Ship me somewheres east of Suez

[sovay]

My life remains a double-tracked medical cavalcade, but selkie has just informed me of the latest development in the Suez: "theyre actually doing it! ever given has been there so long that theyre actually going around the cape of good hope like 1700s scurvy patients oh my god."

I can only imagine how nervous the Panama Canal must be feeling right now. I just checked and thank God the dredging of Boston Harbor is proceeding on schedule. If we Storrowed a container ship, we'd never live it down.

P.S. The breeze coming through the window smells like the ocean; there was a gyre of seagulls visible above the roofs in the afternoon. It is coincidental but pleasant, considering all the chanteys I now have stuck in my head.

Comments

[legionseagle]

I did a special subject on International Trade (Law) in my degree in 1983, and the repercussions of the Six-Day War and its impact on the Suez Canal were still making their ways through the law-courts.

[sovay]

I did a special subject on International Trade (Law) in my degree in 1983, and the repercussions of the Six-Day War and its impact on the Suez Canal were still making their ways through the law-courts.

So what are you expecting from this obstruction?

[legionseagle]

Very large top up payments to their pension plans from lawyers engaged in the shipping industry. It's going to run like The Mousetrap.

The first and most important issue is going to be establishing how the skipper came to fall down the companionway boat ended up in both banks simultaneously in the first place. There's a wonderful article Sailors talk about hydrodynamics the way CEOs talk about macroeconomics: they either treat it with mystical reverence, or they claim to understand it and are wrong. delving into the physics of it.

Then there's going to be all sorts of fallouts between the owners, the charterers and the insurers. Oh, and the salvage issue, of course.

And that's before everyone else sticks their three pennorth in.



(Incidentally, the attached post I did a couple of weeks ago manages to combine kdrama and shipping law, and it has some background on shipping rates.)

[movingfinger]

Is there any chance that "some ships are too big for the Suez" is going to be fallout from this?

[sovay]

Is there any chance that "some ships are too big for the Suez" is going to be fallout from this?

There is a designation for that, although it doesn't appear to apply to container ships. That said, it looks as though Ever Given exceeded a couple of its parameters and I'm sure people who know more about naval architecture than me have already taken up this point. [edit] Yep.