The full recording of what transpired on the Ever Given’s bridge hasn’t been released by the Egyptian government, so it isn’t clear exactly what the pilots and crew said about the conditions.īut the commercial pressures on Captain Kanthavel, an experienced mariner from Tamil Nadu, in India’s far south, would have been enormous. Like airplanes, modern ships carry voyage data recorders, or VDRs, black-box devices that capture conversations on the bridge. APĪccording to documents filed weeks later in an Egyptian court, there was a dispute at some point about whether the ship should enter the canal at all, given the bad weather – a debate that may have been hampered by the fact that English was neither side’s first language.Īt least four nearby ports had already closed because of the storm, and a day earlier the captain of a natural gas carrier sailing from Qatar had decided it was too gusty to traverse Suez safely.
The Ever Given is one of the largest container ships in the world.
That didn’t leave much room for error.Īfter climbing aboard, the two Egyptian pilots were led up to the bridge to meet the captain, officers, and helmsmen, all of them Indian, like the rest of the crew. Its keel would be only a few metres from the canal bottom. En route from Malaysia to the Netherlands, it was loaded with about 17,600 brightly coloured containers. The Ever Given is 400 metres from bow to stern and nearly 60 metres across. Modern ships, by contrast, are massive and getting bigger. The channel saves a three-week detour around Africa, but it’s narrow, about 200 metres wide in parts, and just 24 metres deep. Transiting the Suez Canal is sometimes nerve-racking. Soon after daybreak, a small craft approached, carrying the local pilots who’d guide the ship during its 12-hour journey between the seas. It was also one of the newest and most valuable, only a few years out of the shipyard.Įver Given, the name painted in block letters on its stern, stood out in crisp white against the forest-green hull. Kanthavel’s container vessel was scheduled to be the 13th ship travelling north through the Suez Canal on March 23, 2021. From his viewpoint on the bridge, it was just possible to see the dark outlines of the 19 other vessels anchored in Suez Bay, waiting for their turn to enter the narrow channel snaking inland toward the Mediterranean. Winds of more than 60km/h, whipping off the Egyptian desert, had turned the sky an anemic yellow. Captain Krishnan Kanthavel watched the sun rise over the Red Sea through a dusty haze.