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Wednesday, March 24, 2021

It is an evergreen day at Suez Canal … literally !! "Updated"

It is all about evergreen in the Suez canal and in Egypt

It is not every day we find a huge big container vessel blocking the Suez Canal and its traffic creating a crisis in world trade movement worldwide even for short time !!

Ever Given in Suez canal
The Ever given vessel stuck by Julianne Cona on Instagram. 

The whole strange drama started at 7 AM on Tuesday when a gigantic vessel ran aground in the narrowest part of the Suez canal blocking it and creating a canal jam.

A 220,000-tonne, 400 metre-long Ever Given “Mega Ship” is technically stuck and the Egyptian Suez canal sent help with 8 mega tuck boats to help re-float.  

Currently, it is stuck in the narrow single-lane path between the Red Sea and Bitter lakes. ِ

Now we got news from Reuters that a team from the Netherlands will come and help in its refloating early Thursday, so yes we are speaking about more than 48 hours. 

The latest update we have so far from the Suez canal that the Suez canal authority team managed to free that part of the ship called "bulbous bow" which was stuck in the rocks. 

From John Scott-Railton's excellent coverage for the incident on Twitter

Here is another photo from the AFP showing the efforts to liberate the bulbous bow "that term is ridiculous in Egyptian Arabic"

Ever given in Suez canal
Liberating the bulbous bow 

The first photo of the vessel was shared by Julianne Cona who is on board the Mersek Denver vessel whose misfortune brought to be behind the Ever Given which was heading from China to Netherlands Rotterdam. 


Ever Given which is known now in Egypt as “Evergreen” is owned by Taiwanese container transporter giant “Evergreen Marine Corporation”. It is registered in Panama as usual.

Launched in 2018, Ever Given is one of the biggest vessels worldwide now.

This drama has been taken place live on Vessel Finder and its live interactive map which shows the traffic jam minute by minute since last night.

Tanker Tracker published an interactive video for the moment the Ever Given stuck. 

Here is the most recent photo from Live Viewer Satelite.


To be honest, when I saw the news late Tuesday, I thought it would be solved by morning as some told me that it was not the first time we have had something like that.

It is true that it is not the first time we have had something like that but it seems that it the first time we have had something of that size.

Both Evergreen Marine and Suez Canal Authority which issued a statement after many hours of radio silence say that the strong wind we had yesterday.

On Tuesday, the Suez canal cities region had its share from the dust and sand storm wave hitting the country and I have read that the Suez ports in the South of the Canal closed down till the storm is over and there have been warnings about navigation in the sea by the Egyptian Metrological authority.

Still, I cannot imagine this gigantic vessel that can go through huge sea storms stronger than our Khamseen spring storms.

Some hinting of mechanical failure with strong wind ended up in this scene. We still need to know what happened. 

Economically, it is a disaster. Every delay is a lost dollar.  The oil price can be affected by every hour of delay.

According to the latest statement for the Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority Vice Admiral Osama Rabea to Egyptian Media, the authority is studying compensating the ships and vessels currently stuck due to the delay. I do not know but this will be a huge compensation in total. 

The ships and vessels that pass through the Suez canal account for 12% of trade worldwide.

 It is worth mentioning that the Suez canal's revenues in 2020 witnessed a decline for the first in at least four years due to the coronavirus pandemic's impact on the international trade movement. 

I read that there was an impact on the oil price today worldwide plus the ships are moving to Cape of Good Hope :(

This is in addition to all the jokes and memes. 

You got Gary Lineker's tweet. I do not know if Mourinho will fire back at this. 

And this too.

Plus this classic from Austin Powers
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