(CNN) – The emergency stop is a family maneuver for most motorists. There is a danger in front of the moving vehicle, the driver collides with the brakes and grabs the steering wheel and the car stops, hopefully it is fully controlled.
But what happens when the vehicle you’re driving is the size of a small town and doesn’t actually come equipped with brakes?
This is the scenario faced by those at the head of the hundreds of giant container and cruise ships on our seas and waterways.
The maneuverability of these ocean titans has reached headlines this week when a container ship, as long as the Empire State Building is high, got stuck in the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important waterways.
Given the level of traffic commonly seen on the Suez Canal (when there is no pandemic, it can become an average of 106 imposing container ships and cruises each day), it may be surprising that this incident does not happen more often.
The perspective of a container ship captain
A container ship sailing the Suez Canal.
KHALED DESOUKI / AFP via Getty Images
Captain Yash Gupta leads the container ships that cross the world’s oceans. He has been working at sea for almost 20 years.
Gupta calls marine life “unpredictable, but very interesting.”
“If you’re at sea in normal operations, you feel very relaxed,” he tells CNN Travel.
But, he adds, one never knows what will happen next.
“One day, you see that the water is calm and the boat stays steady. You wake up in the morning and you see a storm and waves of maybe five meters, six meters, eight meters coming in. You never know.”
The key, he says, is to plan. On board, Gupta directs between 20 and 25 people at a time, with crew contracts ranging from four to nine months.
Together with his navigation team, Gupta carefully traces the route before the voyage begins, taking into account the weather and tide conditions.
Wind is a particularly important consideration for container vessels, as stacked containers provide them with a dizzying height.
“So you can imagine it’s like a solid wall, that’s facing the wind,” Gupta says.
He says the effect of the wind is uncontrollable because the boat is in the water. It is not possible to press the brakes in the same way you would stop a moving car.
And how quickly can a container ship stop?
To answer this question, Gupta points to the extremely high demand for freight forwarding.
“Look around you, sit down, everything you see or touch has been on a ship in your life.”
He says this high demand means that container ships are being built in order to accelerate and slow down in the shortest possible time, to avoid delays.
But the scale of the ships means the numbers still look great.
A container ship that goes from top speed to stop takes about 1.8 miles and between 14 and 16 minutes, Gupta says.
Steering mechanisms vary from ship to ship, with some steered by spheres, knobs, and levers, but steering wheels remain commonplace, not just the wooden giants that once maneuvered sailboats.
“It’s a steering wheel with a lot of electronics,” Gupta explains. “When the wheel is turned it gives electronic signals to the rudder which rotates according to the given order.”
When sailing through Suez, ships travel in convoy and must sail at about the same speed as the ship they follow for the approximately 12 to 16 hours it could take to transit the canal.
“You can’t start increasing your speed. Otherwise, the distance between the two ships will be getting smaller and smaller, and in the end it’s going to collide,” Gupta says.
Whether a ship approaches the Suez Canal from the north or south entrance, it may not proceed until at least one pilot representing the authority of the Suez Canal is incorporated.
“They have experience traveling the Suez Canal,” Gupta explains. “This pilot has to be on board the ship and navigate the ship. He basically helps the captain.”
However, the overall responsibility for safely navigating the ship remains with the captain, Gupta says.
Crucially, Suez pilots are experts in the topography of the area. They know the tides, they know the depth of the water, they know the width of the canal.
Once ships pass through the canal, they are generally unable to overtake each other, although at some points the canal is wider and ships are allowed to advance.
Pilots will communicate with each other through radio communication to discuss these maneuvers.
“The pilot says to the other ship,‘ Okay, I’ll get ahead of you, give me some space, go to one side or you want to increase the speed, decrease the speed, ”Gupta explains.
The processes are also involved in what Gupta calls the equivalent of air traffic control in the Suez Canal, a subsidiary of the Suez Canal Authority that controls ship traffic.
“They have a bigger radar and a bigger navigation team. They are monitoring the movement of all the ships in general and coordinating the activities.”
Currently, tugs are helping Ever Ever. Gupta says these small boats are often used to help large ships navigate Suez.
“There are some areas in the canal that are narrower than the rest,” he says. “Tugboats are often used as ‘escorts’ in these areas for large ships.”
Tugs travel in tandem with the larger boat and remain available to assist in the event of a problem.
Cruise perspective
Cruises passing through the Suez Canal or other narrowways experience many of the same challenges as container ships.
On the one hand, they are also extremely tall.
“The higher the ship, the more wind is produced, the more sensitive you are to the effects of the wind, so all of that needs to be taken into account,” says Captain David Bathgate, who directs the ships at Seabourn Cruise Line, a luxury cruise line owned by Carnival.
Bathgate has decades of maritime experience at his fingertips, having worked in general cargo ships, bulk carriers, container vessels and oil tankers throughout his career.
He has held the title of captain for the past two decades.
“Being in charge of the boat is a rewarding and rewarding experience,” Bathgate tells CNN Travel.
Like Gupta, he works with his on-board team to create a travel plan.
According to Bathgate, each plan includes four steps: evaluation, planning, execution, and monitoring.
Assessment, he explains, involves making sure the equipment has the right graphics, navigation warnings, and up-to-date weather conditions.
“Then you have the planning, building the route through the different stretches,” he explains. “Then you have the execution, really doing the job, bringing the ship in.”
Finally, surveillance involves keeping the boat’s tabs on track and making sure the boat is on the right track and taking the necessary corrective action.
Bathgate says each travel plan will be reviewed by at least four people, including senior navigation officers and an environmental officer.
Before navigating a narrow passage, such as Suez, Bathgate’s team will make sure they are aware of the depth, width of the waterway, and what he calls “any other navigational hazard.”
They could include shallow areas, bends, corners or margins.
While these topographic conditions are unlikely to change, unforeseen weather can have an unexpected effect.
“Weather is perhaps one of the most important aspects of these passages in restricted waters, in terms of wind speed and visibility,” Bathgate says.
“In Suez, for example, one of the main dangers would be sandstorms, so that very quickly and without warning, very strong winds can be blown in with a significant amount of sand and reducing visibility.”
Bathgate also watches as the ships traverse the canal in a numbered convoy, so that as they approach the canal, they anchor and wait for confirmation of their time slot.
“Invariably, cruise ships usually give us the number one in the convoy and we are often followed by large container ships that are on a critical schedule,” he says.
Container ship captain Gupta explains that cruises usually have priority because of their number of passengers and because they work in short periods of time. This is the case not only in Suez, but on other waterways, he says.
Typically, two or three Suez pilots will board a cruise ship to assist you in traffic, and sometimes Bathgate points out that pilots can change halfway.
So how easily can a cruise slow down or speed up? The figures are quite similar to those of a container.
“From top speed, just stopping the engines and letting the boat cost as if to say, it would take 15 minutes and 1.75 miles to stop,” Bathgate says.
“However, if we wanted to make a stop by placing the engines aft completely, it would take just under five minutes and the distance we would travel is only three and a half quarters. So, for the size of the boat, that’s pretty much figures. impressive. “
Passenger perspective
While cruise captains work hard to ensure a smooth passage through the Suez, passengers enjoy watching the convoy from the balconies of the boardroom.
Pam Broadhead transited the Suez Canal in November 2019, at Marella Discovery, an 11-bridge TUI cruise. The ship, which was traveling from Malaga to Spain to Dubai, entered from the north entrance and traveled south.
“Our boat was the first boat to sail, so it was an early alarm to be on deck to watch the sunrise,” he tells CNN Travel, reminding passengers to have coffee and eat croissants. as they watched the sun appear on the horizon.
“After watching the sunrise, we sat on our balcony with coffees watching as the ships (all of them container ships) passed by us in a constant convoy. Most loaded with containers.”
From time to time, passengers spotted local fishing boats, bogged down by the Marella Discovery and most of the other boats in the convoy.
“You think they really liked shaking us all up and us,” Broadhead says.
Broadhead and her husband had expected a good view of the Mubarak Peace Bridge (a road bridge that crosses the canal and links Asia and Africa), but the morning fog affected the ship’s range of vision, which meant which is not not possible.
“But just going under it seemed very touching to me. I think being from a generation that is aware of the Suez crisis possibly turned it into a moment,” he says.
Foggy conditions affected a significant portion of the passage, Broadhead recalls.
“At one point, the visibility was just a few meters on a bank of white clouds, making it impossible to see the edges of the canal or even the water or other boats, but we continued to sail in silence with the rest of the boats that followed, ”he says.
“Fortunately, the fog dissipated about halfway and there was a lot to see from there.”
When the ship reached the southern exit, it remained for a while before leaving the canal. Broadhead and his fellow passengers were able to see how the canal trip ended as the sun set over the Gulf of Suez.