Atlas morski (Maritime Atlas) is an independent, Polish-language publication about the sea and the maritime economy. This English page is a plain guide to one subject that Poland does at a scale few outside the country notice: its maritime economy – the ports, the shipyards, the seafarers and, since 2026, the first wind farms standing in the Baltic. If you arrived here looking for the university that once used this address, the note below points you to the right place.
The address am.gdynia.pl was used until 2018 by Akademia Morska w Gdyni. On 1 September 2018 the school was renamed Uniwersytet Morski w Gdyni and moved to a new address. For admissions, faculties, research and all official matters, go to umg.edu.pl. Atlas morski is an independent publication; we hold no student records and cannot forward anything to the university.
- Poland has roughly 440 km of Baltic coast and three port complexes – Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin-Świnoujście. In 2024 they handled 124.2 million tonnes of cargo and a record 3.27 million containers (TEU).
- Gdańsk is now the largest port on the Baltic and among the five biggest in the European Union.
- In July 2026 Baltic Power delivered the first offshore wind electricity ever to Poland’s grid; national policy targets about 5.9 GW of Baltic wind by 2030.
- Poland barely builds large merchant ships any more, but it is one of the world’s leading builders of yachts and a growing hub for offshore fabrication and ship repair.
- Polish officer certificates meet the international STCW standard and are recognised worldwide; the training runs through the maritime universities in Gdynia and Szczecin.
A maritime country by geography
Poland faces the Baltic – a shallow, brackish, almost enclosed sea – along roughly 440 km of coast. That coastline is short for a country of 38 million people, which is exactly why the sea matters so much: nearly all of Poland’s seaborne trade has to pass through a handful of ports, and the country’s exclusive economic zone in the Baltic is now filling with wind turbines. The maritime economy is not a niche here; it is the point where a large industrial economy meets the water.
The Baltic itself shapes everything built on it. It is only about 55 metres deep on average, barely salty, and freezes along the Polish coast in hard winters. Those conditions make it easier to drive turbine foundations into the seabed than in the deep North Sea, but they also mean ice, fog and short, steep storm waves that any ship or offshore crew has to plan around. We cover the sea itself in Polish under Morze i Bałtyk.
The ports: Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin-Świnoujście
Almost all of Poland’s maritime trade moves through three complexes on the coast. Gdańsk and Gdynia sit side by side on the Gulf of Gdańsk in the east; Szczecin and Świnoujście share the Oder estuary in the west, near the German border. Each has a different specialism, and together they turned Poland from a transit afterthought into one of the Baltic’s main gateways.
According to Statistics Poland, the country’s seaports handled 124.2 million tonnes of cargo in 2024 – down 8.9% from a record 2023, mainly because coal and grain volumes fell sharply. The more telling number rose: container traffic reached a record 3.27 million TEU, up 9.3%, as the ports kept shifting toward higher-value general cargo. Gdańsk alone handled roughly 71 million tonnes, well over half the national total, and its Baltic Hub terminal is the largest container terminal on the Baltic Sea. Over the past decade Gdańsk has been the fastest-growing large port in Europe and now ranks among the five biggest in the European Union.
| Port complex | 2024 cargo | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Gdańsk | approx. 71 mln t | Containers (Baltic Hub), crude oil and fuels, the deepwater terminal – the Baltic’s largest port. |
| Gdynia | approx. 23 mln t | Grain (the Baltic’s leading grain port), containers, ferries; the new Outer Port is under way. |
| Świnoujście | approx. 19 mln t | The LNG import terminal and a new installation port for offshore wind. |
| Szczecin | approx. 10 mln t | Bulk cargo, steel and general cargo on the Oder, deep inland by river and rail. |
The direction of travel is toward deeper water and bigger ships. Gdańsk is building out its deepwater container capacity; Gdynia is constructing an Outer Port that will also serve as an installation base; and Świnoujście, already home to Poland’s LNG import terminal, is adding a terminal to assemble offshore wind turbines. The logistics behind all of this – Incoterms, bills of lading, freight rates, customs – are covered in Polish under Transport i logistyka.
Offshore wind: the Baltic’s new power plants
The biggest change to Poland’s maritime economy in a generation is happening offshore. For decades the Polish Baltic had no wind farms at all; now the first are being switched on, and a pipeline measured in gigawatts is under construction. This is the story to watch, because it turns the sea itself into a power station and pulls ports, shipyards and engineers into a brand-new supply chain.
In July 2026 Baltic Power – a joint venture of the Polish group ORLEN and Canada’s Northland Power – delivered the first electricity ever generated by offshore wind to Poland’s national grid. Sitting about 23 km off the coast near Choczewo and Łeba, it uses 76 turbines of 15 MW each for a capacity of roughly 1.1-1.2 GW, enough to supply around 1.5 million households and about 3% of national electricity demand once fully commissioned in the second half of 2026. Its roughly 4.4 billion euro financing was the largest ever raised for a single investment in Poland. A second project, Bałtyk 2 and 3 (Equinor and Polenergia), began offshore construction in early 2026 and will add another 1.4 GW with 100 turbines off Ustka and Łeba.
| Milestone | Capacity | When |
|---|---|---|
| Baltic Power – first power to the grid | approx. 1.1-1.2 GW | July 2026; full operation H2 2026 |
| Bałtyk 2 and 3 – under construction | approx. 1.4 GW | Offshore work from early 2026 |
| National target (first wave) | approx. 5.9 GW | by 2030 |
| National ambition (aggregate) | approx. 8-11 GW | by 2040 |
Poland’s energy policy targets roughly 5.9 GW of Baltic wind by 2030 and somewhere between 8 and 11 GW by 2040, with the range reflecting genuine uncertainty over grid capacity and planning rules. The list of developers reads like a map of the European offshore industry – alongside ORLEN and Polenergia there are PGE, Equinor, Ørsted, RWE, Ocean Winds and others. Just as important for a maritime site: the turbines are shipped and assembled from Polish ports, and the electricity they make ties directly into the wider story we cover in Polish under Energetyka morska.
Shipbuilding and yachts
Poland’s shipbuilding story is one of reinvention. The mass production of large merchant ships that defined Gdańsk and Szczecin in the twentieth century – the Gdańsk Shipyard was where the Solidarity movement began in 1980 – largely collapsed after 2000. What replaced it is smaller, more specialised and, in one segment, world-beating.
The clearest success is yachts and recreational boats. Poland is one of the largest producers of pleasure boats in the world, ranking second only to the United States in categories such as small motorboats and 12-metre motor yachts. Builders like Galeon, Conrad Shipyard and Sunreef Yachts export the vast majority of their output, and foreign brands routinely outsource hull production to Polish yards. Sunreef, based in the historic shipbuilding city of Gdańsk, is building what is set to be the world’s largest electric catamaran. A quarter of Polish boat exports go to the United States alone.
The second strand is offshore fabrication and ship repair, which the wind boom has revived. Yards such as Crist in Gdynia build wind-turbine installation vessels and turbine foundations; the Remontowa group is one of Europe’s busiest ship-repair operations; and a cluster of steel-structure and design firms around the Tricity employs well over a thousand engineers. In other words, the same coast that once launched ocean liners now fabricates the machines that will stand in the sea. The engineering behind modern vessels – propulsion, engine rooms, automation – is covered in Polish under Technika morska.
The merchant fleet and Polish seafarers
Poland’s own registered fleet is modest – like most European maritime nations, its shipowners largely fly foreign flags for tax and regulatory reasons. The country’s real weight in world shipping is in people. Polish officers have long crewed ships far beyond the national fleet, and the reputation of Polish deck and engineer officers is one of the maritime economy’s quieter exports.
That reputation rests on training and recognition. Poland sits on the International Maritime Organization’s list of states that fully meet the international STCW convention on seafarer training, so Polish Certificates of Competency are recognised worldwide and can be endorsed by other flag administrations. Officers are educated mainly at Uniwersytet Morski w Gdyni and the Maritime University of Szczecin, backed by dedicated training centres, while the Maritime Offices (Urzędy Morskie) in Gdynia and Szczecin, under the Ministry of Infrastructure, administer seafarer documents. The tradition runs deep: the interwar Polish Merchant Marine ran ocean liners such as MS Piłsudski, and Poland still sends cadets to sea on the sail training ships Dar Pomorza and Dar Młodzieży. Life and work at sea, ship types and flags of registry are covered in Polish under Żegluga, and the rules that govern safety at sea – SOLAS, MARPOL, STCW – under Bezpieczeństwo morskie.
Fishing and the Baltic environment
Fishing is now a small part of the maritime economy, and its recent history is a cautionary one. The eastern Baltic cod stock – once the backbone of the Polish fleet – collapsed, and the European Union has cut cod quotas to near zero to let it recover. Polish boats have shifted largely to sprat and herring, much of it processed for feed and canning rather than the plate.
Behind the quotas sits the ecology of a fragile sea. The Baltic’s low salinity, limited exchange of water with the North Sea and periodic oxygen-starved „dead zones” on the seabed make its fish stocks unusually sensitive to both fishing pressure and nutrient pollution washed in from the land. It is a working sea and a stressed one at the same time – which is precisely why its currents, ice and coastal processes are worth understanding rather than taking for granted.
A one-page English reference sheet with the numbers on this page – ports, containers, the offshore wind pipeline, yachts and seafarers – collected in one place for quick reference or citation.
Maritime education and the Gdynia connection
All of this comes back to Gdynia, and to why this domain exists at all. In the early 1920s Gdynia was a fishing village. Poland had just regained independence with a short stretch of coast and no major port of its own, so it built one from scratch – and a whole modernist city grew around it within a decade. The maritime school that trained officers for the merchant fleet was founded in Tczew in 1920 and moved to Gdynia in 1930, once the port existed. That school became, in time, Akademia Morska w Gdyni and then Uniwersytet Morski w Gdyni. It is the reason the address am.gdynia.pl once belonged to a university – and the reason this independent site keeps a clear signpost to the real one at umg.edu.pl. The full history is told in Polish in Historia szkolnictwa morskiego w Gdyni, and the city that a port built under Gdynia i wybrzeże.
Frequently asked
Is this the website of Gdynia Maritime University?
No. The university operates at umg.edu.pl under the name Uniwersytet Morski w Gdyni. Atlas morski is an independent publication that uses an address the university stopped using in 2018. We cannot help with admissions, diplomas or student records.
How big is Poland’s maritime economy?
Measured by its ports, it is one of the Baltic’s largest. In 2024 Polish seaports handled 124.2 million tonnes of cargo and a record 3.27 million containers (TEU), and Gdańsk is now both the biggest port on the Baltic and among the five largest in the European Union.
Does Poland have offshore wind farms?
Yes, as of 2026. Baltic Power, off Choczewo and Łeba, delivered the first offshore wind electricity to the national grid in July 2026, with a capacity of roughly 1.1-1.2 GW. A second project, Bałtyk 2 and 3, is under construction, and national policy targets about 5.9 GW of Baltic wind by 2030.
Does Poland still build ships?
Not large merchant ships in any volume – that industry largely ended after 2000. Poland is, however, one of the world’s leading builders of yachts and recreational boats, and its yards now fabricate offshore wind installation vessels and turbine foundations and carry out ship repair.
Are Polish seafarer certificates recognised internationally?
Yes. Poland fully meets the international STCW convention, so Polish Certificates of Competency are recognised worldwide and can be endorsed by other flag states. Officers are trained mainly at the maritime universities in Gdynia and Szczecin.
Why is the rest of the site in Polish?
Atlas morski is written for Polish readers. This English page exists so that visitors following older links understand where they have landed, and so that anyone researching Poland’s maritime economy has a clear overview in English with links onward to the detailed Polish sections.
Sources
- Statistics Poland (GUS) – The maritime economy in Poland 2024
- Port authorities of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Szczecin-Świnoujście – annual cargo results
- Baltic Power (ORLEN and Northland Power) – project data and first-power announcement, 2026
- Equinor and Polenergia – Bałtyk 2 and 3 construction updates, 2026
- Polish national energy policy (PEP2040) – offshore wind targets
- Polish Investment and Trade Agency and POLBOAT – the recreational boating and yacht sector
- Invest in Pomerania – shipbuilding and offshore fabrication in the Tricity
- International Maritime Organization – STCW list of confirmed parties
- Uniwersytet Morski w Gdyni and the Maritime University of Szczecin – maritime education
- European Union – Baltic fishing quota regulations