. I just want to get a sense, was that something that was exacerbated by the drydocking? Or was there may be a utilization issue during the quarter?
Joseph Royce
Well, it was exacerbated by the crisis. Being one of the areas that we've been hit, obviously it started at the end of last year whereas in the volumes especially in steel. Steel is a big part of our business, it is the core of our east coast South America liner of service, TLA service, and just there was an overall reduction in volumes, steel being the leader, as a result of the crisis and the credit problems.
What we are starting to see today, is that slowly these volumes are starting to come back. I just spent three weeks, close to three weeks in South America, visiting all our offices and talking to our major customers. And when you look at South America, divided from the east coast, into the east coast and west coast, on the east coast of South America, we were talking to our steel shippers and they were all complaining, there were certainly suffering as a result of the crisis. They were complaining about the prices.
But the one thing that was starting to show life was an increase in volumes. We used to have three to five sailings a month prior to the crisis and in -- out of the east coast of South America, Brazil in January, we had one sailing, February we had two, and we had three sailings in March and we are experiencing now three sailings through April and it also looks like we'll have three sailings in May.
So the volumes are starting to come back. We're seeing more request from our customers, our core customers for quotes as we look into the future. And I think the trend here is that the volumes come back and the rates follow.
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