18% of the world's cargo ships are sitting idle

Your personal Sea Org?

My escape from Trumps personal Sea Org.

They often are. The use of the term “small” in the article is really deceptive. We are talking about that as being a ship likely under 1000 feet long. Then there is a big difference between traveling at maximum speed and traveling at the most efficient speed. Most of the time, container ships have to work within the schedule produced by the shipping company, but within that, there is a constant effort towards efficiency.
The issue of giant, inefficient ships has happened before. Sea-Land built a fleet of giant, super fast ships in the mid 1970s, just in time for the gas crunch. Those ships were all sold to the USN, and are now known as the Algol-class. I had a hellish experience as the navigator aboard one of those.
The major shipping companies have to try to make predictions well in advance. There has been a move towards gigantic ships with the expectation that most of the container business will be happening at gigantic port facilities that had not yet been built. At the same time, slightly smaller ships that could carry different types of cargo to many more places were sold and scrapped. The sort of business where we would take a voyage that sent us to six or more medium sized ports, moving a hundred or so containers in each, cannot be done with a humongous ship that cannot even fit in some of those ports. Having those smaller ships was good, because you could do the big dedicated runs between major ports most of the time, then break out and do a multi-port trip when things slowed down a bit. Flexibility. To keep things working with the giant ships, you need to have exactly enough business between the major ports to fill the ship each time. Too many or too few ships, and either ships or containers just sit there.
There is another part of this as well. There are miles of diesel locomotives sitting on rail spurs in Arizona and other places. I don’t know anything about trucking, but I bet there is a slowdown there as well.
I am pretty pessimistic about our economic future in general. Everything is so interconnected,and bits of the system are faltering.

No, that’s a poker deck. The cards on bridge decks are narrower, which makes them easier to hold when you’re dealt thirteen of them. So what you have is a poker deck bridge, as opposed to a bridge deck bridge.

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All of those old ports are still there, but if the cargo can go into containers, offloaded quickly at a container terminal, then trucked to the destination, it can be cheaper. The mid-sized ships can carry containers and often odd sized cargo as well. Besides the very deep draft, the mega ships have gotten rid of shipboard cranes, and cannot even offload a container without a shore crane. I have spent most of the last decade bringing humanitarian aid cargo to places where either the ship cranes do the offloading, or we have to do it by hand. which can be a big job. And trucking is not always possible or safe. I personally hate the mega ships. They do exactly one thing, and go to exactly the same places over and over. Repetition breeds complacence. I love getting a call from the company saying that they have a huge part for a power plant turbine in some obscure country, and can I get it loaded with a multi-crane lift, secure it in some creative way, then unload it safely 100 km up some river on the other side of the world to a temporary dock that they are going to start building next week. To me, that is fulfilling and interesting. And it requires more skill than a job where you spend half your time entering container numbers into a database program.
I guess that concludes today’s rant

MB

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There was a Nat’l Geographic article not long ago about that side of the business.

Yes, I find it incredibly depressing. There are plenty of worn out ships that have served their purpose. Scrapping is what is best for them. But sometimes we scrap a ship that is perfect in every way, because of a decision made by someone in an office who has never even seen the vessel. Of course they have data that we never see, and sometimes there are contractual advantages to making wasteful decisions. But a few years ago, we decommissioned and scrapped a ship that was in better than new condition. We had been continuously upgrading the equipment and coatings for a decade. But the contract was renewed with the customer, which specified a replacement vessel. The new ship was built without many of the features that allowed the old one to be so adaptable, and cost more to run. I was there for the decommissioning of the old ship, but not there when they ran it up on the beach and killed it. It just makes me sick to think about that ship, shiny and rust free, with every piece of equipment working perfectly, and enough spare parts aboard to run for another decade, just chopped up and melted down. ugh.

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