Together with his navigation team, Gupta carefully maps out the route before the voyage begins, factoring in tidal and weather conditions. On board, Gupta heads up around 20 to 25 people at any given time, with crew contracts ranging from four to nine months. You wake up in the morning and you see it’s a storm coming in and waves of maybe five meters, six meters, eight meters. “One day, you see the water is just calm and the ship is rock steady. “If you are at sea under normal operations it feels quite relaxed,” he tells CNN Travel.īut, he adds, you never know what’s going to happen next. Gupta calls seafaring life “unpredictable, but very interesting.” He’s been working at sea for almost 20 years. KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty ImagesĬaptain Yash Gupta helms container vessels that cross the world’s oceans. So what is it really like to steer the world’s biggest ships through the Suez and beyond? CNN Travel spoke to expert mariners to learn more.Ī container ship navigating the Suez Canal. Given the level of traffic typically seen in the Suez Canal - when there’s no pandemic this can be an average of 106 towering container vessels and hulking cruise ships each day - it’s perhaps surprising that such an incident doesn’t happen more often.
Amid the struggle to push the ship back on course, scores of vessels became stuck in a marine traffic snarl up. The Ever Given rammed into the side of the waterway on March 23 when, according to the Suez Canal Authority, it was engulfed by 40-knot winds and low visibility caused by a sandstorm. The maneuverability of these titans of the oceans hit the headlines when a container ship as long as the Empire State Building is tall became stuck in the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important waterways. That’s the scenario facing those at the helms of the hundreds of gigantic container and cruise ships in our seas and waterways. A hazard presents itself in front of the moving vehicle, the driver hits the brakes and grips the steering wheel, the car screeches to a halt, hopefully under full control.īut what happens when the vehicle you’re driving is the size of a small city and doesn’t actually come equipped with brakes? The emergency stop is a familiar maneuver for most motorists.
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