They carry a lot of extra food. And same as for fuel - they could get more if they needed it.
I’d like to ask you to flesh this out a bit more if you’re able … If I understand you correctly it generally goes something like this:
Some outfit owns some ships. Which they lease to somebody else to drive from here to there, maintain, crew, etc. Meanwhile they’re contracted to a 3rd company that’s selling the space on the ships and holding themselves out as a “freight line” or “shipping line”. That third company is the name laymen recognize as “the shipping company”. Is that sorta close?
Interestingly, a lot of the raggedier parts of the air cargo business runs that way. In the air passenger biz, pretty much always the seller of tickets is the same entity as the operator / maintainer of the machines. Although even that is sorta fuzzy once you start talking about the so-called regional or express carriers flying the smaller jets.
For darn sure lots of mainstream airlines own only a fraction of their fleet, leasing the rest from dedicated fleet owner/lessor companies.
There’s a cattle ship anchored off the north end of the canal. Wouldn’t want to be sitting downwind of them. 
It’s often more complicated than that but yeah. The following is about as complicated as it usually gets in the container trade (other trades are a bit different) but it often goes like this -
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Registered owner - shelf company in a Flag of Convenience country, wholly owned subsidiary of actual owner. The actual owner is very often an investor/financier who wants to keep control of their collateral, even though they have no actual involvement with vessel. Alternatively, the Registered Owners may be the “real” actual owner, see below. Charters the vessel on demise (bareboat) terms to the …
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Disponent owner ie owner by way of a demise charter. Has the vessel on demise (bareboat) terms meaning typically responsible for absolutely everything to do with the vessel. Often the “real” owner, subject to financial interests. Maintains, crews and insures the vessel. Will often appoint a technical manager responsible for maintenance, and a crewing manager responsible for crewing. The disponent owner/technical manager/crewing manager are quite often separate companies in the same group. Time charters the vessel to…
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Time Charterer - under standard time charter terms, the time charterer has a contractual entitlement to the commercial capacity of the vessel. In short, they get to say where the vessel goes and what it carries, and pays by the day. In the container trade this will be a container line (or a company associated with a container line) (eg someone like Evergreen). May well operate the vessel as part of a slot charter arrangement with…
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Slot charterers. These are typically other container lines which collaborate with each other to sell space on each others’ vessels. So for example three container lines may agree that they are each going to supply one vessel to service a particular route, and each is entitled to place its customer’s containers in “slots” on the other parties’ vessels, paid by the container.
This is all subject to variation but that tends to be the basic structure. There has to be a registered owner but all other roles are optional. And there can be other players. For example there could be more than one time charter eg registered owner - disponent owner - time charterer (1) - time charterer (2) etc.
Ref C.W. McCall and Convoy, at least it’s not a ship full of hogs.
Thank you. The similarities to at least segments of the airline / air cargo biz are much more than the differences. Which makes sense. The business imperatives, capital structures, tax considerations, etc., are all pretty similar.
Do you get speculation in the airline business? Particularly in the bulk trades there a ship owners and charterers who are not interested in anything to do with ship operations but just own or charter ships in the hope that ship values and/or charter rates will go up or down.
It seems like a perfectly normal practice for any expensive asset to be owned by someone (or consortium) with no interest in anything but the profit it generates, who relies on someone else to handle all that money making for them, who hires out people who in turn find the people who do the jobs that make the money, or find the customers to pay the rent, or whatever. With anything requiring a big enough investment with a very complicated operating structure, that’s going to develop naturally as different businesses will specialize at very specific things within the industry. I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t normally go deeper than described.
Not much in the shiny parts of the industry, at least as far as I’m aware. Among the minor operators and freight outfits there’s lots of owner lessors who are just in it for the investment cashflow as @glowacks describes. In the last few years pre-COVID with low interest rates a metric shitload of capital has flowed into consortia buying up a small number of new or used planes and trying their hand at being a lessor to operators.
It’s not clear to me how much of that is driven by true speculation where them hiring the asset out to an operator to generate a cashflow is really the secondary income stream and they expect to make their real money on the buy/sell margin of the asset itself over time.
As I read it in most cases the intended profit play is almost entirely
- Buy asset using minimum down and cheap loan.
- Lease to operator for payments greater than loan amount + asset depreciation.
- Easy profit!!1!
20 years ago it was trendy to get into time charter rate speculation particularly in certain parts of Asia. There were certain well known household brand name companies with no connection to ships whatsoever, who got into it. They would bet that charter rates were going up for example, then time charter ships in on a relatively long term basis (few years) then time charter out to others at higher rates. Hopefully.
They had zero people who actually knew anything about ships or even chartering but just assumed they would always be able to mirror any problems that arose to others up or down the chartering chain.
This went well for a while but then inevitably hit issues. I had a weird time where I was trying to talk about complex ship casualty/chartering issues to a guy whose only experience was in manufacturing. I could have recommended anything no matter how nonsensical and he would have just said “I not really understand but yes Mr Princhester, we go with your recommendation”.
The pictures of the digger next to the huge ship are amazing. It gives a clear perspective of how ridiculously large that ship actually is.
I’m surprised it was allowed to enter the canel.
I remember in college we discussed the mining of the Suez canel during the Yom Kipper War. I recall the canel was already considered obsolete back then. Much too small for modern cargo ships.
I didn’t realize shipping today still relied on that thing. Has it been dug and updated since the 1970’s?
Here’s the digger photo.
Looks like a fly on an elephants butt.
To loosely quote Jaws… They need a bigger boat, uh machine…
I am willing to bet all ship captains who sail these routes know the limits of the canal and what is allowed.
Indeed, many ships are built to specifically fit a canal (see: Panamax). This captain would never have even started this transit without believing he/she could finish it. A mistake like this is a career ender.
The big question here is how/why did this happen?
Yes, Ever Given is a (very) big vessel, but it’s not in the top 20 container vessels and it’s not even the biggest within the Evergreen fleet, which is the Ever Golden, currently on it’s way to Taiwan from Malaysia.
All the top 20 can go thru Suez. They wouldn’t be economical to run if they didn’t.
That would be the Yom Kippur war, but I do like the idea of a war over Herring Day, in a fictionaly sense.
lol…good catch 
I bet for all ship captains, the canals are 90 percent of the stress of the voyage, and once you hit the big blue deep sea, it’s kick-back-feet-and-relax time, comparatively.
There seems to be some sort of view creeping in that this casualty is all about the size of the vessel. To be quite clear, that is at best a peripheral issue. Plenty of smaller vessels that go through Suez are large enough to get wedged across. And vessels of this size go through all the damn time. The issue is that something caused the vessel to veer hard to starboard. Nothing else.
In a sense, it doesn’t really matter what they know given that the whole process is so tightly controlled by those who run the canal that a clueless master who tried to exceed the limits wouldn’t get anywhere near the entrance anyway. You don’t just rock up at the entrance and dive in.
There isn’t even any evidence yet that the guy made a mistake. I know plenty of masters of vessels that suffered casualties more serious than this who still had their job afterward.
Ports not canals. And the stress of ports is the paperwork, not the passage in or out, for the most part.
I used to joke that the three most important things on a ship are the main engine, the steering mechanism and the photocopier. These days maybe replace the last with “the internet connection”. The bureaucracy a modern ship’s master has to deal with is insane.
Companies do not care about casualties.
Companies care about money.
This cannot be a cheap accident and I doubt his/her employers will be keen on keeping a captain who cost them so much.
Unless we find it is somehow totally not the captain’s fault but the buck stops with them and the company is likely to use them as a scapegoat.
Maybe the captain will get out of this fine but, if I were him/her, I’d be deeply worried about my career right now.