Suez blocked.

[Gary Fox]

I would love to see the view from the bridge. With containers stacked almost as high as the bridge it bet it would be hard to see much of the canal ahead of you.

Yes and they have the superstructure forward (compared to a tanker for example).
There is supposed to be a certain maximum distance from the bridge for the sea surface to be visible, ( I think that's how it's worked out) limiting the height of the stacked boxes forward of the bridge, which usually have a visible slope downwards to the bows. It's crazy stuff!
Edit, found it on the 'Ship's Business' website:

 

[penfold]

***Warning - Thread drift***

The Endurance flood occurred while cleaning out the strainer on one of the main engine salt water inlets. The complicating factors were that the seacock was remotely operated, using an actuator activated by HP air, and the air lines had to be disconnected to remove the strainer.

The valve was closed; and air lines disconnected, to prevent accidental activation. The lid was removed and strainer cleaned out. Strainer was put back in, and air lines reconnected. Unfortunately (1) the lid had not yet been reinstalled and (2) the air lines were reconnected incorrectly. With the hoses connected incorrectly, the actuator opened the seacock rather than keeping it shut, allowing water in through the lidless strainer. The water pressure (of course) was too great to get the lid on, and repeated attempts to close the valve failed (in the heat of the moment it was not realised that pressing the "open" would have shut the valve, until after the HP compressor had failed due to SW ingress).

End result, she came within a gnats whisker of being lost. She was salvaged, but ended up being written off and scrapped.

A fascinating incident report to read; I've only worked on vessels that had manually actuated hull valves, so my experience of evicting crabs, shrimp, starfish etc from the strainer basket has never included flooding the ER.

I'm thinking the BP tanker was the one they managed to 'sink' alongside in Kwinana, WA, ... well... sit on the bottom by flooding the engine room.

I see the that a few posts ago Ever Given morphed into a tanker ... did the same thing yesterday on MSNBC.....

Sky News were describing it in their ticker display as a Huge Shipping Container at one point.

Thanks. Yes I understood the weight distribution regards to yachts but I wondered if a 200,000 ton tanker would even notice where the cargoe was. I thought you were chatting about movable water ballast while on the move. After all a container ship must load and unload many times to the point that a container ship is never actually empty. Thanks again live an learn.

Aha. The penny dropped. So this trim is an accident of chance caused by loading an unloading at various ports on the route not a deliberate trim to bias the ships attitude and responce to the helm. So if the ship got into a bow down position she would be (like another poster said) as manouvarable as a supermarket trolley. Thanks.

The trim is the responsibility of the 1st officer and will be adjusted via ballast and arrangement of cargo to keep a compromise between safety, comfort and fuel efficiency, although they don't always get it right.

 

[BurnitBlue]

No!! No!! No!!

Loading, stowage, discharging and ballasting are all pre-planned to achieve optimum trim, which is important because it affects both the ship’s handling and her fuel consumption, and it has to be done taking into account the bending, shear and torsional moments on the structure.

It is part of the Chief Officer’s job - actually the main part - and uses a fair amount of IT.

I have now remembered that some Class Societies do sell trim optimisation packages which will in some circumstances recommend a bows down trim. LR certainly do, but I didn’t buy it as I wasn’t willing to spend money to help the charterers unless they chipped in, and they were not persuaded. The Ever Given is ABS, and I don’t know if they do, as I sacked them in favour of LR.

You obviously know what you are writing about. Is that why I got the "smily" from you about my solution using a navy depth charge. I am serious, they will have to use a massive sudden brute force eventually. That ship is a "thing" and not worth the cost of the disruption to world trade. An engineer working on big heavy machines told me that the worse thing you can do to free a seized component is to tap it with a light hammer for hours. It will distort gradually. Just give the stuck item a big wallop with a huge sledge hammer. It will either break away or move. I am in electronics but even I can see he is correct.

Anyway thanks indeed for the correction. I could have been ignorant of the fscts for years. Many thanks.

Edit to change apparantly to obviously because the word apparantly seemed a bit rude.

 

[duncan99210]

There’s a world of difference between using explosives and administering a hard, sharp blow with a hammer. Trying to blow the ship‘s bow off the sand will more likely result in blowing the bow off. And that would simply turn the salvage problem from recovering an intact vessel to removing a wreck.
The work that’s going on at the moment seems sensible: digging away the sand round the bow and presumably something similar round the stern. The wait for the high tides on Monday to pull her off the sand.

 

[Kukri]

The very best people are on the job:

The SCA are highly capable. Egypt has a large population with a well educated middle class, and a bent towards STEM subjects. Egypt doesn’t have an aerospace industry; it has a ship canal, which is its major source of foreign exchange. The doubling of the northern (and longer) part of the Canal, opened in 2015, was done entirely by the SCA with no foreign money or technical input or equipment.

Everyone knows Smit. The name is synonymous with salvage and wreck removal and they are now part of Bos Kalis who dredge, build harbours, oil and gas platforms and so on everywhere.

Not everyone knows Nippon Salvage, because unlike Smit they don’t have a PR Department; they are owned collectively by the marine insurance companies of Japan, but I’ve known them and Smit since 1976 and they are equally good, though they make less noise about it.

 

[BurnitBlue]

The very best people are on the job:

The SCA are highly capable. Egypt has a large population with a well educated middle class, and a bent towards STEM subjects. Egypt doesn’t have an aerospace industry; it has a ship canal, which is its major source of foreign exchange.

Everyone knows Smit. The name is synonymous with salvage and wreck removal and they are now part of Bos Kalis who dredge, build harbours, oil and gas platforms and so on everywhere.

Not everyone knows Nippon Salvage, because unlike Smit they don’t have a PR Department; they are owned collectively by the marine insurance companies of Japan, but I’ve known them and Smir since 1976 and they are both equally good.

I agree with both Duncan and Kukri. There will have to be conventional attempts to refloat the ship. BUT the experts on the various news channels are saying it is very difficult and could take a week or more. The cargo can be moved or salvaged. The fate of the 15 year old ship is simply not worth the cost of the chaos to trade. A few percentage points on the stock market will destroy any savings of ego by refloating what actually will be scrapped anyway in a few years. I am sure that Smitt can blow the ship up and free at least one lane. Realise that in a week the cost of the chaos to trade will be in the billions of dollars. A few well placed sticks of dynamite or an equally destructive method will be cheap if the ship is not re-floated soon.

Interesting subject I think. I would bet a penny to a pound that accountants and market traders are examining solutions to totally wipe out that ship ASAP.

 

[Gary Fox]

I agree with both Duncan and Kukri. There will have to be conventional attempts to refloat the ship. BUT the experts on the various news channels are saying it is very difficult and could take a week or more. The cargo can be moved or salvaged. The fate of the 15 year old ship is simply not worth the cost of the chaos to trade. A few percentage points on the stock market will destroy any savings of ego by refloating what actually will be scrapped anyway in a few years. I am sure that Smitt can blow the ship up and free at least one lane. Realise that in a week the cost of the chaos to trade will be in the billions of dollars. A few well placed sticks of dynamite or an equally destructive method will be cheap if the ship is not re-floated soon.

Interesting subject I think. I would bet a penny to a pound that accountants and market traders are examining solutions to totally wipe out that ship ASAP.

Yes I bet every avenue is being explored, behind closed doors, in case she doesn't come off at springs.
Presumably they would have to get all the boxes off first, and pump out all the bunkers etc? They can't do that with dynamite.

 

[Kukri]

You obviously know what you are writing about. Is that why I got the "smily" from you about my solution using a navy depth charge. I am serious, they will have to use a massive sudden brute force eventually. That ship is a "thing" and not worth the cost of the disruption to world trade. An engineer working on big heavy machines told me that the worse thing you can do to free a seized component is to tap it with a light hammer for hours. It will distort gradually. Just give the stuck item a big wallop with a huge sledge hammer. It will either break away or move. I am in electronics but even I can see he is correct.

Anyway thanks indeed for the correction. I could have been ignorant of the fscts for years. Many thanks.

Edit to change apparantly to obviously because the word apparantly seemed a bit rude.

I forgot to mention the very obvious point that the stowage of cargo must be done in such a way that it can be discharged and additional cargo loaded at the minimum possible time and expense, and that a container ship has to call at numerous ports. Dangerous cargo and incompatible cargoes must be separated and refrigerated cargo (“reefer”) boxes must be on deck and plugged in to electric points. This makes it a real game of three dimensional chess on the grand scale.

Oh, and you stow heavies at the bottom and lights at the top, everywhere.

A friend who retired as CEO of Hong Kong Salvage and Towage was Mate of a small boxboat in 1980. He did the stowage himself everywhere except in Singapore where the terminal did it. On one trip they sailed from Singapore and as they turned to port leaving the harbour the little ship nearly fell over. Alan retired to his cabin to work out what had happened, and finally concluded that the terminal had stowed the ship exactly backwards, with the lightest boxes in the holds and the heaviest boxes at the top of the deck stacks. They decided that the best thing to do was to make their next port, getting less stable all the time as they burned fuel, and they crawled gingerly into Port Moresby and called for a shore crane to start discharge because using their own gantry crane would have capsized them!


I think that if the Ever Given breaks her back then the wreck will have to be removed pronto. Otherwise, not so, and I’ll explain:

All container lines give the receiver of the cargo - the importer - fourteen days free storage on the dock - called the “dwell time”.

Now, this is always taken because it gives the importer a “buffer” against the unexpected.

The unexpected just happened - but, by happy “not entirely coincidence”, the additional time needed to go round the Cape of Good Hope is, generally speaking, fourteen days.

So the only question that Lines have to consider is “when do we divert round the Cape and incur the additional fuel costs?”

Oh, yes, the ship is three years old, not fifteen years old.

 

[Kukri]

I'm thinking the BP tanker was the one they managed to 'sink' alongside in Kwinana, WA, ... well... sit on the bottom by flooding the engine room.

I see the that a few posts ago Ever Given morphed into a tanker ... did the same thing yesterday on MSNBC.....

Thanks Frank. I’ve remembered. She was the “British Dragoon”, and yes, Kwinana, 1969.

 

[Kukri]

Surely only the RN would use pneumatic valve actuators. My father , like many others was in the RNVR in WW2, and like all of them he grew to loathe the British MTBs and MGBs with their petrol engines and more to the point pneumatic everything. Poking around in the newly captured Catania E-boat base he found a full set of drawings for the German E-boat - diesel and hydraulic everything. He sent them back to Their Lordships with a few well chosen words, which did his Naval career no good at all.

 

[BurnitBlue]

I forgot to mention the very obvious point that the stowage of cargo must be done in such a way that it can be discharged and additional cargo loaded at the minimum possible time and expense, and that a container ship has to call at numerous ports. Dangerous cargo and incompatible cargoes must be separated and refrigerated cargo (“reefer”) boxes must be on deck and plugged in to electric points. This makes it a real game of three dimensional chess on the grand scale.

I think that if the Ever Given breaks her back then the wreck will have to be removed pronto. Otherwise, not so, and I’ll explain:

All container lines give the receiver of the cargo - the importer - fourteen days free storage on the dock - called the “dwell time”.

Now, this is always taken because it gives the importer a “buffer” against the unexpected.

The unexpected just happened - but, by happy “not entirely coincidence”, the additional time needed to go round the Cape of Good Hope is, generally speaking, fourteen days.

So the only question that Lines have to consider is “when do we divert round the Cape and incur the additional fuel costs?”

Oh, yes, the ship is three years old, not fifteen years old.

Thanks again kukri. Would it be safe for one of those heavily laden container ships to round the cape. I hear the wind over current down there can form high wave peaks that have broken many a ship. Horses for courses. There must be quite a few ships past their prime and must use Suez to survive.

It must appear that I am argueing with you. Believe me I am not. I am genuinly concerned about the disruption added to what is already a disruption due to Covid. I find the interaction between goods and people to be interesting. I reckon that most of the stuff in those 20,000 containers are Chinese made articles where a good proportion will be plastic crap. It probably represents less than haĺf a days total production from China which will take less than half a day to reproduce it.

If that ship had sunk in the Indian Ocean it would not have been a blip on the world economic map. Blocking the Suez canal for a week will cause a blip. I have no idea how much Lloyds of London is in the can for insurance payouts but if you have any idea I would love to know. Just for my own interest.

 

[Kukri]

I’m enjoying the chance to explain a bit about the industry that the modern world depends on but which prefers to hide and keep quiet. We are major users of IT, the second biggest on the planet or so I am told, but most of the people whom we never explain ourselves to assume, understandably, that we are rather simple people who just chuck a few boxes on and motor off.

I have heard it said that you always know when you are in the same room as a pilot, because he will tell you, but I can say that you will never know when you are in the same room as a Master Mariner or a Chief Engineer, because he won’t mention it.

One reason is that disruption is what we thrive on. We had a grim time a year ago but as the pandemic wore on people started to buy stuff and we went from laid up ships and laid off crews to a boom. Many complaints about freight rates in the Press, around Christmas, but never a word about the super low freight rates earlier.

Now, if the Canal is shut for a good long time we shall be raising our glasses to Evergreen
(who by the way are one of the more popular companies in the business - nice, competent people who pay their bills, honour their contracts and are good seamen) because nothing helps freight rates like a Suez Canal closure!

 

[Frank Holden]

Did someone mention dynamite?

The canal has been closed before .... second mate I sailed with long time ago regaled me with his '56 story... on an old Clan boat homeward bound from India at 12 knots.... they were 2 days south of Suez.... took them more than 10 or 12 days extra to get back to the UK.

 

[dolabriform]

I’m enjoying the chance to explain a bit about the industry that the modern world depends on but which prefers to hide and keep quiet. We are major users of IT, the second biggest on the planet or so I am told, but most of the people whom we never explain ourselves to assume, understandably, that we are rather simple people who just chuck a few boxes on and motor off.

I have heard it said that you always know when you are in the same room as a pilot, because he will tell you, but I can say that you will never know when you are in the same room as a Master Mariner or a Chief Engineer, because he will never mention it.

One reason is that disruption is what we thrive on. We had a grim time a year ago but as the pandemic wore on people started to buy stuff and we went from laid up ships and laid off crews to a boom. Many complaints about freight rates in the Press, around Christmas, but never a word about the super low freight rates earlier.

Now, if the Canal is shut for a good long time we shall be raising our glasses to Evergreen
(who by the way are one of the more popular companies in the business - nice, competent people who pay their bills, honour their contracts and are good seamen) because nothing helps freight rates like a Suez Canal closure!

I for one would like to thank you and others here for taking the time to share your knowledge. This is the most interesting thread I have read for a long time!

 

[Kukri]

to illustrate:



The slightly embarrassed chap shaking hands with Rear-Admiral H M Burrough, CB, on the well scrubbed teak decks of HMS Nigeria is Captain Dudley Mason of Eagle Oil, aka Shell, who is about to step on board the tanker OHIO, full of aviation petrol, and take her to Malta in July of 1942.

She arrived like this:


In two pieces and sinking, but the cargo was intact, and saved Malta. He got the GC.

 

[newtothis]

The very best people are on the job:

The SCA are highly capable. Egypt has a large population with a well educated middle class, and a bent towards STEM subjects. Egypt doesn’t have an aerospace industry; it has a ship canal, which is its major source of foreign exchange. The doubling of the northern (and longer) part of the Canal, opened in 2015, was done entirely by the SCA with no foreign money or technical input or equipment.

Everyone knows Smit. The name is synonymous with salvage and wreck removal and they are now part of Bos Kalis who dredge, build harbours, oil and gas platforms and so on everywhere.

Not everyone knows Nippon Salvage, because unlike Smit they don’t have a PR Department; they are owned collectively by the marine insurance companies of Japan, but I’ve known them and Smit since 1976 and they are equally good, though they make less noise about it.

I went out to Egypt for the opening ceremony of the extension channel. I agree it was an amazing effort getting it done in eight months or whatever it was, but you can do that when you have an army to do the work.
I'm a little surprised they haven't just thrown the army at it again to dig out Ever Given, but they have put two suction dredgers down that can suck up 2,000 cubic metres of sand an hour. Would be good if they got if off by Monday, as the tides, such as they are, will be agin them after that.

 

[newtothis]

So the only question that Lines have to consider is “when do we divert round the Cape and incur the additional fuel costs?”

They've already started. Ironically, the first was Ever Given's sistership Ever Greet. At the moment, its cheaper to spend another $500k on fuel than $1m on canal fees anyway. In the container shipping world, things are so out of whack at the moment that a week or sos delay until things settle again will hardly be noticed.

 

[Bajansailor]

The canal has been closed before .... second mate I sailed with long time ago regaled me with his '56 story... on an old Clan boat homeward bound from India at 12 knots.... they were 2 days south of Suez.... took them more than 10 or 12 days extra to get back to the UK.

My Dad was a ship's doctor on a Blue Funnel ship in the last convoy that got through the Canal before it was closed in 1956. He was very relieved that they managed to get through ok - it sounds like quite a few other vessels were literally stranded there for years?

At the moment, its cheaper to spend another $500k on fuel than $1m on canal fees anyway.

Good grief, is that how much Ever Given would have paid in fees to do the canal transit?
Yet I am sure that this will be mere peanuts compared to the claims from other vessels that will come in now against their Insurers re the delays that they have incurred?

 

[newtothis]

Good grief, is that how much Ever Given would have paid in fees to do the canal transit?
Yet I am sure that this will be mere peanuts compared to the claims from other vessels that will come in now against their Insurers re the delays that they have incurred?

I'll defer to Kukri, who actually pays the bills, I believe, but yeah something around that. It's a complicated calculation based on size of ship, weight of cargo, quality of baksheesh, etc but I'm pretty sure that for the larger boxships it come in around that figure.
It sure ain't cheap, but Ever Given should get a discount for only using a few miles of the canal ?

 

[Kukri]

I'll defer to Kukri, who actually pays the bills, I believe, but yeah something around that. It's a complicated calculation based on size of ship, weight of cargo, quality of baksheesh, etc but I'm pretty sure that for the larger boxships it come in around that figure.
It sure ain't cheap, but Ever Given should get a discount for only using a few miles of the canal ?

The SCA are very astute in the matter of charges.

When the Americans ran the Panama Canal, they charged enough to maintain it; the Panamanians do much the same plus a bit to maintain a nation of 4.2 million people and build new locks, and indeed it is a by word for reliability, but the SCA take a different approach, having a nation of 100 million to maintain, and charge just slightly less than it would cost to go the long way round.

Typically the costa of using Suez is four times higher than the cost of using Panama, for the same ship.

This old girl, very much smaller, was $33,000 to go through Panama and $127,000 to go through Suez a few weeks later: