At Anchor Today in Stumptown
For me, shipspotting started with the names.
I'd be crossing the Steel Bridge, and some hulking ship would be taking grain at the eastbank, and the name of it is what would hit me. It would be my oracle for the day. They don't call ships things like Huge Disaster and Grave Humiliation, so the oracles were usually pretty good: Summer Fortune, New Eminence, Global Endeavour all sounded hopeful.
I started looking the names up four years ago. Some ships had stories, and even the ones that didn't--well, they're ships. They sail the ocean blue. They call at ports with exotic names. They're cool.
But inexorably, as the tales became repetitive, and the glamorous ports of call morphed in my imagination into the global shipping version of strip-malls, I started thinking about what the ships mean.
Samjohn Amity was tied up at the Steel Bridge grain elevator yesterday. It's 32 meters across the beam. Here's what a ship that size would look like if my street were ocean:
(That's my house there, at "A". Oooh nooooo!)
They're big, these Panamax bulk carriers. Doing thirteen knots (which is about twenty miles per hour), they consume--get this--24 tons of fuel a day. That's roughly equivaletn to 6,700 gallons. A day. Fourteen gallons to the mile. And the ocean isn't just a few miles across, you know? It's about 68,000 gallons from here to Tokyo.
And why is ship fuel measured in tons rather than gallons or litres? I'm glad you asked:
Ships use the tar-like, sulfur-concentrated remains of petroleum left once the gasoline, oil and all other products have been extracted. This high-sulfur fuel is responsible for the significant environmental impacts of ship sulfur emissions.
They don't live very long, either, these great hulks. Seriously, oceangoing cargo ships have a lifespan somewhere between that of your computer and that of your car, and when they die, some of them are scuttled--hauled off and sunk. Although a form of recycling is now the norm, I think it's pretty telling that ship-breaking is an industry centered in Bangladesh and Pakistan, where grinding poverty makes dangerous, toxic labor really cheap.
The Samjohn Amity is ten years old and kind of rusty-looking. And let me tell you: walking in front of it down near the waterline on the Steel Bridge at twilight really gives you a feeling for how vast the effort will be to recycle it when its day comes. That thing is HUGE.
So shipping is a dirty business, and massive, and hungry, and international by nature--way outside the reach of environmental authorities on the coasts that it pollutes, powerful enough to bribe, bully, and buy its way out of regulation. And it's at the core of the world economic structure--you know, the one that's collapsing around our ears? So it doesn't submit easily to change. And it's gonna have to.
At anchor today in Stumptown: the Samjohn Amity, an oracle of anachronism, showing no inclination to change.
I'd be crossing the Steel Bridge, and some hulking ship would be taking grain at the eastbank, and the name of it is what would hit me. It would be my oracle for the day. They don't call ships things like Huge Disaster and Grave Humiliation, so the oracles were usually pretty good: Summer Fortune, New Eminence, Global Endeavour all sounded hopeful.
I started looking the names up four years ago. Some ships had stories, and even the ones that didn't--well, they're ships. They sail the ocean blue. They call at ports with exotic names. They're cool.
But inexorably, as the tales became repetitive, and the glamorous ports of call morphed in my imagination into the global shipping version of strip-malls, I started thinking about what the ships mean.
Samjohn Amity was tied up at the Steel Bridge grain elevator yesterday. It's 32 meters across the beam. Here's what a ship that size would look like if my street were ocean:
(That's my house there, at "A". Oooh nooooo!)
They're big, these Panamax bulk carriers. Doing thirteen knots (which is about twenty miles per hour), they consume--get this--24 tons of fuel a day. That's roughly equivaletn to 6,700 gallons. A day. Fourteen gallons to the mile. And the ocean isn't just a few miles across, you know? It's about 68,000 gallons from here to Tokyo.
And why is ship fuel measured in tons rather than gallons or litres? I'm glad you asked:
Ships use the tar-like, sulfur-concentrated remains of petroleum left once the gasoline, oil and all other products have been extracted. This high-sulfur fuel is responsible for the significant environmental impacts of ship sulfur emissions.
They don't live very long, either, these great hulks. Seriously, oceangoing cargo ships have a lifespan somewhere between that of your computer and that of your car, and when they die, some of them are scuttled--hauled off and sunk. Although a form of recycling is now the norm, I think it's pretty telling that ship-breaking is an industry centered in Bangladesh and Pakistan, where grinding poverty makes dangerous, toxic labor really cheap.
The Samjohn Amity is ten years old and kind of rusty-looking. And let me tell you: walking in front of it down near the waterline on the Steel Bridge at twilight really gives you a feeling for how vast the effort will be to recycle it when its day comes. That thing is HUGE.
So shipping is a dirty business, and massive, and hungry, and international by nature--way outside the reach of environmental authorities on the coasts that it pollutes, powerful enough to bribe, bully, and buy its way out of regulation. And it's at the core of the world economic structure--you know, the one that's collapsing around our ears? So it doesn't submit easily to change. And it's gonna have to.
At anchor today in Stumptown: the Samjohn Amity, an oracle of anachronism, showing no inclination to change.