(CNN) – Emergency braking is a familiar maneuver for most motorists. There is a danger for the moving vehicle, the driver presses the brake and grabs the steering wheel, the car comes to a screeching halt, hopefully under full control.
But what happens if the vehicle you’re driving is the size of a small town and doesn’t actually have brakes?
That’s the scenario for those at the helm of the hundreds of gigantic container and cruise ships in our seas and waterways.
The maneuverability of these titans of the oceans made headlines this week when a container ship was trapped in the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important waterways for as long as the Empire State Building is high.
Given the traffic levels typically observed in the Suez Canal – if there is no pandemic, it could be an average of 106 towering container ships and colossal cruise ships per day – it is perhaps surprising that such an incident is not more frequent.
The perspective of a container ship captain
A container ship sailing through the Suez Canal.
KHALED DESOUKI / AFP via Getty Images
Captain Yash Gupta pilots container ships crossing the world’s oceans. He has been working at sea for nearly 20 years.
Gupta calls seafaring life “unpredictable, but very interesting”.
“When you’re out at sea during normal surgeries, it feels pretty relaxed,” he tells CNN Travel.
But, he adds, you never know what’s going to happen.
‘One day you see that the water is just calm and the ship is rock solid. You wake up in the morning and you see it is a storm and waves of maybe five feet, six feet, eight feet. You never know. ‘
The key, he says, is to plan. On board, Gupta manages about 20 to 25 people at any one time, with crew contracts ranging from four to nine months.
Together with his navigation team, Gupta carefully plans the route before the journey starts, taking into account tidal and weather conditions.
Wind is a particularly important consideration for container ships because the stacked containers give them dizzying heights.
“So you can imagine that it is like a solid wall that stands up to the wind,” says Gupta.
He says the wind effect is uncontrollable because the ship is in the water. It is not possible to apply the brakes as you would a moving car.
And how fast can you bring a container ship to a stop?
To answer this question, Gupta points to the extremely high demand for freight transport.
“Look around wherever you sit – everything you see or touch has been on a ship in his life.”
He says this high demand means container ships are being built to speed up and slow down in the shortest possible time to avoid delays.
But due to the scale of the ships, the numbers still seem large.
A container ship going from top speed to stop takes about 2.9 miles and between 14 and 16 minutes, Gupta says.
Steering mechanisms vary from ship to ship, some controlled by dials, knobs and levers, but steering wheels are still common – just not the giant wooden ones that once maneuvered sailing ships.
“It’s a handlebar that involves a lot of electronics,” explains Gupta. “When the wheel is turned, it sends electronic signals to the rudder turning according to the command given.”
When navigating the Suez, ships travel in convoy and must sail at roughly the same speed as the ship they are following for the entire approximately 12 to 16 hours it may take to traverse the channel.
“You can’t just start increasing your speed. Otherwise the distance between the two ships will get shorter and shorter, and you will eventually collide,” Gupta said.
Whether a ship is approaching the Suez Canal from the north or south access road, it cannot continue until at least one pilot representing the Suez Canal Authority comes on board.
“They have expertise in transit through the Suez Canal,” explains Gupta. “This pilot has to be on board the ship and he is navigating the ship. He is actually assisting the captain.”
However, overall responsibility for passing the ship safely remains with the captain, Gupta says.
Crucially, the Suez pilots are experts in the area’s topography. They know the tides, they know the water depth, they know the width of the canal.
Once ships pass through the channel, they generally cannot overtake each other, although the channel is wider in places and ships are allowed to overtake.
Pilots will communicate with each other via radio communication to discuss these maneuvers.
“The pilot says to the other ship, ‘Okay, I’m going to overtake you, you give me some space, you go on one side or you want to increase the speed, decrease the speed,” explains Gupta.
Also involved in the procedure is what Gupta calls the equivalent of air traffic control of the Suez Canal, a subsidiary of the Suez Canal Authority that controls shipping traffic.
“They have a larger radar and larger navigation equipment. They track the movements of all ships as a whole and coordinate the activities.”
Tugs are currently assisting the Ever Given. Gupta says these small ships are often used to help large ships navigate the Suez.
“Some parts of the canal are narrower than the rest,” he says. “Tugs are mostly used as ‘escorts’ in such areas for large ships.”
The tugs travel with the larger vessel and remain available to assist if problems arise.
Cruise ship perspective
Cruise ships traversing the Suez Canal or other narrow waterways face many of the same challenges as container ships.
First, they are also extremely long.
“The higher the ship, the more wind, the more sensitive you are to the effects of the wind, so everything needs to be taken into account,” said Captain David Bathgate, who directs ships to Seabourn Cruise Line, a luxury cruise line that owns. is from Carnival.
Bathgate has decades of maritime experience to his name and has worked on general cargo ships, bulk carriers, container ships and oil tankers throughout his career.
He has held the title of captain for the past twenty years.
“Being in charge of the ship is a hugely rewarding and fulfilling experience,” Bathgate told CNN Travel.
Like Gupta, he works with his onboard team to create an itinerary.
Each plan, Bathgate says, involves four steps: assessment, planning, execution and monitoring.
In the assessment, he explains, it is important to ensure that the team has the correct maps, navigational warnings and current meteorological conditions.
“Then you have the planning, constructing the route itself through the different sections,” he explains. “Then you have the execution, you do the work and you take the ship there.”
Finally, monitoring involves keeping an eye on the ship en route and ensuring that the ship is on course, taking corrective action if necessary.
Bathgate says each itinerary will be monitored by at least four people, including senior navigator officers and an environmental officer.
Before the Bathgate team travels through a narrow passage such as the Suez, the Bathgate team will ensure that they are aware of the depth and breadth of the waterway and what he calls “any additional navigational hazards”.
These can be shallow areas, bends, corners or banks.
While those topographic conditions are unlikely to change, unexpected weather can have an unexpected effect.
“Weather is one of arguably one of the most important aspects of these confined water passages, in terms of wind speed and visibility,” said Bathgate.
“In the Suez, for example, sand storms would be one of the main dangers, so very fast and without warning, very strong winds can rise with a significant amount of sand and reduce visibility.”
Bathgate also notes how ships traverse the canal in a numbered convoy, so when they approach the canal, they drop anchor and wait for confirmation of their time slot.
“Invariably cruise ships, we generally get number one in the convoy and we are quite often followed by the large container ships that are on a critical timeline,” he says.
Container ship Captain Gupta explains that cruise ships are usually given priority because of their number of passengers and because they operate within tight timescales. This is not only the case in the Suez, but also in other waterways, he says.
Typically, two or three Suez pilots board a cruise ship to assist with transit, and Bathgate notes that pilots can sometimes switch halfway.
And so how easily can a cruise ship slow down or speed up? The figures are comparable to a container ship.
“At full speed, just shut off the engines and swerve the ship, it would take 15 minutes and 1.75 miles to come to a stop,” said Bathgate.
“However, if we were to crash-stop by putting the engines in full reverse, it would take us a little less than five minutes, and the distance we would cover is only three-quarters of a mile. So for the size of the ship, that’s pretty impressive Numbers. “
Passenger perspective
While cruise captains are hard at work ensuring a smooth passage through the Suez, passengers enjoy watching the convoy from the balcony of their boardroom.
Pam Broadhead sailed the Suez Canal on Marella Discovery, an 11-deck TUI cruise ship, in November 2019. The ship, traveling from Malaga in Spain to Dubai, entered from the north entrance and traveled south.
“Our ship was the first ship to pass through, so it was an early alarm to be on deck to see the sunrise,” she tells CNN Travel, recalling passengers drinking coffee and eating croissants while taking in the sun. saw the horizon appear.
After watching the sunrise, we sat on our balcony with coffee and watched the boats (all of them container ships) pass us by in a constant convoy. Most of them fully loaded with containers. ‘
Occasionally the passengers saw local fishing boats, overshadowed by the Marella Discovery and most of the other ships in the convoy.
“I think they really enjoyed waving to all of us,” says Broadhead.
Broadhead and her husband had hoped for a good view of the Mubarak Peace Bridge – a road bridge that crosses the canal and connects Asia and Africa – but the early morning fog affected the ship’s field of vision, meaning this was not the case. t possible.
“But just going through it felt kind of moving. I think I was from a generation aware of the Suez crisis, maybe making it more of a moment,” she says.
Foggy conditions affected a significant portion of the passage, Broadhead recalls.
“At one point the visibility was barely a few meters in a white cloud, making it impossible to see the canal edges or even the water or other ships, but we just kept going quietly with all the other ships that followed,” she says.
“Fortunately, the fog disappeared halfway and there was plenty to see from there.”
When the ship reached the south exit, it was detained for a while before leaving the channel. Broadhead and her fellow passengers were able to watch the canal journey come to an end as the sun set over the Gulf of Suez.