Short answers, pulled from the story.
Between 2,500 and 2,800 attempts were made to run the Union blockade, with at least an 80 percent success rate. By the end of the war, however, the Union Navy had captured more than 1,100 blockade runners and destroyed or run aground another 355.
The Syren, a privately owned iron-hulled sidewheel steamer built at Greenwich, Kent, in 1863, completed a record 33 runs through the Union blockade. She was finally captured on the 18th of February 1865, in Charleston harbor at the Ashley River.
Most blockade runners were long, narrow side-wheel steamers with a shallow draft, painted dark gray to blend into the night sea. When approaching a coastline, crews switched from standard coal to smokeless anthracite to reduce their profile against the horizon; some ships burned cotton soaked in turpentine for added speed and reduced smoke.
British investors financed and built the majority of blockade runners, and British firms supplied most of the Confederacy's arms. The London Armoury Company alone shipped more than 70,000 rifles to the Confederacy by February 1863, while the Liverpool firm Fraser, Trenholm and Company served as the Confederacy's primary financial and shipping agent in Europe.
Between October 1864 and January 1865, Wilmington received 8,632,000 pounds of meat, 1,933,000 pounds of saltpeter, 1,507,000 pounds of lead, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 pairs of blankets, half a million pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles, and 43 cannon. When the port fell in February 1865, the Confederacy's main supply line was cut.
Various historians have estimated that supplies brought into the Confederacy via blockade runners lengthened the duration of the conflict by up to two years. At the same time, the Union blockade reduced Confederate cotton exports by 95 percent from pre-war levels, severely damaging the Southern economy.