The Big Ditch 2.0

          Alrighty then!

                             Let’s all gather ‘round for another episode of:

 Quirky Conundrums Curiously Contained in Querying Concentrations

                                                          or

More Geographical and Historical Lessons from The Insomniac Voyager

                   Let us begin:

                   Thousands, yes…. thousands of years ago, when Pyramids and the like were the latest things to have, mainly because you had slave labor and you were the Pharaoh, someone said, “Let’s dig some ditches and see if we can connect our favorite river, the Nile, with all that water to our east, namely the Red Sea!”

                   And so it was.

                   The more we travel around and “discover” things, we find that someone was here before us and already had thought of the stuff that seems like it took us the rest of eternity to come up with ……..

 “Yea, been there, done that, dug the Canal, and got the tee-shirt.” (Egyptian cotton of course!)

          It turns out that way back in the day, like when Ramses II and his buddies were around, various projects with various levels of success, were tried at various times. Variously complicated plans were tried, failed, and then shelved because they did not work out for various reasons, leading to those various levels of success that I alluded to.

                   Water levels waxing and waning, silt build-up at the confluences of these various waterways led to the various projects being actually workable or not. (There will be no more usage of the word various for the remainder of this report!) But, let it be known that those guys back in 1859 were not the genius’s that everyone thought that they were, they were in fact, just copy-cats with better tools!      

However, some honesty should be sworn to the guys that really needed this canal but had neither the money, nor influences, to make it happen. I am speaking here of the Spice Traders of Venice, for it was back in the 1400’s when a Portuguese explorer wondered what was on the other side of Africa, that a direct trade route was established around the Cape of Good Hope and the overland routes (remember the guys in Petra?) became obsolete.          The Venetian’s did try and negotiate with the then current Sultan in Egypt, but those Ottoman’s and their conquest of Egypt (and sofa building 😊) kept anything from coming of it.

          Fast-forward 400 years and we come to the middle of the 1800’s when the Brits (again!) decided that it was not a good idea to build a canal because they already controlled the trade routes and if a canal was built (and the opinion of the day was to have it available to all nations) it would deprive them of their exclusivity of these obvious advantages.

          Not surprising, the French said,  “Just hold on there Monsieur’s, we’ve studied the elevations of both sides of this proposed canal and have found that a sea-level waterway can be constructed, we just need to dig it!” Apparently, Mr. Napoleon had some extensive studies done (much earlier) and came just this close to starting the project!

The British, along with a few allies, continued to oppose the plan, but the French, along with their friends formed a company, the Suez Canal Company, and in 1859 started to dig. It took ten years to complete and at any one time up to 30,000 workers were to be found laboring on it.

          So now we’ve got a navigable waterway that connects the Indian Ocean (via the Red Sea) with the Mediterranean Sea and onward to the North Atlantic.

          Is everybody happy???!!!

          Nope.

          It’s all well and good to have this project finished and marine traffic flowing, but the estimated costs of the construction were off by double! (Some things never change!) So, someone had their hand out asking, “How and When?” which are the questions that the typical financiers will always ask.

          The cost to transit the canal and therefore generate the income needed to pay off the bondholders and others, never mind pay for the running and upkeep of the canal, are derived from ‘how much you carry on board’ and /or ‘how big is your ship’? Which brings us to yet another question!

          How do they figure all of this out, not only here, but all around the world. It’s all about how much a ship weighs, how much interior (volume) it has, how much water it displaces when it sits in the water, and combinations of all of the aforementioned. The arguments over the years have led to different systems being used around the world but the most used one at this point is GRT or Gross Registered Tonnage. GRT is the total of all of the cargo on board. It does not include the weight of fuel, water, supplies, or the crew and passengers. The GRT Certificate is issued to each vessel at the time of its building. Each Port and/or Authority (canal) gets to assess vessels at its own rate. So, if your vessel has a GRT of 20,000 and the Port has a $5.00 per ton fee, then your Port/Canal Fee is $100,000. There are varying degrees of this, including some length and width calculations thrown in for fun, but you get the idea.

          For Cruise Ships, which we obviously all know and love 😊, the tonnage is determined by interior volume alone. So, when a new Gigundo Ship is announced by the Gargantuan Cruise Line and it lists the tonnage at XXX,XXX and is now the largest in the world you start to wonder….” Hey its’s no longer or wider than the ships sailing now”…. but wait! Take a look at how much of that ship is built over and above the waterline, you know, the ones that look like floating apartment buildings. Now figure out the volume of that baby and you can see how it’s the Biggest Ever! And usually the ugliest, but that’s a subject for another post!

          But way back in 1873, right after the canal was built and the financial issues were staring it in the face, a special international agreement having to do with this way of determining tonnage was agreed on by all the parties involved and it is still in effect today.

          In the meantime, the Brits managed to get themselves appointed by one of the old school Egyptian Rulers, as the protectors of Egypt and Sudan. In 1888, the Convention of Constantinople declared the Canal was under the protection of the British and it remained that way through WWII. The canal never fell into the hands of the Axis countries, so it was never used by them to channel warships during that war.

          After this time it gets really dicey in the Sinai Peninsula and the Canal Zone. Egypt started to get cozy with the Soviet Union which really pissed off Great Britain and the USA. Both told Egypt that they were going to not help Egypt with the financing of its big project at the time, the Aswan High Dam on the Nile, which was really important to Egypt for flood control and water.

          The Egyptian president , Mr. Nasser, said “Oh yea? Well I’m gonna just nationalize the Canal and you can all just go home ‘cuz it’s mine now!”

This all took place over a several year period in the mid to late 1950’s and it gets worse, much worse! You know how these playground bullies and gangs work, it’s all about the one-upmanship’s and threatening overtures, lots of saber-rattling, until someone pushes too far and the fists start flying.

          The year was 1956 and the gangs all lined up, with France, the UK, and here it comes… Israel lined up on one side after Egypt blockaded a waterway that Israel used at the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula. Israel invaded Sinai, the other two rushed to the rescue (mainly to save the canal).

          Let the fighting begin! Guns, cannons, and bombs were sent flying all around the region, the most devastating part of this was the ships that Egypt sank in the Canal, rendering it useless to the rest of the world. An important guy from Canada, Mr. Pearson, was the only clear-thinking guy around and he proposed that the UN get involved which resulted in the first UN sponsored Peace Keeping Force being sent to the canal while Egypt and Israel worked out their differences. Thankfully Mr. Pearson was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!

We all remember the Six-Day War in 1967 and the next skirmish in 1973, the latter resulting in OPEC raising prices and putting embargoes in place against the US and it’s allies. What a mess!

So, let’s “cut to the chase” here and summarize the next bunch of years. The UN force didn’t work out and was refused to be extended by a Syria-requested Soviet Union Veto in the Security Council, so then there was another multi-national force put into place that still remains there to this day.

Phewf!

Since then, the only big deal was almost exactly two years ago when the Evergreen Lines biggie, the container ship Ever Given, got wedged across the canal for about nine days which resulted in the obvious back up as the canal transits about fifty ships a day. The doom-sayers predicted a global crisis but that did not happen and when the ship was cleared it only took a few days for everything to settle down as some ships had already made other arrangements. The 450 ships in the back-logged queue went through without an incident.

                   Including us! (two years later)

                   We were the first ship in our convoy on the day that we passed through. Convoys are used so they can be staggered and kept in holding areas when the opposing convoy meets up and needs to use the same channel. This practice has been hugely minimalized by the addition of parallel canals being dug over the last ten years or so. There are just a few areas that cannot be by-passed and guess what happened with the Ever Given? Yup! It got stuck in one of the areas that bottle everything up!

                   Our day was bright, a little overcast at times, but there was always something to see. Other ships, shoreline defenses, weird concentrations of unused apartments, and a big festival area used once year for a big party celebrating the canal’s “nationalizing” way back in the day.

                   There was no party for our transit ☹

                   Except in the Bars!