Big boat big stuck, again

Since Sunday night, a 1,095-foot-long cargo ship has been stuck in the mud off the Maryland coast of the Chesapeake Bay. For reasons that remain unknown, the ship—which is fate-temptingly named the Ever Forward—missed a turn while traveling from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, and veered out of a 50-foot-deep channel that runs down the middle of the bay to accommodate such large cargo ships. Ship tracking data shows that the Ever Forward overshot the edge of the channel into waters much too shallow for it to traverse. The grounding came almost exactly one year after the Ever Given, a slightly larger cargo ship, got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days, blocking a massive amount of global trade. Both ships are operated by the Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp.

(Lots of the company’s boats employ the “Ever” naming convention; they include the Ever Forever, the Ever Dainty, the Ever Uranus, the Ever Salute, the Ever Balmy, the Ever Boomy, the Ever Burly, the Ever Concise, the Ever Fashion, the Ever Unicorn, and the Ever Cozy.) Compared with the Ever Given debacle—which froze up about $10 billion of trade per day as hundreds of waiting ships amassed at the entrance to the Suez Canal—the Ever Forward’s oopsie is no big whoop. The ship has completely exited the channel, so Ever Forward is not blocking any path between major ports. Boat traffic in the Chesapeake will not stop. Global trade will continue. There will be no dramatic photos of a gigantic boat stuck crosswise in a narrow space, à la Austin Powers doing a 1,000,000-point-turn, no images of a tiny excavator digging valiantly alongside a hulking hull. But, from another angle, the Ever Forward’s quagmire is more serious: The process of freeing the Ever Forward will be more complicated than the Suez Canal mission, and it will take a lot longer to complete.