The Canal Transit

I have now seen the thing I most wanted to see on this entire leg, and it is difficult to describe without sounding like I have lost perspective.

A 400 metre container ship in the Suez Canal does not look like a ship in a waterway. It looks like a building sliding through a desert. From the bridge wing you look down and there is water for a surprisingly short distance and then there is sand, road, a line of palms, a man on a motorbike keeping pace with us and gradually winning.

We joined the convoy at first light and moved south at about eight knots for most of the day. Eight knots is a brisk cycle. It is slower than the traffic on the road beside us. It is, from a bridge sixty metres up, hypnotic.

The pilot came aboard at Port Said and talked, without meaningful interruption, for six hours. He talked about the canal, his sons, the price of everything, a previous captain he had not liked, the correct way to make tea, and the 2021 grounding, which he raised himself, twice, unprompted, with the confidence of a man who was definitely not there.

Priya had the watch for most of it and handled both the ship and the pilot with the same unbothered efficiency. At one point he asked her whether she was the Captain's daughter. She said "no," and nothing else, for a full six seconds, and he did not ask her anything again for twenty minutes.

The Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the day opened out and for an hour it felt like a sea again, then it narrowed and we were back in the ditch.

Out into the Gulf of Suez by evening. Red Sea tomorrow. I ate three biscuits from the stash to mark the occasion.