The Floating Container

At about 11:20 this morning somebody on the bridge wing spotted something in the water off the port bow, and for roughly fifteen minutes this became the most interesting day of the voyage so far.

It was a container. Half submerged, rust brown, riding low with one corner up, rolling slowly in the swell about three hundred metres off. From the deck it looked small. It was not small. It was a forty foot box weighing several tonnes doing an excellent impression of a rock that is not on any chart.

The immediate assumption, held by me and by every other person who is not an officer, was that it was ours. That somewhere up forward a lashing had let go in the night and we had quietly shed part of our own cargo into the Mediterranean.

The bridge did not assume this. The bridge did a check. Stack plan, lashing inspection, a walk of the relevant bays, a radio call. Inside twenty minutes it was confirmed: not ours. Every box we loaded in Rotterdam is still exactly where it was put.

What genuinely surprised me was the reaction to that news, which was relief followed immediately by a total loss of interest. I asked Priya how often this happens.

"Every year, hundreds," she said. "Some years, thousands. Weather, stack collapse, bad lashing, bad luck. Most of them sink. Some of them float for weeks."

I said that seemed like something the public might want to know about.

She said, "the public wants a television delivered on a Tuesday."

Big Kev's contribution at lunch was that he had once passed a container full of what turned out to be running shoes, and that for a season afterwards a stretch of coastline had very good footwear. I have no way to verify this and I have decided to believe it entirely.

The position was reported. We carried on. It is still out there.