Suez blocked.

[westernman]

I would have thought all that you needed to do was to dig a deep shaft on the opposite bank, fill it up with steel reinforced concrete and then get one of those tugs to take both bow anchors accross and tie them in a knot behind your new concrete bollard and then winch the ship free.

When I ran aground in a narrow channel, I took the anchor in a dinghy, dropped it as far away as I could and winched myself free.

What works for a 34t pilot cutter should work for this slightly larger boat.

 

[westernman]

INow, 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!

Their hotels in China are very nice too.

 

[DJE]

Where does that photo come from? It’s brilliant!

Channel News Asia via my daughter in Singapore. But as Bajansailor has pointed out widely used elsewhere.

 

[Tomahawk]

They laughed at the time, now the training kicks in...

View attachment 112130

Always thought that if I were to build an inland waterways boat, a model of a modern box ship would be an interesting shape.. Certainly catch far more attention than a boring white bucket.

 

[Uricanejack]

Didn't the Israelis use water pumps to move the desert, would that help shift the bank?

I believe it was the Egyptianscwhonsuprised the Israelis by using water pumps in 73.

 

[Uricanejack]

It was possible to embarrass a generation of BP tanker officers by dropping the words “plywood patch” into a conversation.

I would have been confuse,
Pleanty of other things I might have been embarrassed by, but I don’t know a plywood story.
I did hear one about a very unsuccessful cement box.

 

[Uricanejack]

Me too. I am still trying to figure out what trimmed by the bow or stern means. In a aircraft it has relavence to the trim tabs on the wings to bias attitude and also for minor adjustments. How does this relate to a 200,000 ton tanker? As a boat owner should I know these things?

Ideally they want to be even keel. Primarily it’s about maximizing cargoe.
so even keel at the most restricted point of the voyage, Ussualy arriving, could be departing.
or it could be transiting a canal.
I don’t know the max draft for Suez. One of these 400 m ships has a summer draft around 15m maybe a bit more.

Eg so if the max draft for Suez is 15m the ship would plan its load and bunkering to arrive even keel at 15m draft.
if the ship arrives trimmed by head or stern the max draft is still 15 m.
So if trimed the mean or average draft would be less than 15m by roughly half the trim, eg if trimed 10cm by the stern she would have a max allowable draft of 15m at the stern the bow would be 14.9 m draft. The mean 14.95

Arriving even keel mean draft would be 15m.

on ships of this sise at 100+ tones per cm that’s 500 t of cargo not carried.

So they load to the nearest cm. Without submerging the load line.

Actually it’s a wee bit more complex because the ships bend, or sag or hog which you try and avoid. Unless you are loading to your marks. Sometimes ships have been intentionally hogged to load more cargoe.

So the Mate would load the ship trimed by the stern for departure (if there is sufficient depth)
by the amount of stern trim caused by the weight of fuel required to reach Suez.
Fuel burns ship arrives even keel. At Suez.

If the most restricted draft was at the arrival port, then stern trim would be planned by for fuel required to reach arrival port.

For a departure port depart even keel , burning fuel fro aft tanks only you will slowly trim by head. Not a bog problem, ship might actualy be more fuel efficient with a slight head trim, but they don’t steer so well.
No problem transfer fuel aft from forward tanks, to change trim back to even keel.

You could do it with ballast but nobody pays you to carry ballast.

The loads on big box boats are so complex, I am told it’s done by computer probably ashore. cant confirm never been on one.
I sure wouldn’t want to figure out the weights for 2000 boxs with a pencil.

Tankers is easy.
Just converting Cubic meters to Tonnes to f@#$&* barrel‘s ,
why the hell anyone wants to know how many barrels of oil you’ve got Is beyond silly.
Or
worse Bushels of grain.

But they do.

 

[john_morris_uk]

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.

The RN didn’t choose to use pneumatic actuators. All of the HMS ENDURANCES we’ve had were bought into service as pre-owned civilian ice-breakers.

 

[Kukri]

Good explanation by Uricanejack.

The Suez Canal is good for 20 metres now. Beam is now 77 metres (no restriction really) and there is an air draft limit under the Japanese bridge of 68 metres.


(I don’t think anyone has deliberately hogged a bulk carrier for quite a while, but it’s the sort of thing that used to be talked about)?. Container ships are basically big shallow barges with no decks to speak of, and they are extremely floppy. I can remember a VLCC that we reckoned, by looking at the forecastle from the main deck alleyways, would flex by a good metre in heavy weather. We used to scare one another by remembering that she had been built in two halves that were joined up afloat!

The RN didn’t choose to use pneumatic actuators. All of the HMS ENDURANCES we’ve had were bought into service as pre-owned civilian ice-breakers.

I was waiting for a Naval officer to rise to that one!?

 

[Babylon]

I know nothing about floaty things longer than 27ft, but why isn't the option of lightening her load by removing the boxes being discussed let alone undertaken?

 

[Kukri]

I know nothing about floaty things longer than 27ft, but why isn't the option of lightening her load by removing the boxes being discussed let alone undertaken?

It is. But it can only be done with (a) great big helicopters (bit of a gimmick; would take too long) or (b) a floating crane with a big enough jib to reach the top of the deck stack with a container spreader (would also take ages).

 

[Frank Holden]

They had a naval officer (rtd) on a local radio talkie show thingo this AM....
Waffled on about how of course these ships would take tugs through such a narrow waterway.. etc , bollocks, wiffle waffle, etc.....
Ended up with ' I have never been through the Suez....'....

Loading tankers with as much hog as you could get away with was said to be normal practice with the greeks... or so people said.

Maybe thats why the broke in half with such regularity.

PS nothing against grey funnel line.... had a son, a nephew, a neice and her husband, in the RAN...

 

[Frank Holden]

It is. But it can only be done with (a) great big helicopters (bit of a gimmick; would take too long) or (b) a floating crane with a big enough jib to reach the top of the deck stack with a container spreader (would also take ages).

They used Chinooks some years ago... well quite a few years ago... to take boxes off an Anro that had gone aground in Moreton Bay... it worked.

However..... given that all the top boxes are full of soft toys and bubblewrap how many boxes do you have to remove to reduce draft by 1cm.... what is the TPCI(?) on those ships?

 

[dolabriform]

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:

View attachment 112156

I found this very interesting:

 

[Kukri]

I found this very interesting:

It’s good but he’s taking a handy bulker voyage that really favours the canal.

Let’s take Singapore - Hamburg, a typical big box boat route:

8541 miles via Suez, 19.8 days at 18 knots

12,008 miles via Cape, 27.8 days at 18 knots

if anyone wants to play, this is an easy voyage calculator:

SEA-DISTANCES.ORG - Routelist Distances

The Youth of Today have it easy; when I was a lad you were expected to do a voyage estimate in your head and write down the answer on the back of an envelope standing on the floor of the Baltic Exchange! I used to reckon to do half a dozen or so per fixture; I asked a Greek friend how many he did and he said “Oh, maybe thirty”. Petros owned two elderly tweendeckers when he said that; he is now a billionaire shipowner and I am not!?

 

[ProDave]

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.

But the act of taking all the boxes off would surely have the ship re floated anyway?

 

[Kukri]

They used Chinooks some years ago... well quite a few years ago... to take boxes off an Anro that had gone aground in Moreton Bay... it worked.

However..... given that all the top boxes are full of soft toys and bubblewrap how many boxes do you have to remove to reduce draft by 1cm.... what is the TPCI(?) on those ships?

Taking a stab at that:

Tonnes per Centimetre Immersion (tpci) is length x beam x water plane coefficient of fineness x density of sea water divided by 100.

The Ever Given is 399 metres LOA x 58 metres beam and I reckon her water plane coefficient of fineness might be 0.8 and sea water is usually around 1.025

Top of my head, 399 x 58 x (?) .8 (?) x 1.025 /100
gives (?) 200 tonnes per centimetre immersion so to lose the two metres that she is out of her draft forward you need to unload 40,000 tonnes.

Average box weight East West is now about 11 tonnes/Teu (its been getting less) so call that 22 tonnes plus 3.75 tonnes for the tare weight of the box so an average forty footer will be 25.75 tonnes.

So to lose 40,000 tonnes you need to get 1,554 average forty foot boxes off.

But as Frank says the ones on the top are the light ones so reckon to take 2,000 forty foots off.

Cycle time for a top line shore gantry is about a minute so 33 hours, but for a floating crane which is built for lift capacity not for cycle time the cycle time might be 15 minutes on a good day, so three weeks.

 

[Babylon]

Taking a stab at that:

Top of my head...

...so three weeks.

Then they'd better make a start pronto! I'll check back in on this thread in mid April...

 

[Kukri]

Then they'd better make a start pronto! I'll check back in on this thread in mid April...

Plus mobilisation time for a big crane...

 

[BurnitBlue]

I know nothing about floaty things longer than 27ft, but why isn't the option of lightening her load by removing the boxes being discussed let alone undertaken?

Hold off everyone. I now know the answer to that question.

It's because if a mistake was made and the wrong box at the bottom of the stack was removed first the whole stack could come tumbling down. Ask any supermarket manager or shelf stacker. It happens all the time.