how far can a cargo ship travel in a day

Cargo Ship Comparison: How Far Can They Go In A Day?

The mass transportation of cargo across the globe would not be possible without cargo ships. A container ship sailing at full speed in a straight line for 24 hours – across the Pacific Ocean, for example – could theoretically cover around  600 nautical miles , which is equivalent to 690 land miles.

Given that it would take a jet cargo plane less than 90 minutes to cover the same distance, are cargo ships really the optimal way of transporting cargo?

Looking at the table above, it appears that cargo ships are by far the slowest mode of transporting goods over long distances. In order to understand why this is not the case, we must look at the important advantages which cargo ships have over planes, trains, and automobiles.

Because 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, ships can travel great distances between countries via much more direct routes than trains or heavy goods vehicles (HGVs). An additional advantage is that ships have multiple crew onboard, and can therefore operate safely 24 hours per day.

An HGV may have a maximum speed of 60mph, but in reality its average speed will be much less than that. An HGV driver frequently travelling long distances at 60mph on the motorway will find that their actual average speed is below 30mph due to the start/stop nature of driving. Ships do not have to deal with traffic lights, roundabouts, or junctions – a major advantage!

Although aeroplanes have a huge speed advantage, they simply do not have the ability to transport cargo in any meaningful volume when compared to a cargo ship.

Did You Know:  Ships and aircraft measure distance in nautical miles. 1 knot is equal to 1 nautical mile per hour. To learn more, check out our article:  What Is A Nautical Mile And Why Is It Used?

The largest aeroplane ever built was the  Antonov An-225 Mriya , and its primary purpose was the transport of cargo. This plane could carry a maximum of  250 tonnes   of cargo , burning  20 tonnes of fuel per hour .

In comparison, the world’s largest container ship,  Ever Alot , has a deadweight tonnage of  241,000 tonnes , and consumes significantly less fuel than the  Antonov An-225 Mriya  to carry almost 1,000 times more cargo.

Cargo ships are not designed for the quick transport of goods, but rather the mass transport of goods in the most efficient manner possible.

Do all cargo ships sail at the same speed?

Different types of merchant ships are capable of travelling at different maximum speeds, and they also have varying average speeds. For example, vehicle carriers and container ships tend to operate on more direct liner routes and can therefore travel at higher and more consistent speeds.

Despite these seemingly low average speeds, some cargo ships are built for speed.  Maersk Boston  is the world’s fastest container ship, capable of travelling at 36.5 knots . She is, however, a relatively small vessel with a maximum carrying capacity of only 4,196 TEU (the world’s largest container ship  Ever Alot  can transport over 24,000).

Most cruise ships have a maximum speed of just over 20 knots, although there are some that are capable of much higher speeds.  Queen Mary 2 , for example, can sail at  30 knots  on her   transatlantic liner service between Southampton and New York.

To learn more about the different speeds of cargo ships, check out our article:  Cargo Ship Speed Comparison: How Fast Do They Go?

How far could different ships travel in a day?

As we now know, the average speed of cargo ships varies depending on their type.

Based on the speeds above, here are some examples of how long it could take each type of cargo ship to sail between some of the busiest container ports in the world. Each voyage is based on the quickest possible route. For example, the distance shown for Felixstowe to Shanghai is for a voyage via the Suez Canal.

Why don’t ships just always travel at full speed?

Shipping companies have three priorities when it comes to how their ships are navigated:  safety, punctuality, and fuel economy . They want their ships to arrive on time and by burning as little fuel as possible.

As an incentive, it is common for shipping companies to provide a bonus to Captains who are able to save money on fuel while still arriving in port on time. This is a particularly common arrangement on cruise ships, which spend less time in port than cargo ships on average.

On certain cruise ship itineraries, for example in the Caribbean, it may not be very far between ports. This means that the required sailing speed to get from one port to the next can be very low.

This allows cruise ships the opportunity to ‘slow steam’ between ports. There are many benefits to slow steaming, but slow steaming isn’t just for cruise ships.

Over the last fifteen years, slow steaming has become more and more popular for cargo ships due to the financial and environmental advantages it offers. Check out our video learn about slow steaming and why it’s become so popular:

All merchant ships must abide by the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, more commonly known as the  COLREGS  or  Rules of the Road .

One of the most important rules states that ships proceed at a ‘safe speed’ at all times. There is no specific numerical speed limit prescribed – it is up to the ship’s Captain and officers to judge what is an appropriate safe speed based on a number of factors including but not limited to the amount of traffic in the area, the depth and width of the water, and visibility.

It is generally considered that when other ships are in the area, a slow speed is a safe speed. This is because it gives the navigators more time to think and act, it allows the ship to be stopped more effectively, and if a collision does occur, the damage will be less.

Ports and harbours, however, will have their own numerical speed limits – usually in the range of 6-10 knots. This is not only because of the closeness of hazards when in port, but also because a speed of above 6 knots is not considered safe when using or interacting with tugs in harbour.

Unless a ship is sailing in open seas with no traffic interfering with her passage, it is unusual for a ship to sail at full speed. One of the few exceptions to this would be the cross-channel ferries which regularly cross the English Channel at speeds in excess of 20 knots – but in these circumstances, the officers onboard are experts at navigating in these busy waters at such speeds.

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Freighter Travel Costs and Questions

Travel by Cargo Ship: What You Should Know about Freighter Travel

By R.F. Ahern, “The Freighterman”

LISTEN TO OUR FREIGHTER TRAVEL PODCAST EPISODE

Remember the old stories of adventurers who would hop a cargo ship to get to an exotic port of call, traveling like a sailor or Merchant Marine? Well, the good news is that it’s still possible. Travel by cargo ship continues to interest our most curious and intrepid readers.

Freighter Travel is Popular

You can travel from one port to another or around the world by freighter. It’s relatively inexpensive (compared to other cruise ships) and easy to do as more and more freighter companies come on board to offer passenger service.

Freighter Travel

Most freighters only have room for a limited number of passengers, and, while you won’t be bunking with the crew anymore, traveling by freighter is still enough of an alternative mode of transportation to keep regular cruise tourists standing in the buffet line.

Your accommodations will be quite adequate–sometimes even a reconfigured Captain’s berth! – and all your meals while at sea will be provided. But unlike a regular cruise ship, you won’t find an onboard disco or gambling casino.

On the other hand, you may have more than one-night playing cards with the crew or sitting quietly on the deck watching the stars. Some freight ships have swimming pools!

Check out these FAQs on freighter travel , provided by R.F. Ahern, “The Freighterman,” who has traveled around the world and then some by freighter ship. Then hop a freighter and sail the seven seas like a real voyager!

WHERE CAN I GO BY FREIGHTER?

You can travel from just about any major port in the world to any other port. Some freighters also go to places you’ve never even heard of. Most lines have regular routes and transatlantic crossings. Frequently you can catch a “tramp” that has no fixed ports of call. Americans cannot travel between one U.S. port and another. From South America to Asia, the ships cross all of the world’s oceans.

CAN ANYONE TRAVEL ON A FREIGHTER?

No. Usually, the upper age limit is 79, the lower is about 5 years. These upper and lower limits may vary from one shipping company to another. If you are over 65, you will generally be required to get a medical certificate from your physician certifying you are fit to travel. Pregnant women are usually not permitted.

If you have difficulty negotiating stairs, this will also preclude you from travel on a freighter. Since all of the passenger-carrying containerships are sailing under a foreign flag they are not subject to American laws requiring accommodation of disabled individuals

HOW LONG IS A FREIGHTER VOYAGE?

The average length of a freighter voyage is 40 to 50 days, though there are some shorter trips available last a couple of weeks. A roundtrip from the U.S. West Coast to Australia/New Zealand and return takes about 46 days. An around the world voyage lasts generally 80 to 100 days or more. Hong Kong China to Los Angeles USA, has an estimated average time between 18 to 20 days of transit port to port.

A westbound voyage from Los Angles, CA. to Hamburg , Germany is about 41 days.

CAN I TAKE A SEGMENTED CARGO SHIP TRIP?

Many people do not like to take a roundabout freighter travel voyage, having neither the time nor the money. Segmented trips are possible with a stopover in port for as long as you want. You can resume your voyage or fly home by plane. These kinds of voyages are popular with people who only have a couple of weeks to travel, and only want to spend some it at sea.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO TRAVEL ON A FREIGHTER?

Travel by freighter, the average cost of a voyage is just about $100.00 US per day, for a single person traveling in a single cabin. It is always more expensive for a single to book a double cabin and always cheaper per person for double occupancy of a double cabin.

There is an additional charge of about $262.00 for deviation insurance and a $12.50 customs charge per person departing or entering the country. Keep in mind that more than one owner/charter may have vessels on a given route. The fare charged by different owners on the same route can vary considerably. Shop around.

Historically, German owners have had a two-tier pricing system, with euro prices lower than the prices quoted in US dollars. If you want to convert euros to dollars, you can use a currency converter. I have been advised that American agents are striving for a single pricing system so that the cost of a voyage is exactly the same for a given ship, regardless of where the traveler calls home, or currency of payment.

HOW DO I BOOK A FREIGHTER VOYAGE?

Most travel agents do not book freighter voyages. You will have to book through an agent that specializes in freighter cruises or directly through the ship’s agent/manager. Remember that there may be voyages available that the travel agent is not advertising on the Internet or elsewhere. If you want to go on a particular voyage, ask the agent what they have available. Remember also that not all agents offer the same voyages.

WHEN SHOULD I MAKE MY TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS?

Unlike an airline, you cannot call your travel agent on a Friday evening and expect to leave on Monday (except for hopping a Tramp Voyage–covered later). Allow several months to plan your trip. I usually start early in January to arrange for a mid-April departure. However, some routes are very popular and you may have to arrange for your voyage many months ahead of your desired departure date. While some freighters depart on exact date and time, others have a window for departure. Be flexible.

New offerings are becoming available every month, so it is possible you can schedule a trip on short notice, but it is better to plan far in advance. Remain flexible with your travel plans. I recently booked a voyage only to be notified the ship I was to board in Los Angeles had grounded and would be unavailable for more than a month after my planned departure date.

Luckily, I was able to hop another ship leaving a few days earlier than I had planned.

WHAT IS A FREIGHTER TRAVEL OPTION?

An option is a period of time within which the pre-payment of a portion of the cost of a voyage must be made. Once your travel agent tenders your voyage, your agent will ask for payment of $500.00, to be paid within a couple of weeks, if you live in the US, to secure your cabin. Full payment is due usually 60 days before the ship’s departure.

If you live in Europe it is customary to be required to make a deposit equivalent to 25% of the cost of the voyage. One agent told me that it is customary in some European countries for the agent to expect payment in full once you have contracted for a voyage, even if you are required to cancel the trip.

WHAT IS A TRAMP VOYAGE

Tramps are cargo ships that have no fixed schedule or ports of call; they go where the cargo is and drop it off where it’s supposed to go. Often, tramp voyages have passenger rooms and travelers can book them. The advantage is that you can get a cheaper voyage to a remote destination at the last minute.

The downside is that you might not be able to get away from that port until another tramp comes along. Tramp voyages are often listed in booking agency’s “Last Minute Specials.”

WHAT SIZE OF SHIP IS BEST?

Having traveled on small container ships (those carrying 1,000 or fewer containers, under 15,000 d.w.t. and about 485 feet) and large ones (4,500 containers or more, over 63,000 d.w.t. and 950 feet in length) I much prefer the former. Traveling on large ships is like being on a cruise ship. By this, I mean it is very stable. The majority of the time you are unaware of the fact that you are at sea!

So, if you like the feel of the sea, think small. Another potential disadvantage of a larger ship is the possibility that it may berth at a newer pier and thus, it may be inconvenient or far away to get from the ship to the port city (for example, the Port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan ).

Large ships obviously have larger engines. Accordingly, the engine air intakes, usually on the “A” deck, generate a lot of noise outside of the vessel. These large engines produce a lot of carbon discharge, making decks D and E, where passenger cabins are usually located, quite dirty.

Video: What’s It Like Inside a Cabin on a Freighter Ship?

CAN I WORK ON A FREIGHTER FOR ALL OR PART OF MY PASSAGE?

The answer is simple. NO! Sit back and enjoy the ride.

SO WHAT CAN I DO ON A FREIGHTER?

Remember, that a freighter is a working ship and passengers are secondary. Thus, there is no such thing as a cruise director or any planned activities other than watching a VCR or doing your laundry. But there’s plenty of time to read, get some sun, hang out on the bridge. What is life on board a freighter trip like? What is the daily routine?

Meals are something I looked forward to as they provided an opportunity for some interesting conversation with the ship’s officers. Some ships have pools, often below the main deck. One smaller container ship that I was on was only able to fill the pool half full to prevent the water from sloshing out in rough weather. Bring plenty of books or your Kindle filled with reading.

You can buy all the beer and hard liquor you want to mellow out, tax-free. But, don’t expect to find your favorite Scotch or Rye whiskey on board. Selections are limited, but there is enough booze on board to keep any hardcore alcoholic happy.

WILL I GET SEASICK?

Could be. Unlike cruise ships, there are no stabilizers on a cargo ship voyage. Accordingly, there can be a significant amount of pitch and roll, depending on the size of the ship, the amount of cargo, and the weather. Most of the time, waves do not exceed 15 feet (about 3 meters), usually less.

There are two things to remember about being seasick: You feel like you are going to die and then you realize that you won’t! As a general rule, the bigger the ship and the more cargo aboard, the smoother the “ride”. I recently sailed on the Cho Yang Atlas, a 965-foot, and 4,500 T.E.U. container ship and was not even aware of the fact that I was at sea.

CAN I BRING ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES?

All ships have a 220-volt power supply. The U.S. standard is 110 volts. Accordingly, you should check to see if your computer, razor, radio, etc., have a 110-220V-option switch. If not, you will need a converter. If you are from the U.S., you will need a plug converter (square to round prongs, but you can usually find one on the ship). A small, portable, AM/FM/SW radio is nice to have along, so you can stay in touch with what’s going on in the world.

WHAT CAN I BUY ON-BOARD?

Cigarettes, beer, soft drinks, toothpaste, and the like. All transactions are in U.S. dollars, no checks, or credit cards; often the price of these items is quoted in the currency of the country of registry or vessel ownership, but there may be exceptions. There is no tax on items purchased on the high sea, however, the ship’s “slop chest” is locked while the ship is in port.

WHAT SHOULD I PACK TO WEAR?

It depends on where you are going and the time of year. Attire is very informal. Jeans, T-shirts, and shorts will work. Leave your coats and ties at home as well as any fancy dresses, unless you want to wear them ashore. Rubber-soled shoes (not boat shoes) are a must. Leather-soled shoes should be left at home. Since shoes are removed in all carpeted areas of the ship they should be easy to take on and off. This is important as often the deck is wet or has residue from the engine’s exhaust.

IS A FREIGHTER NOISY?

Not really, unless you like to hang out in the engine room. There is a much higher noise level than on a cruise ship, but, like vibration, it is minimal.

One exception is the noise generated by the engine intake fans located on the main deck or first deck. Engine exhaust noise is felt and heard on large ships, though not to the extent that it is annoying.

WHAT LANGUAGES ARE SPOKEN ABOARD SHIP?

English, but not necessarily American English. On my last cruise, the Belgian Captain spoke excellent English, but the Ukrainian officers had limited ability with English. Most of the Filipino crew had a decent command of the language.

WHAT ABOUT SHIPBOARD ETIQUETTE?

All members of the ship’s crew are addressed as “Mister” unless they tell you to call them by their first name. Do not go on the bridge without asking for permission. Usually, passengers have access to the bridge at all times.

The only exception may be during the period the harbor pilot is aboard. As you will be in an entirely new environment, it will take a few days to get a feeling for the ship and its crew.

It is a good idea to learn the name of all officers and crew (there are only 17-20) as soon as possible. It is also recommended that you learn a few words or phrases in the native language or languages of the crew members.

CAN I BRING MY PET?

No. However, you can ship your four or five favorite polo ponies from here to there in a container! Of course, the owner is required to have them accompanied by a trainer/keeper, and they will be subject to quarantine regulations.

WHAT ABOUT VISAS?

Check with your travel agent to be sure of the visa requirements of the various countries. Non-US citizens must have a visa to enter the United States by cargo ship. Australia requires a visa for all foreign nationals arriving by ship. Ditto for China , but not Hong Kong. The fact that you never leave the vessel is of no consequence. Most countries do not even bother to stamp your passport, though they do check it.

It has been my experience that the Captain will ask for your passport after you board and you may be invited to his cabin for a “chat” with immigration officials after docking, though in this is not the case in most large ports, such as Hong Kong.

Again, it depends on where you are going. No immunizations are required for travel between Europe, the U.S., Canada , and Australia. However, for the transit of either Panama or Suez Canal, you will need an inoculation for yellow fever and cholera. In the U.S., these will cost $50 to $60 each. To find physicians or clinics in your area, call your local Public Health Department. Your travel agent can advise you as to the inoculations you will require.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Plan what you are going to need on your voyage; bring a short wave radio, DVDs, reading material, a camera, or whatever. A laptop computer makes for a handy companion. The ship might have one available for your use, but don’t count on it.
• Once your ship leaves port, that’s it; there is no going back. Ships have many stairs and they are steep, so hold on at all times. A few have elevators. After a couple of days (weeks) you will get used to them (smile)
• When booking a cabin, get one as high as possible in the superstructure, assuming you have available options. If you do not, containers will block your forward view. Almost always cabins are outside with a view forward, port, or starboard; some have two views.
• Of course, the downside to higher cabins is that you will have to go down several flights of stairs to get to the officer’s mess, which is usually located on the poop deck (one deck above the main deck on ships not stowing containers aft of the superstructure) or the main deck. Usually, passenger cabins are on the fourth or fifth deck.
• Visit this great updated 2020 Freighter Travel site
• Tipping is optional. Other than the mess steward, there is no one to tip other than the cook, and then only if the food is exceptional. The steward may make up your bed and empty your wastebasket daily; then again, it might be only on a weekly basis, so tip accordingly, if at all.
• If you need information about shipping cargo, such as your car (in a container), household goods, etc., here is the place to start to get information. Cargo can be transported on the same vessel you travel on, however, you are probably better off shipping with the line usually used by the freighter forwarding company.

Freighter Travel in South America

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62 thoughts on “ Freighter Travel Costs and Questions ”

I was looking at a short trip from Brisbane Australia to New Zealand in the North Island/Auckland.,Tauranga in September..are there many options to do this and do I have time to do this?

“These faqs are helpful if you ask me. They answer all the questions that one might have, so I am delighted that I read all about these faqs and whatnot. “

Great info.,worth the read.

Do you know if there is any chance of me traveling w my Harley Davidson on a ship from eastern US to Panama or Costa Rica ?

You will have to crate it and pay port fees.

You post is not originally this taken directly from Cargotravel.com

Travel by cargo ship with dog with cargoholidays. No. However, you can ship your four or five favorite polo ponies from here to there in a container! Of course, the owner is required to have them accompanied by a trainer/keeper, and they will be subject to quarantine regulations

How may I travel between US NY-NJ Ports and Iran Ports? any experience, recommendations, or guidance?

Very doubtful you can do this on a freighter. Too many restrictions plus Covid.

thanks for this article. Very helpful. Would love information about How to get to the US (east coast) from Sweden. (Im in Stockholm). Any freighters still leaving from Gothenburg to the US that accept passengers? or we have to find another out- port going across the Atlantic? thx Ewa

I am wanting to go Capetown SA from the US. I live in the Baltimore Washington area with that be possible

do they have ship longbeach to manila

can one take a dog/pet with you on a container ship? i am trying to find an alternative to putting my dog on a 24 hour flight.

No, you can’t bring any pets on a cargo ship. NO.

I think you need to be a little more clear. Maybe something like “the one I went on does not allow it” or “Its a standard that every single cargo ship I know of does not allow it”.

When I read your answer it makes me believe that your just saying no to the cargo ship you have been on and other companies may allow it. But then again I know less than you about this industry… in fact I know nothing.

Finding a cargo ship is the last effort I have before either giving up my 2 dogs or chartering a private jet just to move them to south America from the US. No airline will take them and you can not drive it.

“No, you can’t bring any pets on a cargo ship. NO.”

How could it possibly be any clearer that pets aren’t allowed on cargo ships?

The guy posting this article is an expert on cargo ships… and I think it’s pretty clear where he says: NO you cannot bring pets onboard the cargo ship. As for shipping your dogs via the airline, I’m not sure why it would be a 24 hour flight – can’t you put the dogs (per standard procedure) in the dog crate area of the plane, and be flying on that same flight, which will NOT take 24 hours?

what is the point travelling like this? This is the most expensive way, not cheap at all.

If you read the FAQ, it IS covered.

Hi I am looking for a cargo freighter to travel from South Africa to Australia with motor bike at the end of 2022?

Back in 1971 I took a cargo ship from South Africa to Australia with my BSA Bantam on which I actually ended up going round the world. i was allowed 40 cub.ft in the hold as accompanied ‘baggage’ and my bike was approx that size. It actually went in a room, never in a crate. And that was true of: Bombay to Mombasa; S. Africa to Australia; Australia to nZ; nZ to Singapore and Bangkok to Hong Kong. I was always a passenger. What the conditions are nowadays I know not. But good luck.

A FOURTY CUBIC FEET BSA BANTAM – Really? My ex-Bro-in-Law worked Tankeres as a Second Officer back in the day for SHELMEX in their first SUPER TANKERS and both my sister and sometimes his Mum and Dad travelled with him. I believe ‘the missus’ went free but Mum and Dad had to pay. My son was an Officer i the RAF for eight byears and I used to visit heim regularly [I was myself and ex-EArmourer Sergeant] for the odd weekend. Atbthe time [the late 90’s it cost nhim the princely sum for rather excellent Full Board and Lodgings for me from Friday Evening to Monday Morning ££5.00 aand bar prices wer about 1/5th and probably still are of normal Pub Prices. I monce went nto mthe Officers Mess New Years Eve Party. It had to be experienced to be believed – a WHOLE BLOODY FUNFAIR for starters. Talk about the AIR STAFF letting their hair down on the Bumper Cars!!!!

Are there any cargo ships taking passengers from Southern Africa to Australia?

Is it safe for a woman over age 60 for a voyager? Are most ports are safe to travel to during the day?

I have the same question and don’t see any answers

How reliable is the Satellite Hotspot? Is it safe for a woman over 60 to travel solo? How do you find out the layout of the ship before choosing the cabin?

No need to play the gender card. Everyone is welcome subject to their age limits, and if it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t go.

Thank you for this article. I was especially interested in the difficulty of moving around the ship. As a former navy man I forgot just how hard it was to go up and down the stairs. At my current age, I do not believe I could do that much anymore. Too bad.

This was an interesting article. I recall a long time ago hearing about such methods of travel and must have just forgotten about it. I was just reminded in an old movie. There were a lot of good comments that answered some questions. I also watched the video of the fellow showing us his room. It looked quite adequate and not at all cramped. I’m 72 years old but I don’t look it and I’m in good physical condition. I did read that some of these companies do have age restrictions, and I can understand why. But going up and down some steep stairs isn’t an issue for me and I do swim every day in my pool. Getting a certificate for this from my doctor wouldn’t pose a problem. I have to say that taking a cruise on a regular cruise ship has had no appeal to me. I’ve watched videos and talked with family who do that and it’s just not something I want. They seem way too crowded and just not for me. I do however enjoy a nice Hindricks and tonic, smooth jazz, and interesting conversation. Those things seem to be plentiful on one of these ships. I would have to bring my own Hindricks (gin), my laptop, some reading material and maybe my Xbox. It all sounds much more interesting to me than the alternative. Going up on the bridge, conversations with the Captain and crew, that all sounds great. I’m glad I found this article.

Who or where can I get detailed info on what freighter ships offer this service from Los Angeles to Manila/Cebu Philippines? I don’t even know where to start. TIA for any info on this subject!

I’m in the same Boat, no pun intended. I want to go to the Philippines from either Portland Oregon, or Seattle Washington but can find no one who ships there. I cannot believe no vessels travel from Major US Ports such as Portland and Seattle. Any help you can give us would be greatly appreciated. Thank You, Mike

HOW OLD is this article?? Its telling people to bring videotapes to watch and talked about the cost of film. How many people use a film camera anymore, 1 out of a hundred? Who has videotapes lying around?!?!

Yes, that story was published in 2000, but we have edited the copy so it’s been updated for 2021. Thank you, dear reader.

You are so polite to some of these commenters.

Many tnx for the response. Can you please update what online services like wifi and email are available???

Vickie and Paul say: what are you doing looking at cargo ship cruises? If that’s you… Please write. Paul

Hi I am looking for a cargo freighter to travel from Vancouver to China the shortest route cause I can’t take flight due to my conditions. Thanks

Hello Zoey, Did you make it from Vancouver to China by ship? I’m trying to do the same trip. Would like to know more.

Thank you so much!

I am hoping to travel from the Seattle area to Costa Rica on a cargo ship… can anybody tell me if the ports in Costa Rica are open now (August 2020) and how can I travel in one of these ships? Thank you for your help!

I had no idea that from Europe to the US, shipments can take about 41 days. Since we just started offering an online shipping option, I wonder if we should look into a contract with a port agent to help us get our products shipped without too much delay between getting an order placed. I would imagine it would be easiest to get a warehouse in the countries we will ship to and then fulfill orders from those warehouses.

Do cargo ships have internet access? Thanks

yes they almost always do. But it might be slow and it will cost money in most cases.

Hey R.F. Ahern and fellow boaters! Thank you for the article I really enjoyed reading it and I did not know that you can travel on a cargo ship! That’s really amazing. Me and my husband have a world travel vlog called Dawn Hunters where we post our sailing adventures and also tips for travelers (well, currently we are fixing our 1985 steel motorsailer, so there is much more boatyard adventures for now). I’ve just started special series for aspiring digital nomads and posted a video called Digital Nomad Series – How to Travel for Free and Get Paid – Hopscotch the Globe on a Boat about crewseekers so you might want to see the video if you are looking into boat travels – they have super cool and unexpected opportunities for cheap or even free travels on boats. They do NOT have cargo ships over there, but maybe not everyone here wants to go on one? Anyways I thought that might be useful for some people!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTpW5uIJE7E

Also would love to collaborate on the blog/vlog to make an interview or a podcast for some interesting “boaters” stories if you are interested – shoot us an email.

Thank you for sharing! Dawn Hunters

Wow, I never knew this! I wish I were not so prone to seasickness, this sounds incredible. I would definitely go for the experience, the opportunity to visit other countries and take in the sights and sounds, plus the operations of a cargo ship are seriously impressive.

I am trying to get to Southeast Asia from Saudi Arabia. I am trying to leave in May. Because of COVID the airlines are grounded. Is there anyway I can book on a cargo ship?

great site thanks for all the info. I am looking to go from Barcelona to USA May of 2021, thanks in advance for any help

I have read that one can’t go to Hawai’i, Alaska, or any of the US insular terretories (Guam, Northern Marianas, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, USVI), by freighter because US-flagged freighters don’t take passengers, and foreign-flagged freighters (try saying that three times fast!) are not allowed to take passengers (or cargo, for that matter) between US ports.

However, would it be possible to take a freighter to these places from a Mexican or Canadian port?

Not that I’m a professional traveler, but why pay over $4k to travel in less luxury, and for over a month? You could go an an actual cruise for that money, or if you’re purely looking to travel, fly for a whole lot less. Is it just for the experience?

JR, I think the appeal of freighter travel is that you don’t have to deal with the huge crowds on a regular cruise ship, if you just want time to write, think, look at the ocean and chill totally, that’s the attraction. Yes it’s costly because the cruises are longer!

Some of us hate to fly.

Outside of the mental/health appeal of slow travel, it is much more environmentally friendly (as freighters carry cargo regardless of passenger, so your journey is essentially carbon neutral). Additionally, it is more expensive than a flight, but you’re also paying for several days of lodging and food.

I think some people are “simple” and don’t want luxury or to be pampered. I learned a lot about myself and personality over the years. I hold multiple college degrees—including a post-graduate degree in business. However, I learned and realized that I am happiest and most satisfied working on blue collar skilled trade industries. I learned that I don’t like suits and ties. I don’t like snooty people. I don’t like all the pomp and circumstance of luxury. I enjoy being around everyday working people. I think it will always be that way no matter how much money I have. I feel out of place in luxury places, but I feel right at home around everyday people. I love quiet and having lots of reflection time. I wear working man’s jeans and work boots everywhere I go. I think that living with humility and humbleness makes me feel comfortable.

Are there often any medicines not allowed on freighters?

lookin to travel from Miami to Portsmouth any ideas of cost and travel time

What about wifi?

Forget about wifi!

If one must, one can always bring a satellite phone or a satellite modem. With a satellite phone you pay per minute. With a satellite modem you pay for data. Both can be expensive so I highly suggest you not use, say, a satellite modem to watch YouTube videos or Netflix, but you can do email or chat or even place a phone call via GooglePhone or free VoIP Calls top actual phone numbers via TextNow.com and you can link your laptop to it!! So, you don’t have to be fully off-line. Or you could, if you must, here’s a “low-cost” option: https://satellitephonestore.com/catalog/sale/details/iridium-go-252 No, I don’t work for them. lol -but it’s the type of thing I’ve seen. Good for emails and chat or iMessaging. Just don’t do big Powder Puff attachments. lol Enjoy!

Did the Satellite modem or phone work out as you expected? Is it reliable? Which part of the world did you travel to? Does the cargo ship has wifi for their staff or captain?

I’m planning on a move to Japan and would like to know what freight ship companies handle transit between the U.S. (Port of Seattle Washington) and Japan. Unlike people doing really early planning for a trip later in the year, I’m aiming to make my move in a very short period of time (1-2 weeks). My last concern is if there are any direct shipping routes between the U.S. and Japan. I’d prefer as direct as possible for the quickest trip. I’m certainly not worried about finances.

How can i travel from Toronto to india by frieght

Put your car on the ship. Then you get on. There you go.

I traveled from Japan to southern California in summer 1985. From the above article now in the age of Internet, it looks like you have to (1) find what cargo companies travel your routes, (2) contact each one to get availability/price/procedure, (3) take the trip!

How can I travel one way from the US on a cargo ship, and take my own car on the same ship? I’d like to travel from the north-east US coast (possibly New York,…) to a northern port in France, Belgium, Netherlands, or Germany.

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Imagine for a moment that you are on the deck of a ship, sipping a glass of wine. You turn your head towards the water just in time to spot a pod of dolphins swimming by or flying fish, providing company in the ocean. After lingering in the sunshine for a while, it's time to head inside for a 3-course evening meal and a splash in the pool before retiring to bed.

Now, what kind of vessel are you on?

No, you are not on a standard commercial cruise ship. You are not on a packed luxury liner hopping between Caribbean islands. You are aboard a modern freighter. Hundreds of cargo ships, carrying everything from fire engines to apples, are crossing the world's oceans, and many are happy to take you along for the ride. Adventurous travelers, including the Transitions Abroad family, have been doing so for years, as have many long before us.

What Does Travel on a Cargo Ship Feel Like?

A far more intimate and relaxed experience than you might imagine! The experience on board contrasts sharply with the rough and industrial outward appearance a container ship tends to project. You will be one of a handful of passengers among a crew likely to number up to a dozen or a few more. There will be no evening cabaret shows as on a standard cruise, though you may have access to TV, video, and board games in a common area on the ship where passengers may meet the crew. You may even play cards with the crew under the night skies. You might be invited to karaoke with the sailors, and you will almost always dine alongside the captain, who is far more likely to turn up in shorts and a t-shirt than in full uniform. Some cargo ships also offer equipped exercise rooms or pools.

Here was our first taste of the wonders of sea travel. Our introduction to freighter travel was a relatively short 5-day sailing between Australia and New Zealand. We joined the French ship CMA CGM Utrillo in the busy port of Melbourne, where our luggage — including two bicycles and bags — was quickly hauled on board and into a spacious cabin by a host of cheery Filipino deckhands.

What are the Costs of Cargo Ship Travel?

Depending upon your destination (Transatlantic, Transpacific, South Seas, Worldwide, and other special combinations), your daily freighter travel costs will be about $100-$130 per day per person per day with a luggage allowance of approximately 30kg-100kg (66-220lbs) depending on the line you are taking. Generally, US dollars are the primary currency used onboard to buy soft drinks, snacks, beer, and toiletries. You can then use your credit cards at each location you disembark.

What kind of Hospitality Can You Expect on Board?

Our next surprise was how quickly we felt part of the family. Just moments after arriving, our fellow passenger (a French woman "going around the world in 80 days”) hinted that the captain was sure to throw us a welcome barbecue. “He does that for every one new,” she said with a wink. Sure enough, the next evening was spent on the back deck of the ship, feasting on grilled fish and chatting with the seamen as the sun went down.

One of our concerns before sailing was that we'd find the days long. It was just the opposite. There were three square meals a day (hearty plates of meat and vegetables for workers) and our time between eating was filled with strolls around the deck and trips up to the bridge to check our position and ask questions.

Had there ever been stowaways? Yes, once a harmless passenger was allowed to board. What about pirates? Not here, but there were off the coast of Africa. And just how much fuel did a cargo ship need? In the current era of relatively low oil prices, $60,000 U.S. a day will generally cover the trip.

Why is it a Relaxing Way to Travel?

With our curiosity temporarily curbed, we would return to our cabin for reading our books or Kindle, journal writing, and a bit of table tennis if we felt especially energetic. Far away from the hustle and bustle of life on firm land, we were truly relaxed. The experience was in complete contrast to our usual hurried airplane trips.

For Hamish Jamieson, the owner of Freighter Travel NZ and one of only a handful of travel agents in the world licensed to book tickets on cargo ships, the simplicity of being at sea is the main attraction.

“When you're sitting up the front of the bow of the ship, on your own, and all you see is the sea going past and you hear the wind and waves, you're in heaven. For me, an afternoon...sitting right on the bow, watching the world go by with my binoculars, that's my heaven,” he said.

What Kind of Flexibility is Needed for Freighter Travel?

Of course, nothing in life is all smooth sailing. While we didn't encounter any problems during our trip, we did struggle with the uncertain nature of freighter travel before we boarded. Our initial departure date jumped forward first by three days and then seemed to bounce around by 12-24 hours every time we called to check the latest news. Ours was not an uncommon experience and you must prepare yourself for flexibility.

Even ports of call are not guaranteed because on a cargo ship, freight comes first, not the passengers. If the demand is not there for a certain stop, the ship will go where the business is.

“Our trip from the USA to Europe changed three times after initial booking,” said Rebecca Hogue and Scott Drennan, then on a journey around the world without using airplanes . Their initial trip from South Carolina to Belgium was from Florida to Italy. “Had we not been flexible with our departure times and locations, things would not have worked out.”

As Mr. Jamieson is fond of telling his passengers, when you go to sea, there are two things you must pack: a sense of humor and a sense of patience.

What are the Practical Issues?

Your trip may also involve some red tape, particularly concerning U.S. stops. American citizens are not permitted, for example, to travel within their country by cargo ship, although they can make international journeys. Meanwhile, travelers to the United States must have a visa, even if they would not need one to arrive by air. Only Canadians are exempt from this rule.

Be sure to budget time and money to get vaccinations like Yellow Fever if you are going through the Suez and Panama canals. A medical certificate declaring you in generally good health is another typical requirement.

Where in the World Do You Want to Go?

The hardest part of booking your cargo ship voyage is deciding where to go. Will it be to South America and around Cape Horn? How about a 55-day round trip from California to Australia and New Zealand via Tahiti and Mexico? Mr. Jamieson offers a few more ideas and favorite voyages based on years of experience.

“For me the ultimate voyage is from Auckland, in New Zealand, to Singapore. It takes 40-45 days to sail what you can fly in just under 12 hours but it visits nearly every island in the Pacific on the way and it stops for 2-3 days. The second choice for me would be from Singapore through to Houston in Texas. It goes up through Thailand, Vietnam, half a dozen ports in China, into Japan, then straight across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal.”

With enough time and money at your disposal--round-the-world trips can take 80 to 100 days or more--there are few places a cargo ship can't reach. Voyage destinations on cargo ships can change, so the many options available will often surprise you. You need to be adventurous enough to do your research, find a specialized cargo ship travel agent (see resources below), and then get on board.

The Golden Rules of Cargo Ship Travel

• Be prepared to make your own fun. There are seldom programmed activities aside from the odd safety drill.
• Go before you're too old. An upper age limit of 77-80 years is not uncommon, as no doctor on board and there are often plenty of stairs.
• Check that your travel insurance covers freighter travel.
• Be flexible. Schedules can and do change frequently. You may need 2-3 ships to reach your destination.
• Book in advance. Cabins are limited and the most popular routes can be sold out by ships months ahead.
• Forget about working in exchange for your passage. Current union rules mean this is no longer permitted.
• Take a good supply of seasickness pills. While not very common, rough weather can occur, sending tables, chairs, and your stomach flying across the room.
• Wifi and other modern electronics are now often available on cargo ships for travelers . If connectivity is important to you, ask whether those options are accessible and free in advance.

Friedel Rother gave up her job as a journalist for Reuters to ride a bicycle around the world with her husband. They have published two books in addition to cycling.

Matador Original Series

How to: travel by cargo ship.

Article updated on Sunday, September 10th, 2017.

I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED a collection of brown leather trunks with brightly colored stickers from all the world’s corners. They remind me of travelers in the early 1900s who spent days on the ocean in order to reach their destinations. Back then, arriving at the destination was as much a part of the trip as the destination itself.

• Taking a cargo ship to Southeast Asia? Here’s all the gear for backpacking Southeast Asia.
• Taking a cargo ship to Latin America? Here’s all the gear for trekking in Latin America.

So when I needed to get from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to France I asked myself, “is it still possible to travel by boat?” There are, after all, still cargo ships that carry everything from automobiles to antiques over the ocean, so why couldn’t I just hop on one myself and enjoy an ocean voyage? A few months later I was on a CMA-CGM cargo ship headed from Pointe-à-Pitre to Dunkerque.

Note that if you are having your car shipped overseas and wonder if it were possible to travel with your vehicle and save a little money while having a fun experience, it is well worth asking the cargo line whether they offer passenger rooms on their ships.

Traveling on a cargo ship is very much possible, and while it isn’t considered a luxury cruise, it is still a great way to travel — even at a cost of roughly $100 USD daily, it is worth the time to find a spot on a ship.

My nine days on the Atlantic included gourmet French food, duty-free Porto, and hours spent mesmerized by the blinking lights of the GPS. Yes, you can still travel to many locations in the world by boat. It was by far one of the best trips I’ve ever taken.

Here are some pointers for researching and planning your own adventure on the high seas:

1. What exactly is traveling by cargo ship?

Most of the major global shipping lines including CMA-CGM offer paying passengers an opportunity to hop on one of their lines. As a paying passenger, you are accommodated in guest cabins and have access to most areas of the ship.

Cargo ships have a limited number of rooms for passengers, so be prepared to start planning your ventures, and book the trip at least 6 months in advance to ensure you have a spot on the ship. Your fare will usually include port fees as well as meals and your room.

Captains and crew spend a lot of time on the water, and they are usually happy to have a fresh face walking around their workplace, meaning that they may even invite you to eat with them, give you tours of the ship and maybe even have you over for an Officer’s happy hour.

2. Where can I go?

You can travel almost anywhere by cargo ship.

The global shipping industry is huge, and many ports like New York, Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Sydney welcome several ships daily.

Shipping companies have certain lines covering specific routes, and many of them will allow you to buy a ticket for one of these lines and disembark and board as you please if there is a ship leaving on your chosen day. Just remember to book your passage in advance because you can’t just show up at a port to jump on a ship on a whim.

A word of advice to the cargo ship traveler, be flexible. Schedules can, and very often do change and when that happens, you will need to hop on and off more than one ship during the trip.

This is often how round the world routes work: book your freighter ticket and then plan in a few weeks in every major port. With freighters, the possibilities for your adventure are almost endless. Just think: anywhere global commodities are shipped are places that you can disembark and spend time soaking up the local culture before re-boarding.

3. What will it cost?

A common misconception is that if you are willing to spend an extended amount of time on open water you can score an inexpensive mode of transportation to your next travel destination.

Traveling as a passenger on a cargo ship is, in fact, more expensive than your average airfare. But before you scoff at the price — plan on an average price of $80-140/day — consider this: your ticket pays for room, meals, and experiences that cannot be had anywhere else.

The days where a person could work for their passage are long gone. The cargo lines will not allow you to work your way across the Atlantic just so you can have a free trip overseas. You will, however, get to meet crew members and will most likely find yourself spending a great deal of time getting to know many of them when they take a break or have some time off to relax a little.

4. Life on a ship

As a passenger, you are surrounded by the everyday life of the vessel and her crew. Schedules revolve around meal times, which can be extravagant events depending on the chef.

If you are a gourmet traveler, consider traveling with one of the French companies which are known for their high-quality cuisine and table wine.

Besides meals, the rest of the day is spent as you please. Make your way up to the bridge and chat with the captain about sea navigation or schedule a tour with the head mechanic to see the vessel’s impressive technical insides. Officers on cargo ships are often willing to show you how things work to keep the ship afloat and to keep things safe.

You will quickly find that the freighter environment is a rough but enjoyable one; think lots of steel and salt water. Before the evening meal, meet for a pre-dinner drink with your co-passengers in the guest lounge area and discuss the events of the day.

You may think that a week on open water can give you a case of cabin fever, but a slower pace of life can be much welcomed and enjoyable.

There is something to note about health and fitness levels when traveling on a cargo ship. Because these ships usually do not have a doctor on board, you should be healthy and fit enough to take on such a voyage. This is a safety precaution as the ship wouldn’t want anyone being injured or in need of medical attention and be at sea without a doctor to help.

5. Planning

So you’ve decided that freighter travel is for you, what now? Do your internet research, there are several websites maintained by individuals seduced by traveling on the high seas with great tips and long lists of different routes around the world.

Go to the websites of the freighter companies and send them an email asking about passenger fares. Another option is travel agencies that specialize in freighter travel like A la Carte Freighter Travel based in Montreal.

Some helpful websites to get you started:

• https://www.freightercruises.com/
• http://www.hamburgsued-frachtschiffreisen.de/en/freightertravel/index.jsp

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Travel on Cargo Ships: An Unconventional and Affordable Way to Explore the World

If you’re looking for an off-the-beaten-path travel experience that’s both adventurous and budget-friendly, you might want to consider traveling on cargo ships.

Contrary to popular belief, travel on cargo ships can be a viable alternative to traditional cruise ships, offering a unique opportunity to see the world while getting a glimpse of the day-to-day life of seafarers.

In this article, we’ll explore how can you travel on a cargo ship as a passenger, the ins and outs of traveling on cargo ships, including the pros and cons, how to book a trip, and what to expect during your voyage.

What is Cargo Ship Travel?

Cargo ship travel, also known as freighter travel, is a mode of transportation where passengers book a cabin on a commercial cargo ship and join the crew on their journey. This type of travel allows you to visit new destinations, experience life at sea, and enjoy a slower pace of life.

Cargo ship travel has a long and fascinating history that dates back to ancient times. Throughout history, ships were primarily used for transporting goods, but as time passed, they became a popular mode of transportation for people as well.

In the late 19th century, passenger liners started to become popular, offering luxurious amenities for travelers crossing the Atlantic. However, as air travel became more common in the mid-20th century, passenger ships began to lose popularity, and cargo ships became the dominant vessels on the seas.

Despite the decline in the popularity of passenger ships, travel on cargo ships has continued to be a niche way to travel for adventurous and curious travelers.

It offers a unique opportunity to experience life at sea, interact with the crew, and explore destinations that are often off the beaten path. In recent years, cargo ship travel has experienced a revival, with more and more travelers seeking a slower, more authentic way to explore the world.

Discover the rich history of cargo ship travel and how it has evolved from its origins as a mode of transporting goods to a unique and authentic way to explore the world.

The Benefits of Traveling on Cargo Ships

When it comes to traveling, there are a lot of options available. From traditional cruises to budget airlines, the possibilities can be overwhelming. However, one option that often gets overlooked is traveling on cargo ships. While it may not be the most convenient way to see the world, there are a number of benefits to choosing travel on cargo ships for your next adventure.

Unique Experience

One of the biggest draws of traveling on a cargo ship is the unique experience it offers. Unlike traditional cruises, where the focus is on entertainment and relaxation, cargo ships offer a chance to see the world from a different perspective. As a passenger on a working ship , you’ll get a glimpse into the daily routines of the crew, the challenges of life at sea, and the sights and sounds of the ocean.

Another major benefit of cargo ship travel is affordability. While luxury cruises and air travel can come with hefty price tags, traveling on a cargo ship is often much more budget-friendly.

Depending on the route and season, a one-way trip on a cargo ship can cost anywhere from $50 to $150 per day, with the average trip lasting between 10 and 30 days. The cheapest cargo ship travel is available in Northern Europe and the Mediterranian sea. There is plenty of regular short sea connections, for example, routes starting in Hamburg or Rotterdam to the UK or Norway are just 7 days and are under 1000$ per person.

Additionally, the cost of the trip usually includes meals and accommodations, making it a great value compared to traditional cruises or air travel.

Flexibility

Traveling on a cargo ship also offers a high degree of flexibility. Unlike scheduled flights or cruises, cargo ships typically have more flexible departure and arrival dates, allowing you to plan your trip around your schedule. Additionally, because cargo ships often stop at multiple ports along the way, you can choose to stay on board for the entire voyage or get off at any point along the route.

However, you should be familiar with the shipping industry which often meets delays due to unexpected reasons, mainly, during loading operations and weather. In most cases, containership lines are the least affected cargo ships.

Cultural Immersion

Another advantage of cargo ship travel is the opportunity for cultural immersion. As a passenger on a cargo ship, you’ll have the chance to visit ports that are off the beaten path, getting a glimpse into local cultures and customs that you might not experience on a more traditional vacation. Whether it’s trying new foods, exploring local markets, or meeting new people, cargo ship travel can offer a truly immersive travel experience.

Sustainability

Finally, traveling on a cargo ship can be a more sustainable way to travel. While air travel and cruises are known for their high carbon footprints, cargo ships are a more environmentally-friendly option.

Because cargo ships are already making the journey regardless of whether or not there are passengers on board, choosing to travel on a cargo ship means that you’re not contributing to additional emissions or environmental impact.

How to Book a Journey and Travel on Cargo Ships?

Booking a journey on a cargo ship is relatively straightforward. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through the process:

• Research cargo ship companies: Start by researching different cargo ship companies that offer passenger services. Look for companies that offer routes that interest you, and compare prices and amenities.
• Choose a route: Once you have found a few cargo ship companies that interest you, choose a route that fits your travel plans. Consider the duration of the journey, the destinations, and the time of year.
• Check availability: Contact the cargo ship company to check availability on your chosen route. Some cargo ships only accept a limited number of passengers, so it’s important to book in advance.
• Make a booking: Once you have confirmed availability, make a booking for your journey. Be sure to provide all required information, including your personal details, travel dates, and payment information.
• Prepare for your journey: Once your booking is confirmed, start preparing for your journey. Make sure to research the cargo ship you’ll be traveling on, including the conditions on board, what to bring, and what to expect during your journey.
• Enjoy your journey: Finally, sit back, relax, and enjoy your unique and unforgettable cargo ship travel experience. With its cost-effective prices, off-the-beaten-path destinations, and slow-paced lifestyle, cargo ship travel is a truly unique way to explore the world.

What Are Examples Of Companies Offering Traveling On Cargo Ships?

There are several companies that offer passenger services on cargo ships, here are a few examples:

• Freighter Expeditions : Freighter Expeditions offers passenger services on a variety of cargo ships, with routes spanning across the world.
• Cargo Holydays : France Cargo Ship Travel company offers a unique and authentic way to explore France and other destinations around the world via commercial cargo ships. With a focus on personalized service and cultural immersion, France Cargo Ship Travel is a top choice for adventurous travelers looking for a slower and more meaningful way to experience the world.
• Freighter World Cruises : Freighter World Cruises is an American-based company that offers passenger services on a variety of cargo ships, with routes spanning across the world.
• Sea Swift : Sea Swift is a unique travel company that offers passengers the opportunity to experience life on a commercial cargo ship while exploring the stunning waterways of the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait. Their flagship vessel, the MV Trinity Bay, transports vital supplies to several communities in Australia, providing a glimpse into the daily lives of locals. With its award-winning cruise operation and plans to expand to other remote areas of northern Australia, Sea Swift offers a truly unforgettable adventure for those seeking a unique and authentic travel experience.
• Cargo Ship Voyages : a premier provider of passenger services on travel on cargo ships, offering unique and affordable travel experiences to destinations worldwide. With a focus on safety, comfort, and personalized service, Cargo Ship Voyages is a top choice for adventurous travelers seeking a one-of-a-kind way to explore the world.

These are just a few examples of the many companies that offer cargo ship travel. When researching, make sure to consider your destination, budget, and travel preferences to find the best company for your needs.

Traveling on a cargo ship can be a unique and rewarding experience for those seeking a different type of travel adventure. With its cost-effective prices, off-the-beaten-path destinations, and slow-paced lifestyle, cargo ship travel offers a truly unforgettable experience. However, it’s important to be aware of the limited amenities, rougher seas, and long journeys that come with this mode of transportation. By properly researching and preparing, you can ensure that your cargo ship journey is a success.

How much does it cost to travel on a cargo ship?

The cost of cargo ship travel can vary depending on the route, duration of the journey, and the company you choose. On average, cargo ship travel can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per person.

Can you bring your family with you on a cargo ship?

Yes, cargo ship travel is suitable for families with children. Some cargo ship companies even offer special rates for children.

Is it safe to travel on a cargo ship?

Yes, cargo ships are equipped with safety equipment and trained crew members to ensure the safety of passengers. However, it’s always a good idea to research the safety record of a particular cargo ship company before booking your journey.

Can you work on a cargo ship while traveling?

Yes, some cargo ship companies offer work opportunities for travelers. This can include jobs such as working in the kitchen, assisting with cargo operations, or helping with maintenance tasks.

Are there any restrictions on what you can bring with you on a cargo ship?

Yes, cargo ships have restrictions on what passengers can bring with them. This can include restrictions on the number of bags, the size of bags, and the type of items that are allowed on board. Before your trip, make sure to research the restrictions for the specific cargo ship you’ll be traveling on.

About the author

I worked as an officer in the deck department on various types of vessels, including oil and chemical tankers, LPG carriers, and even reefer and TSHD in the early years. Currently employed as Marine Surveyor carrying cargo, draft, bunker, and warranty survey.

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Travelling by Cargo Ship

Article for mature and senior travellers on who to travel using the network of cargo ships to reach your destination.

2 Feb 21 · 6 mins read

For people who don’t want to travel by air–either due to phobia, budget concerns, specific travel needs, or environmental mindfulness–travelling by sea on a ship is a viable option. Reducing carbon footprint is also a top of mind concern for many travellers due to the climate emergency . According to Emine Saner on The Guardian, flying contributes 2% to global carbon emissions, and climate and environmental activists are looking at other modes of transportation, such as travelling by train or ferry, noting the hypocrisy in calling for personal responsibility regarding the environment only to jump on a plane or a private jet. The New York Times reports that a single passenger’s share of emissions on a US cross-country flight (New York to Los Angeles) can melt 32 square feet (roughly 3 square metres) of Arctic sea ice. As we’ve written before , there has been a growing “ no-fly movement ” made up of people who are aiming to reduce the number of flights they take, or to shun air travel altogether.

While some travel by cruise ship for leisure and luxury, many travellers are discovering an equally carbon-saving but cheaper way of maritime travel: travelling by cargo ship. In this article, we will look closer at this unique travel experience, and how this kind of cruise travel can be a boon for the environment.

Becoming a Passenger on a Cargo Ship

Do cargo ships even carry passengers? You’d be surprised. Cargo shipping is a globalised industry , responsible for 90% of transportation of goods worldwide. Each massive ship– some bigger than an aircraft carrier –carry cargo, goods, and materials for hundreds of businesses from around the world and stop at several ports in different countries. These vessels carry anything from garments to motor vehicles , and keep them in thousands of the stacked multi-coloured freight containers we are familiar with.

Tucked in between these containers are a handful of cabins for the crew, but some cargo ships host a handful of passengers. According to Will Vibert, writing for the Guardian , shipping companies sell space through travel agents, and since travelling by cargo ship is still a niche mode of travel, “ships rarely have room for more than a dozen passengers”. Travel agencies that offer this service stress the importance of booking early, as early as six months in advance even , as some ships may have as few as two cabins available for passengers.

Flexibility Is Key

Passengers are also enjoined to be near the destination of embarkation a few days before the date of departure. According to Vibert, this flexibility is important, as his own ship ended up leaving three days earlier than expected; if he had not been in the area, he would have missed his ship. On the other hand, Kajsa Fernström Nåtby, talking to Wired , said she had to stay in New York City for a few more days as her first voyage was cancelled. The port of call may also change, depending on the cargo the ship is carrying.

Passengers up to 80 years of age may travel, but check first

The ticket price include accommodation and all meals, as well as the port fees, and is about half the price of a cruise ship . Passengers up to 80 years of age may go on a cargo ship cruise, but do check with the travel agent first, as well as your healthcare provider. Travel insurance is a must, and some immunisations (such as yellow fever injection) may also be required. Passengers must also have a valid passport with at least six (6) months validity.

Cargo Ship Amenities

As you will be travelling on a working ship, during cargo ship travel you will be engaging with the ship’s captain and crew. A passenger cabin on a cargo ship may not have the same luxurious amenities as in the one you’ll find on a cruise ship, but the utilitarian space is comfortable and spacious enough, with a private toilet and shower, a desk, and a view of the ocean .

However, if you do want those hotel-like amenities, some cargo ships, such as France-based CMA CGM Amerigo Vespucci, have a library and a gym, and serves gourmet meals. A traveller, Thor Pedersen, also reports being once offered the “owners cabin”, which included a huge living room . Pedersen has visited 122 countries by cargo ship from 2013 to 2016.

Spending Time on A Cargo Ship

While you can zip from Australia to the other side of the world in a matter of hours on a plane, travelling by cargo ship is much, much slower. Travelling to Sydney to the West Coast of the United States (Oakland, California) will take 25 days , for example. What do you do with all that time? Unlike a regular cruise, your trip on a cargo ship will not include planned entertainment, such as stage shows or live music. On the plus side, you also do not need to deal with a huge crowd.

Many people who decide to go on a cargo cruise desire this slow and quiet way of travelling, allowing them plenty of time to think, read, write, listen to music, or enjoy other hobbies that do not require internet connection. The cargo ship will likely only have a satellite phone and no internet access, and if it does have internet access, it will be limited and only available on a shared computer.

As a passenger in desperate need for a digital detox puts it , “My screensaver was now the restless Pacific.” Passengers play chess or card games with the crew, walk on the deck for some ocean air, complete jigsaw puzzles, watch DVDs, or watch the sunset.

The journey also offers valuable insight into the life of a cargo ship crew member. It goes without saying that the crew is there to work and not entertain, but they will be welcoming, and you can enjoy conversations with them while you take your meals together. You may also disembark with the crew during port calls or shore excursions. The stop at each port can be 12 hours or longer, and you can use this time to buy the supplies you need ashore . (Note that some ships do not allow alcohol on board.)

Some captains may be amiable enough to welcome you to the bridge (the platform from where a ship is commanded) or show you the engine room and other working spaces, allowing you to be a firsthand witness to how the various instruments work and how a cargo ship is run.

Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

In terms of limiting your carbon footprint, travelling by cargo ship is a carbon-responsible way to do it. While older ships may emit more carbon dioxide for every kilometre per ton of cargo (up to 15 grams), newer ones average only three (3) grams . The International Maritime Organisation, which regulates shipping, announced in April 2018 that it aims to halve emissions from by 2050 , with Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, announcing that it aims to reduce emissions to zero by that year. Despite these promises, experts are not impressed, as neither the IMO nor Maersk have released information about how exactly these goals will be achieved.

Meanwhile, a Dutch company has launched the world’s first 100-percent electric barges, which it hopes will be a viable emissions-free option for global shipping–and for passengers keen to experience this memorable mode of travel.

Odyssey Traveller does not offer cargo ship tours, but we regularly use public transport on Odyssey tours, and our small group size makes us nimble enough not to block local access. This eases congestion caused by large tourist buses, reduces local air pollution, and makes for authentic experiences on the ground. Furthermore, our fares contribute to local services rather than tourist companies. Odyssey Traveller also has tours with sections where we travel by railway , such as Mongolia and Russia by Train, also an excellent way to reduce your carbon footprint when travelling. We also have plenty of walking tours that you can join.

For more information on our style of adventure, you can read our previously published articles:

Practising Responsible Travel

Problem of overtourism.

• Why join a small group tour?

Advice for Mature-Aged Solo Travellers

• Women’s Walking Shoes
• Selecting Shoes and Socks
• Trans-Siberian Railway Travel Advice

Odyssey Traveller has a Loyalty Program for regular travellers. Membership of the alumni starts when you choose to take your first international small group tour with us. To see the discounts and benefits of being a Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond alumni member, please see this page .

For more information on Odyssey Traveller and our educational small group tours, do explore our website. Alternatively, please call or send an email. We’d love to hear from you!

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10 Facts About Traveling By Cargo Ship You Should Know

Here are some essential facts that everyone should be aware of before sailing by cargo ship.

Being aboard a cargo ship is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for people who adore the sea, are worried about their carbon footprint, or simply prefer to cruise in a more tranquil atmosphere away from crowds for a more relaxed environment. Nowadays traveling by container ship is becoming an increasingly popular means for people to go where they want around the world. It is legal to travel by cargo ship , but it takes a long time to organize and requires additional considerations when making travel arrangements. As a result, here are some essential facts that everyone should be aware of before sailing by cargo ship.

10 Cargo Ships Usually Take A Maximum of 12 Passengers Aboard

Although cargo ships can accommodate a maximum of 12 passengers , most vessels only have space for 4 to 6 passengers. From solo travelers to entire families, some cargo ships have passengers from all walks of life on their flights. Suppose passengers have wanderlust and want to experience travel old-fashioned. In that case, this could be precisely what they are searching for, as some of the common thread in these stories is a passion for the sea, excitement for the unknown, the potential of visiting many ports, and the calmness one can experience.

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9 The Departure Can Be Delayed Or Earlier

As these are cargo ships, there are cases that there will be some delays or even early departure. Some of the reasons cargo ships are experiencing delays are weather conditions, technical faults in ports, technical malfunction of the vessel, navigational hazards, vessel stability problems, and many more. However, there are also cases where they will depart much earlier than the said time and date due to several reasons such as perfect flow of schedules, there are no sea traffics, and many more. So, it is recommended that passengers wait for their cargo ships much earlier or contact their port agents to know the status of their cargo ships.

8 There Aren’t Many Free Cabins On A Ship So, It Is Recommended To Book A Trip 6 Months Before Departure

The most popular itineraries in a cargo ship are usually fully booked months in advance. While it is true that nobody sails on a cargo ship, the fact that there are only a few cabins available onboard each vessel means that passengers are out on their desired route if they are not quick. So, in order to avoid unpleasant surprises, most travel agents recommend that passengers should book at least six months ahead of time so there will be less hassle and they can pick a cabin they want.

7 There Is An Age Limit When Traveling By Cargo Ships

There are no standard ages for cargo ships, so one should research and plan accordingly. However, the lowest and upper age restrictions on German ships are 14 and 80, respectively, while on French ships, the lower and maximum age limitations are 16 and 77. In the case of some coastal traders, such as mail and supply ships, some exceptions can be given if there is a large group of people and a doctor onboard. So it is recommended for passengers to inquire first with their travel agents.

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6 Traveling By Cargo Ship Is Slow

Due to the rates, carrying freight by water is a more cost-effective choice than shipping by land. When a ship is not at sea, one approach employed by shipping companies to keep rates down is to conserve fuel, and they can do that by steaming at the vessel's most economical speed when the ship is docked. Aside from that, "slow travel" is a vacation experience unlike any other, providing travelers with an unexpectedly pleasant and up-to-date vacation experience compared to standard travel. This more leisurely means of transportation offers an entirely new dimension when it comes to foreign travel.

5 People Can Travel Anywhere In The World By Cargo Ship

By cargo ship, you can travel practically anywhere in the world. Because of the enormous magnitude of the global shipping sector, most major ports get a high number of ships daily. Shipping companies will also allow you to book a specific section of their trip and one-way and round-trip voyages. Just remember to be adaptable when it comes to schedules. Departure dates and call places are frequently changed depending on the cargo being transported.

4 Book A Spot On Agencies That Specialize In Freighter Travel

Travel brokers do not typically book freighter voyages as passengers themselves will need to make their reservations through an agent who specializes in freighter cruises or directly through the ship's agent or manager in order to take advantage of this offer. Passengers also need to keep in mind that there may be voyages accessible that the travel agent is not advertising on the Internet or other publications, so they should directly contact the agent if they want a specific cruise.

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3 Passengers Should Not Be Worried About Their Meals

Three meals are served on the ship every day, so passengers will not worry about their food while on slow travel. Food and drink on a freighter are nearly typically included in the freighter passage fare, so it is recommended that the passengers not plan on bringing any food with them as the ship may prohibit them from getting any food onboard. Even though nutrition and drink on a cruise ship are typically expensive, eating is a main aboard activity, and some cargo ships feature outstanding cuisine.

2 There Is No Internet Here

On the cargo ship, connections to the telephone, fax machine, and e-mail are available on cargo ships, but there is no Internet. As they are satellite connections, which are routed through the Captain's office, the rates are costly, reaching as high as $5 per minute. Short emails without attachments are, on the other hand, completely free. Upon arrival on the ship, passengers can email their families, informing them of their whereabouts and how to contact them using the ship's address.

1 Passengers Can Have A Chance To Have Shore Visits

Although the Captain, port agents, and the ship's officers may be able to provide some guidance regarding shore excursions, it is important not to emphasize what they have to say in this regard. For a successful cruise, it is recommended that passengers plan ahead of time and be well-informed about their ports of call and the things they aim to see while on their voyage. They should also keep in mind that cargo ships will not wait for any passengers, so if they try to shore visit, they should make sure that they will be back on the ship on time before it leaves.

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How far can a cargo ship travel in a day in atlantic cargo travel

How far can a cargo ship travel in a day in atlantic cargo travel. Cargo ships travel at various speeds, many around 20 knots (or 23mph). Multiply by 24 and you get 480 nautical miles, or 550 miles. Many could travel at 25 knots, but don’t because it uses more fuel (660 nautical miles/day or 760 miles/day) about How far can a cargo ship travel in a day. Some travel as slow as 12 knots in order to save fuel. They would only cover about 288 nautical miles per day (336 miles) for cargo ship travel in a day. The type of cargo they carry also influences how fast they go. A combination of the recession and growing awareness in the shipping industry about climate change emissions encouraged many ship owners to adopt “slow steaming” to save fuel two years ago. This lowered speeds from the standard 25 knots to 20 knots in ship travel in a day, but many major companies have now taken this a stage further by adopting “super-slow steaming” about atlantic cargo travel at speeds of 12 knots (about 14mph). See More Fuel consumption by a containership is mostly a function of ship size and cruising speed, which follows an exponential function above 14 knots to check How far can a cargo ship travel in a day in atlantic cargo travel. For instance, while a containership of around 8,000 TEU would consume about 225 tons of bunker fuel per day at 24 knots. At 21 knots, this consumption drops to about 150 tons per day, a 33% decline. While shipping lines would prefer consuming the least amount of fuel by adopting lower speeds, this advantage must be mitigated with longer shipping times as well as assigning more ships on a pendulum service to maintain the same port call frequency. The main ship speed classes are in How far can a cargo ship travel in a day:

Normal (20-25 knots; 37.0 – 46.3 km/hr). Represents the optimal cruising speed a containership and its engine have been designed to travel at in atlantic cargo travel . It also reflects the hydrodynamic limits of the hull to perform within acceptable fuel consumption levels. Most containerships are designed to travel at speeds around 24 knots. Slow steaming (18-20 knots; 33.3 – 37.0 km/hr) for ship travel in a day. Running ship engines below capacity to save fuel consumption but at the expense of an additional travel time, particularly over long distances (compounding effect). This is likely to become the dominant operational speed as more than 50% of the global container shipping capacity operated under such conditions as of 2011. See More . Travel times between the US and China, or between Australia and Europe, are now comparable to those of the great age of sail in the 19th century for cargo ship travel in a day. American clippers reached 14 to 17 knots in the 1850s, with the fastest recording speeds of 22 knots or more. Maersk spokesman Bo Cerup-Simonsen said: “The cost benefits are clear. When speed is reduced by 20%, fuel consumption is reduced by 40% per nautical mile. Slow steaming is here to stay. Its introduction has been the most important factor in reducing our CO2 emissions in recent years, and we have not yet realised the full potential. Our goal is to reducing CO2 emissions by 25%.”

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Frequently asked questions

If you've never been on a cargo ship, or even if you are an experienced traveller, there may be one or more questions you want answers to. We have compiled a set of Frequently Asked Questions to help answer any queries you may have. Please contact us if you can't find the answer to your question on our website (updated Spring 2024).

Is the Covid pandemic still affecting cargo ship travel?

Regrettably very few long haul international voyages are possible.

I can't find the route I'm looking for

As routes and ships are changing all the time it's impossible list all of them on the website; we are only showing those that it is possible to book.

When considering cargo ship travel it is essential to understand that schedules published are for guidance only. For many operational reasons schedules change and flexibility is paramount. Any associated travel arrangements should be booked on a flexible basis only. No liability is accepted by us or the shipping companies for schedule changes or delays; this is the nature of cargo ship operations.

We advise against cargo ship travel if you have fixed date commitments to meet and we strongly recommend purchase of cancellation insurance in the event you are unable to travel on a delayed or changed voyage.

Are there age restrictions?

Age restrictions apply to most services; generally lower age limit is over 16 years and upper 78 years (to 79th birthday). mv St Helena has no upper age limit. Rules vary by shipping company. Cruise ship voyages are more flexible.

Can I work on board for a discounted fare?

It is not possible to work your passage under any circumstances; as you would expect crew members are trained to a very high standard to ensure the safety of the vessel, cargo and passengers.

Fares quoted are for the only cabins available for passenger use; there are no 'cheap' cabins or last minute bargains (it's not possible to bring your own food for a reduced fare!).

Can I take my pet?

It is not possible to take accompanied pets on any cargo ships under any circumstances however well behaved and lovely!

How long in advance should I book?

The further you are able to plan ahead the better your chances of securing a berth. When enquiring you need to have in mind your earliest and latest departure dates to give us the best chance of finding a suitable ship.

What is my luggage allowance?

Most allow 20-100kg per person depending on the specific line; personal luggage is to be carried aboard and stored by you in your cabin. Commercial/household goods are not permitted under any circumstances and must be sent as freight.

Medical and mobility requirements?

You must be generally fit and able to climb the ship's gangway and internal stairs unaided. Wheelchairs are not permitted, and regrettably there are no adapted cabins on cargo vessels for disabled use.

If you have been denied air travel, you are very unlikely to meet fitness requirements for sea travel and it will not be possible.

Can you tell me about days ashore

Shore leave is granted at the discretion of the Captain, where safe and operationally practical to do so around cargo operations, and not guaranteed nor contractual; you should consider this aspect carefully before booking.

Are there other passengers aboard the ship? What are they like?   

Passengers have a varied background.  A large proportion are mature travellers with around half of them being single but this type of travel is also popular with younger people seeking an alternative way to travel. The most common factor our passengers share is their love for the sea.

What sort of facilities do the ships have?

Being designed for a specific purpose; the ships do not have the same facilities as cruise ships.  But then, that is the whole purpose of going on a cargo vessel. Cabins on cargo ships are comfortable spacious suites for 1-2 people. Passengers share the officers facilities (lounge and dining areas). Some ships may also have bar, swimming pool, gym and lift.  

What food is available on board?  

Food standards are generally good on cargo vessels, but not restaurant or cruise ship standard. Expect three freshly cooked meals a day (included in the ticket price) offering a well balanced and healthy diet. In between meals passengers have access to the pantry for snacks. Whilst specific dietary requirements cannot be met, with international crews most needs can be catered for in discussion with the cook.

Alcohol Prohibited

As a place of work alcohol is generally not available, nor may it be taken on board for private consumption. Cruise ship voyages have full bar facilities.

Fare guidance

Across most operators the fares average around €150 Euros per person per day (en suite cabins and full board meals). All agents work from the same shipping company tariffs so 'shopping around' for deals is of no benefit, delays responses and causes confusion. Please do not ask us to start an enquiry if you are already in contact with another agent.

We accept payment in USD, Euro & GBP, Euro being the invoice currency. Prevailing exchange rates will be applied to deposit and balance payments as/when they fall due.

Does the ship have WiFi?

Many ships do now have access to internet and email. Where available this is likely to be charged for, subject to ships business taking priority. Where no internet is available there will be a facility for you to send/receive emails or telephone via satellite. Access is not guaranteed and ship business will always take priority.

Travelling with children

As a general guide passengers under 18 years old are not allowed to travel owing to safety considerations and the workplace envorinment.

Conditions of Carriage

Contractual conditions of carriage are set and entirely at the discretion of individual shipowners and are non-negotiable. Conditional bookings cannot be accepted under any circumstances.

Freight 

We are unable to offer a freight booking service.

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How Long Can a Ship Sail Without Docking at any Port?

Ships offer a traveling and cargo experience unique to their own, but their extensive journey times have sparked much discussion on the limits of these massive vessels.

How far can they travel at sea without stopping at any port? For example, what kind of safety considerations should companies keep in mind when planning extended trips? What technologies are available to extend the sailing distance for shorter excursions and long-term ventures?

Ships offer an exciting way to travel, explore and move containers to new places, with long distances sailing at sea providing a sense of freedom. But just how far a ship can sail without stopping is something that's often wondered by companies in the industry, captains who are charged with the safety of passengers and voyageurs ready to set off on their next holiday.

This blog post will dive into the research on how long a ship can sail without docking, exploring its practical limitations and how large maritime entities use technological solutions to enhance voyage duration.

Vessels at Seas

In general, vessels can only stay at sea for about twelve days before having to refuel. Despite this, most vessels refuel every few days when calling at different ports. Just because a vessel can theoretically stay at sea for 12 days does not mean that they need to do so and put itself at risk.

The longest that modern vessels usually sail without docking is between six and nine days at the most, but even then calls are made as far as possible to nearby islands or ports for refueling.

According to Frightwaves ,

One of the largest container ships to call on the U.S., the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin,  carries approximately 4.5 million gallons of fuel oil . Ship fuel capacity is generally converted to volumetric measurement. The equivalent on the Ben Franklin would be close to 16,000 cubic meters.

Many container ships calling in the U.S. are considered post-Panamax or New Panamax, so called because they are larger and can pass through the Panama Canal's newer and larger locks. These vessels are typically between 8,000 and 14,000 TEUs. Vessels of this size can carry between 2.5 and 3.5 million gallons of fuel.

All of this gives us an idea of how much fuel these ships can handle in order to keep running; sailing with the challenge of running out of fuel or with very little fuel is not a good idea for anyone involved.

When vessels longer than seven days, there are often challenges with storing enough food and drink to last the entire vessels; crew corridors are packed with dry goods and other foods that don't require refrigeration.

What impacts the fuel consumption of a vessel?

Size of the ship : The size of vessel varies, as some have a capacity for 50 passengers and others for more than 5,000. Larger ships consume more fuel. However, larger vessel have the capacity to store more fuel, which does not mean that larger ships cannot stay at sea as long as smaller ones.

Cruising speed: Vessels can burn over a thousand gallons of fuel every hour of sailing. The faster a vessel sails, the more fuel it has to use to do so. If a vessel sails fast to avoid a storm or reach its destination in a short time, it will consume more fuel than if it sails slowly.

Age of the ship: Newer ships consume less fuel compared to older ships. There are many vessels from the last century that are still in operation and consume much more fuel than newer ships.

Ultimately, vessels and ships of all sizes must be mindful of how much fuel they are carrying aboard and how long they plan to be at sea. 

Most modern vessels liners will remain at sea for six to nine days before making a refueling call, although there is potential for them to remove as many as twelve days. 

While the fact that 4.5 million gallons of fuel oil can take a CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin across the ocean is impressive, safety must always remain the top priority for those at sea. 

That said, working with global, reputable companies such as Agemarin, who offer comprehensive and up-to-date news about maritime operations, can help foster better knowledge about fueling capabilities and more efficient ocean navigation over vast distances. To stay informed on all things related to marine navigation and safety, make sure to follow Agemarin.

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How many gallons of fuel does a container ship carry?

The amount of fuel carried on a container ship varies based on the engine capacity and size of the ship, which themselves are a function of the particular trading route the ship operates in and the optimal speed of the ship’s engine.

One of the largest container ships to call on the U.S., the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, carries approximately 4.5 million gallons of fuel oil. Ship fuel capacity is generally converted to volumetric measurement. The equivalent on the Ben Franklin would be close to 16,000 cubic meters.

The CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin is considered an ultra-large container ship, as it can carry the equivalent of 18,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in containers. Ultra-large container ships are more frequently used to bring goods from Asia to Europe.

Container ships that can go through the old Panama Canal locks are called Panamax ships and can generally hold up to 5,000 TEUs. Those vessels typically hold between 1.5 million and 2 million gallons of fuel.

Many container ships that call on the U.S. now are considered post-Panamax or New Panamax, named so because they are larger and can go through the newer, larger locks on the Panama Canal. Those ships are generally in the 8,000- to 14,000-TEU range. Ships in that size range can carry between 2.5 million and 3.5 million gallons of fuel.

The amount of fuel actually be used on a sailing depends primarily on the ship’s speed. Most ship engines have been designed for top speeds ranging between 20 and 25 knots per hour, which is between 23 and 28 miles per hour. A Panamax container ship can consume 63,000 gallons of marine fuel per day at that speed.

Fuel use drops sharply as speeds decrease. A container ship can decrease fuel use close to one-third if it drops its speed 10%.

Since the 2008-2009 recession, major carriers have reduced ship speeds to 19 mph through slow steaming. Slow steaming decreases the amount of fuel consumption on each voyage. But the trade-off is that carriers need to increase the number or size of ships on a particular route to maintain schedules.

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FreightWaves Staff

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11 Around-The-World Cruises For An Epic Getaway

"Sailing around the world" sounds so romantic, doesn't it? You're sailing to remote islands with like-minded people while chasing sunsets on a distant horizon. Sure, you can just board a plane to, say, New Zealand, but there's something so pure and patient about maritime journeys. Cruises are like floating resorts, which ease their way over the waves. It's the definition of "slow travel." 

Amazingly, in the modern world of jet-setting travel, round-the-world cruises do exist. Voyagers visit dozens of ports over the course of their odyssey, each with its own landscape, climate, and personality. There are lots of ways travelers can experience "the trip of a lifetime," but this kind of circumnavigation outmatches just about all of them -- and in style. However, there are a few things to consider before investigating such cruises. First, what does it actually mean to sail "around the world?"

Many companies use this phrase — and sail thousands of nautical miles — but only around a single ocean or hemisphere. Even when ships do sail a distance equivalent to the equator (or more), they rarely return to their precise port of origin. Also, these epic  cruise vacations can be pricey ; the kind of dream that merits cashing in a 401K, and the time commitment is also substantial, meaning months on the water. But for diehard cruisers, crisscrossing the planet could easily be worth the time and money, and if this sounds like you, these 11 cruise lines are scheduled to sail around the world.

Read more: The Prettiest Waters Around The World

Viking: World Cruise

For 138 days, passengers frog-hop through the Caribbean, pass through the Panama Canal, make their way to the islands of Polynesia, and skirt Australia, Asia, and Europe before finally dropping their anchor in London. On Viking's World Cruise, you can step ashore in 28 different nations and pick from 57 guided tours. Viking has been a prolific, respected cruise line since its founding in 1997, and this three-quarter circumnavigation sets sail in December 2024, so there's still time to book.

Ships are equipped with spas, luxury dining options, and cabin beds that can be separated or combined, among many other touches. Long before stepping aboard, the Viking website has a virtual 360-degree tour, acquainting future travelers with the ship's staterooms. Viking has thoughtfully put together a reading list to help travelers get a deeper understanding of the countries they will visit, which is especially helpful in little-understood destinations like Moorea and Indonesia. The ship also has a sizable library onboard for further research. This, plus its sophisticated tours and dining options that reflect the culture of each port, may explain Viking's moniker, "the thinking person's cruise." Quality does come at a price, with full passage starting at $59,995.

Ambassador: Grand Round The World Cruise

The Ambiance sets off from London, crosses the Atlantic, passes through Panama, and hits Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America before pinging back to the United Kingdom. Not only do you cross all the major oceans, but you actually cross the Atlantic three times. Most of these destinations are warm-weather ports, including Sydney at the height of summer. Sunscreen and wide-brimmed hats are recommended on this largely equatorial route.

Ambassador is new to the cruise scene, having been established in the United Kingdom in 2021, and Ambiance is its flagship vessel. Passengers will spend their 120-night voyage in extreme comfort, traveling to 24 countries and 34 ports of call, with top-notch dining, live entertainment, and about 35,000 nautical miles in between. If you can live without a porthole, opting for an  inside cabin on the cruise , then passage starts at the budget-friendly price of $8,500 per person, making this Ambassador cruise one of the most economical on this list. You can also add on drink packages and arrange tours in advance or onboard through an agent or the Ambassador app. You can also explore the ship before you travel, thanks to a 360-degree virtual tour. The 2024 voyage sets sail on June 6.

Regent: World Cruise

The 2026 Regent World Cruise starts in Miami and ends in Miami, which makes it convenient to coordinate, especially if you're already based in the United States. Regent Seven Seas Cruises was founded in 1992 and is a respected brand in the industry.

The ship, the Seven Seas Mariner, also lives up to its name with a formidable 154-night itinerary: the Panama Canal, points along Central America, a dozen Pacific islands, Australia, South Asia, East Africa, and two Atlantic islands before returning to Florida. The Mariner arrives in many well-trod ports like Cape Town and Acapulco, but the route also includes locations that most travelers would have trouble pinpointing on a map: Lautoka, Abidjan, and Male are all names cruisers will become familiar with. To really explore these places, Regent organizes a whopping 431 free shore excursions across six continents, 77 ports, and 47 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Sailing nearly 40,000 nautical miles with world-class spas, dining, and entertainment aboard doesn't come cheap. While you'll need to contact Regent to request specific prices, passengers can expect to pay nearly $100,000 for passage. Regent's World Cruise is considered a luxury-level experience with first-class airfare, gratuities, and 24-hour room service included. If this is your tax bracket, just wait until you see the suites.

Royal Caribbean: Ultimate World Cruise

Royal Caribbean has been taking tourists to far-flung destinations since the late 1960s, and it's now one of the most recognizable cruise companies in the world, so naturally Royal Caribbean would host a round-the-world voyage. But even for seasoned travelers, the Ultimate World Cruise is pretty, well, ultimate. Royal Caribbean's world cruise lasts 274 nights and arrives in no fewer than 60 countries. In other words, you'll spend nine months at sea and personally visit more than a quarter of the sovereign nations on Earth. The saga starts and ends in Miami, where the Royal Caribbean is headquartered, which should make arrangements easy.

The biggest bragging right of all: This cruise touches on every single continent, including Elephant Island and Paradise Bay in Antarctica. You'll find yourself in both Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, plus ports you've never even heard of. That said, unless your soul is fueled by pure wanderlust, this itinerary may sound like a lot of cruising, which may explain why Royal Caribbean has divided the journey into four segments. Cruisers don't have to commit to the entire itinerary; they can easily pick from the quarter that most interests them. 

By the time you read this, a segment may be the only option left, as the next Ultimate World Cruise departs in December of 2023. The segments are significantly more affordable as well. An interior stateroom for the full cruise costs at least $60,000 per person, while a segment starts at $12,500.

Cunard: Full World Voyage

When the Queen Mary 2 departs from New York City on January 3, 2024, it won't return to this same harbor for 123 nights. The itinerary isn't exactly "around the world," but rather a crossing of the Eastern Hemisphere — twice. Passengers traverse the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, then ease their way down the eastern coast of Africa before beelining for Australia. The ship boomerangs back, with many stops in Asia, a shortcut through the Suez Canal, and a tour of the Mediterranean before heading back to the U.S.

The voyage comes at the heels of Cunard's 100th anniversary, making it the second-oldest company on the list. The Queen Mary 2 has been Cunard's flagship vessel since 2004, and the company has mastered hospitality over the past century, with exceptional dining, luxury suites, and Broadway-quality performances by the Royal Court Theatre. Cunard also takes pride in its children's facilities, encouraging families to travel together, as well as the great English tradition of afternoon tea. Most of the budget cabins on the Queen Mary 2 were already booked at the time of this writing, but cabins with balconies are still available, starting at the not-ludicrous price of $16,899 per person. 

Oceania: Around The World In 180 Days

When Junes Verne wrote his novel "Around the World in Eighty Days," his Victorian goal was to travel as quickly as possible. Oceania is now advertising the opposite: This journey takes passengers the long way from Los Angeles to New York City, across the Pacific, around Australia, along the coasts of East Asia, and then up through the Middle East, Mediterranean, Northern Europe, and even Greenland. The itinerary doesn't spend much time in the "global south," so you'll have to visit Africa and South America another time.

The Miami-based Oceania was founded in 2002 and specializes in long-haul cruises, so they know their system well. This cruise may be especially appealing to foodies. The company takes particular pride in its onboard meals as well as in-country Culinary Discovery Tours. Passengers can also take advantage of The Aquamar Spa & Vitality Center, which can orchestrate a special dietary regimen.

Oceania exudes "small-ship luxury" and caps its total number of passengers at 1,250. Everything about the ship is more intimate than found on its larger cousins, from the live entertainment to the duty-free boutiques. If you like a small-town feel, 180 days should be just enough time to meet all your shipmates. If you can't summon the time or (at least) $47,599 by January 2024, the next ship departs in January 2025.

Princess: 111-Day World Cruise

This Princess cruise is another true circumnavigation, starting in Los Angeles and bearing west until the ship arrives back at its original dock. The 111-day cruise starts on January 18, 2024, and includes all three major oceans, both the Suez and Panama Canals, plus 47 ports along the way. The itinerary is light on Asian and African ports and skips South America altogether, but you can still enjoy visits to Australia, the Middle East, and numerous destinations around Europe.

Princess is a hallowed name in the cruise industry. Not only have its ships been sailing the world since the 1960s, but Princess is still one of the most profitable cruise companies in the world. Passengers can expect onboard enrichment programs, award-winning live performances, and rejuvenating treatments at the Lotus Spa. Each port will also bring its own offerings of special excursions, from river rafting to art tours. 

With its dependable quality of service and nearly four-month itinerary, it's remarkable that base bookings start at only $15,498. Better yet, if you want to circle the globe with the whole family, this Princess itinerary is a family-friendly cruise and offers youth programming, which is not always the case. If you miss this one, no worries. Three more, of varying lengths, are slated for January 2025.

Holland America Line: Grand World Voyage

Fort Lauderdale is the beginning and end point for the Zuiderdam, which spends 128 days making a complete circle around the globe. Holland America's Grand World Voyage is true to its name. Passengers travel across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, making port on five continents. Most of its destinations are clustered around Asia and the Mediterranean, and it skips over Australia. But the Voyage is a rare opportunity to sail up the Amazon River, with visits to inland Brazilian cities most travelers would never think to visit.

Holland America began as a shipping and passenger line in the mid-19th Century, and its history of cruising is nearly as old as the concept. The flagship Zuiderdam is a luxury vessel with a swimming pool and sizable theater. It also boasts several diverse dining areas, including the Pinnacle Grill steakhouse, the Italian-themed Canaletto, and the à la carte Lido Market. There's Billboard Onboard, a special room for trivia nights and karaoke, as well as World Stage, a presentation space with a wraparound LED screen. Bookings start at the more expensive rate of $22,499 for an inside cabin, and the 2024 voyage will set sail on January 3, 2024, but you can expect additional Grand World Voyages to be slated in the coming years.

Azamara: World Voyage

Formerly part of the Royal Caribbean fleet, Azamara is now an independent company taking its own journeys. The 2025 World Voyage begins in San Diego and sails westward, across the Pacific, to Australia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, before passengers disembark in Barcelona. The World Voyage doesn't quite girdle the globe, stopping just short of the Atlantic Ocean, and the only stop in Africa is Giza. But this 155-night expedition should satisfy almost any traveler, especially with its 40 countries and 22 overnights.

Unlike many world cruises, Azamara has divided its full itinerary into segments with clear geographic themes, such as "South Pacific Jewels" and "Mediterranean Icons." These titles can help turn experiences into coherent narratives. For example, "Ancient Pathways" draws a historic and economic line between Mumbai and Athens, along with all ports in between. These themes are coupled with thoughtful excursions, which are often scheduled around local holidays and festivals. The World Voyage for 2024 appears to be sold out, but the 2025 edition sets sail on January 5. Passage starts at a princely $39,999.

Freighter Cruises

Some of us want to keep it simple. No need for late-night show-stoppers, cocktail parties with hundreds of strangers, or daring bets at the roulette wheel. "Freighter cruises" have gone by many names over the years, such as "banana boats" and "cargo cruises," but passengers have hitched rides on commercial ships since the dawn of seafaring. These accommodations come in many forms, and you do have to share your vessel with stacks of massive shipping containers; still, you can expect a comfortable cabin and regular meals, along with friendly and respectful crewmembers from around the world. For travelers with a Jack London streak, the freighter cruise feels raw and adventurous.

The Freighter Travel Club was founded in 1958, and companies like Maris Freighter Cruises and Voyage en Cargo have booked passengers on commercial vessels for years. Maris has arranged round-the-world itineraries in the past, and multi-week journeys are common, as enormous loads are floated from one nation to the next. The pandemic took its toll on this niche industry, and most of these journeys do not precisely travel around the world. But when they're in operation, freighter cruises usually cost a little over $100 per day, and savvy travelers have flexibility in their bookings.

Miray Cruises: Life At Sea

Sure, cruising is fun, but what if you want to turn your ship into a semi-permanent address? Life at Sea Cruises promises three years of luxury seafaring, with stops in 140 countries across all seven continents. By the time you're done with these 382 ports, you'll have more photos to sort through and stories to share than most people will amass in a lifetime.

That sounds life-changing, but we'll have to see whether it's too good to be true. Life at Sea is a brand-new enterprise from Miray Cruises, and the maiden voyage has been fraught with delays. However, at the time of this writing, Life at Sea should get underway by the end of 2023, and most full-voyage passengers should already be sailing by 2024. If all goes well, there are four scheduled embarkation options for travelers who want to hop aboard later on, and more will likely be scheduled.

One of the problems has been the ship itself. For a while, the purchase of the ship was in limbo, pushing back the original sail date. However, the MV Lara now seems ready to sail. The medium-sized vessel has space for 1,266 passengers, with a range of cozy cabins, a wellness center, and a pool deck, among many other amenities. Travelers committed to living at sea for three years should get a lot out of their floating home. Life at Sea is a dreamy concept, so let's hope for calm waters once it finally sets sail. 

Read the original article on Explore .

Meet the 28-year-old Singaporean chief officer of a Celebrity Cruises ship who’s sailed around the Caribbean

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Sahira Sha’ri lives the literal life on deck. The 28-year-old Singaporean spends months onboard Celebrity Beyond, the luxury cruise ship where she is the chief officer who manages the ship’s operations and safety while meeting passengers from all over the world.

Singaporean Sahira Sha’ri is a chief officer of Celebrity Beyond, a luxury cruise ship. (Photo: Sahira Sha’ri)

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Izza Haziqah Abdul Rahman

She wakes up to breathtaking sunrises over the vast ocean and enjoys meals that rival the best fine-dining restaurants. She’s sailed to dozens of countries and taken part in rescue operations at sea. She leads a team of dedicated sailors, ensuring that a premiere cruise ship remains neat and efficient for its passengers. 

Meet Sahira Sha’ri, the Singaporean chief officer of Celebrity Beyond, a luxury cruise ship launched in March 2021 that welcomed its first guests in April 2022. The ship, owned by Celebrity Cruises, has 17 decks and capacity for nearly 4,000 passengers and 1,400 crew members.

At the helm is Captain Kate McCue, an American social media sensation with over 950,000 Instagram followers and 3 million TikTok fans , who shares her adventures from the captain’s seat.

As one of the two chief officers of Celebrity Beyond, Sahira is an integral part of the bridge team, responsible for navigation, communication and safety.  

Sahira oversees various operational tasks, including managing the day-to-day deck operations, conducting scheduled inspections of the ship’s tanks, galleys and other areas, and leading a team of sailors, junior officers, security staff and more to ensure a smooth and safe cruise for everyone on board.

She works 10 to 12 hours a day, with each contract lasting six to nine months. During this time, she lives onboard Celebrity Beyond, sailing from port to port on the ship’s various cruise itineraries, such as around the Bahamas and Cayman Islands in the Caribbean.

Her breaks are typically three months long, which she spends with her family in Singapore. 

A YEARNING FOR AN UNCONVENTIONAL LIFE

Before joining Celebrity Beyond in 2021, Sahira, who has a diploma in nautical studies from Singapore Polytechnic, worked on cargo and merchant ships, often the only female seafarer among dozens of men.

Since graduating in 2017, she has spent months at sea on such ships, undertaking physically demanding work and sailing to different countries around the world. 

“It’s not a life for everyone,” the 28-year-old told CNA Women. Although, for this eldest of two siblings, it's exactly what she has always wanted to do.

“Since young, I knew I wasn’t for the conventional life. 

“I just couldn’t imagine doing a deskbound job, staying put at home in Singapore. I knew I wanted to travel and have different adventures.

“I remember looking at the cruise ships tied up at Marina South Pier and thinking how impressive it’d be to be able to work on such ships.” 

Still, being away from her family for most of the year isn’t easy. She has missed out on significant events, like her younger brother’s wedding, the birth of her nephew, and many Hari Raya gatherings.

She copes by calling her parents, especially her mother, every other day, and keeping them updated about her ocean adventures. Her parents were understandably worried about their daughter’s decision to work at sea, but have since come around. 

“I love what I do, but it never gets easier to say goodbye to my parents when I leave home for work,” she admitted. “I’m always thankful for their support and prayers.” 

GETTING A JOB ON CELEBRITY BEYOND

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Sahira was laid off from her position as a third officer with a shipping company, a junior role in which she assisted senior officers with their onboard responsibilities. Consequently, she had to return to Singapore. 

“It was hard to find a job because based on my experience, not many shipping companies would hire women as officers on a ship, and the pandemic made things more complicated since many people weren’t allowed to travel,” she said. 

“I applied everywhere, and though I didn’t have any experience on cruise ships, I even tried those too.” 

The layoff turned out to be a blessing in disguise when, in 2021, Celebrity Cruises, a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean, began mass hiring in preparation for their newest ship, Celebrity Beyond.

Sahira applied for a position there, as well as to regional cruise companies. She was accepted by all of them but chose to join Celebrity Beyond as its second officer. 

“It would have been safer to go for the regional or local companies where most of the employees are from Singapore or other parts of Southeast Asia,” she said. “But I felt like I wanted a broader perspective and a different culture – so Celebrity felt perfect for me.”

Sahira has been promoted twice since joining Celebrity Beyond in October 2021 – to first officer in September 2022, then to chief officer in December last year. 

As a senior officer, her work also involves helping humanitarian efforts at sea, and helicopter evacuations for medical emergencies. 

“The work might sound repetitive, but the truth is there’s always something unique every day,” she said. 

“I was part of a rescue operation where we saw abandoned boats from Cuba en route to the US, and I was also involved in helicopter evacuations in the middle of an emergency.

“Knowing that I make even just a small contribution to saving lives makes my job a lot more interesting and meaningful.”

THE BEST PART OF THE CRUISE SHIP IS THE WORK CULTURE

Sahira is grateful for the open work culture set by Captain McCue. 

“I work in a highly diverse team and so many officers are from all around the world,” she said. “It makes us more understanding and open with one another, and we don’t shy away from talking about identity and culture. 

I wanted a broader perspective and a different culture – so Celebrity felt perfect for me.

One of the great things is that most of the bridge team are women, she added, a far cry from when she was the sole female on a ship. 

“Here, there are so many of us,” she said. “It does make a difference in terms of how issues are resolved and how we address problems onboard – there’s a lot more empathy, our well-being is taken care of, and the camaraderie between us is strong.

Her being a Malay Muslim from Singapore has also helped to broaden many of her colleagues’ perceptions of the country, which many of her colleagues know little about. 

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Captain Kate McCue (@captainkatemccue)

“Captain Kate is a great leader,” Sahira said. “She is generous as much as she’s a fun personality online and offline. She keeps up with our personal lives, and she gives us a lot of opportunities to grow as staff members.”

One of Sahira’s most unforgettable moments was having her parents board Celebrity Beyond for 18 days as the ship sailed through the Mediterranean Sea. 

On Day 12 of their trip, Captain McCue invited Sahira to show her parents how she steered the ship out of port, even though she wasn’t rostered for duty that day. Her parents were notably proud and impressed.

“It’s hard to explain to my parents exactly what I do as an officer, so when they saw me steering the ship, they were so surprised and looked happy,” Sahira said. “They were so dumbfounded I could do that with such a large ship when I can’t even drive a car!”

Sahira is currently on a three-month break and will return to Celebrity Beyond in mid-June. This time, her break coincided with being home for Hari Raya in April. 

“It’s my first Hari Raya in so long so I was really glad and excited to meet my family and share stories about life on board,” she said.

“It may not be the conventional life but I wouldn’t change a life at sea for anything else.”

CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg .

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D-Day was the largest amphibious invasion in history — and likely the last. Here's why.

• D-Day on June 6, 1944 was a gargantuan feat. Is it the last invasion of its kind?
• In World War II, the best way to stop an amphibious invasion was before troops reached the beach.
• Modern weapons and surveillance systems give a defender more power to accomplish that.

D-Day is more than the largest amphibious invasion in history. Even 80 years after the battle, it still resonates as an epic of courage, endurance, and prodigious effort.

But was D-Day the last invasion of its kind? Could such immense resources be mustered again in a modern-day version of "Saving Private Ryan"-style landings?

World War II marked the zenith of wars waged between mass armies, an era that began in 1792, and modern weaponry, from guided missiles and spy satellites to nuclear bombs, has obviated large-scale amphibious invasions.

Even by the standards of WWII, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was gargantuan. Operation Overlord embraced more than 2 million personnel, 13,000 aircraft and 7,000 vessels from a dozen nations. Six infantry divisions — three American, two British and one Canadian — would hit the beach simultaneously, while three airborne divisions — two American and one British — landed in the German rear.

Some 160,000 troops splashed ashore that Tuesday morning, including around 75,000 American and 61,000 British soldiers, plus 13,000 Allied paratroopers descending from the skies. And these were only the tip of a spear across Europe and the Pacific: the US Army expanded to 11 million personnel during the war — including 2 million in the European theater alone — while the British Army grew to 3 million strong.

These forces today are only a fraction of what they were then. The entire US Army only numbers around 450,000 active-duty soldiers; for Britain, it's 76,000 and shrinking . There were 1,200 warships escorting the D-Day convoys of soldiers and equipment: today's US Navy has just 290 major warships and amphibious vessels spread around the globe, while the Royal Navy is down to 66 commissioned vessels. The Royal Canadian Air Force's 86 squadrons made it the world's fourth-largest air force in 1945, including nearly 40 squadrons that fought at Normandy: today it has just four fighter squadrons with 77 aging F/A-18 Hornet fighters.

D-Day's Allied planners were haunted by two fears: getting ashore despite German coastal defenses – and then surviving the inevitable German armored counterattack from Panzer divisions waiting behind the beaches. This meant there had to be enough transport capacity to land a large assault force and then quickly reinforce it with troops, supplies, and especially the tanks and artillery needed to even the odds in an armored fight.

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More than 3,000 landing and transport vessels were tasked with this mission. The US Navy now aims for enough amphibious capacity to land just two Marine brigades on a hostile shore. More than 1,000 American C-47s transport planes dropped three airborne divisions on D-Day. With just over 200 C-17 cargo planes to meet worldwide airlift requirements, the current US Air Force would struggle to airdrop the entire 82nd Airborne Division.

All of which points to a fundamental difference between 1944 and 2024. The major combatants 80 years ago were committed to total war, in which they mobilized their human and industrial resources to the utmost. Today's Western militaries are much smaller volunteer forces, sustained by a defense-industrial base with only a fraction of its 1940s capacity. As shown by persistent shortages of weapons and ammunition in the Russo-Ukraine War, even if enough soldiers could be drafted to mount a Normandy-sized invasion, there wouldn't be enough equipment for them.

In World War II, the best way to stop an amphibious invasion was before the first troops stepped onto the beach. If the defender's navy and air force could destroy or turn back an invasion fleet, the landing would never take place. D-Day could only happen because, after a long and bloody struggle, the German surface fleet had been decimated, the U-boats suppressed, and the Luftwaffe mauled. Its forces defending French coasts were also spread thin because of the necessity of countering an advancing Soviet force of 140 divisions on the Eastern Front.

Though it must have seemed otherwise to troops splashing ashore under heavy fire, the very fact that the invasion was happening meant the battle for the beach already tipped in favor of the Allies. They could count on the naval bombardment and bombing runs to target German strongpoints and hammer its forces massing for a counterattack.

Isolated from reinforcement and resupply by US ships and aircraft, Japanese troops on Pacific islands, by contrast, could fight to the last man and inflict heavy casualties, but their destruction or isolation was only a matter of time. German counterattacks almost drove Allied landings at Sicily, Salerno and Anzio into the sea, but aided by devastating naval gunfire, the bridgeheads held on.

Hitler placed great hopes in the Atlantic Wall , a fortified belt across 1,700 miles of coastline. The bunkers and machine gun nests did inflict some losses at Normandy, especially during the bloodbath suffered by American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach . But the Atlantic Wall was spread too thin to repel overwhelming Allied force at the landing sites.

In modern strategic parlance, stopping amphibious invasions is part of "anti-access/area denial," or A2/AD. Today's invasion planners worry that coastlines — and waters extending hundreds of miles from the beaches — are becoming no-go zones for warships and transports. Spy satellites and reconnaissance drones can discover an invasion fleet, exposing it to long-range attacks and giving the defender more time to mass troops and firepower in the likely landing zone. Coastal defense weapons include hypersonic anti-ship missiles streaking in at 10 times the speed of sound, GPS-guided cruise missiles and glide bombs, small but stealthy submarines, long-range guided artillery shells, and a variety of aerial and maritime drones. An enemy that has these can threaten the invasion armada and the landing force it launches as it chugs to the beach.

And it's not just major powers like Russia and China that have these arms: even smaller powers like Iran and North Korea could turn beaches into death traps.

There are already signs of this. In the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentine Air Force — armed with bombs and a few Exocet anti-ship missiles — sank six British warships and transports, and nearly derailed the invasion. And in the ongoing Ukraine war, despite initial fears that the Russian Navy would shell cities and land amphibious troops, the Black Sea Fleet has lost two dozen warships and amphibious vessels to anti-ship missiles and small, robotic boats packed with explosives. Russia may have a much larger navy than Ukraine, but it doesn't dare venture closer to the Ukrainian coast.

Of course, it can be argued that technology works both ways. Smart bombs can destroy coastal defenses. Helicopters can ferry troops and supplies from an amphibious fleet hundreds of miles away. Drones likes unmanned tanks and mine-clearing robots can clear beach obstacles.

Yet ultimately, what has really killed massive amphibious invasions is the poisonous mushroom cloud. Even as far back as 1945, after the US atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nations realized that a single bomb capable of destroying a city could also wipe out an amphibious fleet. The U.S. Navy tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 vividly demonstrated how a nuclear blast could smash even battleships and aircraft carriers like bathtub toys. Russia for example is armed to the teeth with tactical nukes that could devastate a massed fleet.

This doesn't mean that amphibious operations are obsolete. They are still needed on a planet that is 71 percent water, and where the ocean is often the only feasible way to transport armies. But we should honor the memory of D-Day, because we shall never see another day like it again.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn .

Watch: World War II historian rates eight WWII battle scenes in movies and television

• Main content

Israel-Gaza latest: Hamas responds to ceasefire proposal - as Netanyahu casts doubt on deal

Joe Biden announced a surprise plan with three phases: the first would be a six-week ceasefire, the second the return of remaining hostages, and the third a reconstruction plan for Gaza. We'll be bringing you all the reaction to this throughout the day.

Sunday 2 June 2024 07:16, UK

• Israel-Hamas war

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• US President Joe Biden announces new ceasefire and hostage deal proposal
• Hamas views latest proposed deal 'positively'
• Israel's conditions for ending the war have not changed, Netanyahu's office says
• Chances of ceasefire 'not that realistic', expert says  
• Egypt making 'intensive efforts' to resume negotiations - report
• Israeli opposition leader urges Netanyahu to take deal - and says he will prop up government
• Explained: What is in Biden's three-phase plan?
• Analysis: Israel seemed blindsided by Biden announcement
• Live reporting by Emily Mee

We will be focusing on our general election coverage tomorrow, but we'll be back with more live updates on the Israel-Hamas war next week. 

Models Bella and Gigi Hadid are collectively donating one million dollars (£785,000) to support relief efforts, according to their agent. 

The money will go to Heal Palestine, Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF), World Central Kitchen (WCK), and United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The sisters have frequently been vocal in their support for Gaza, and their father Mohamed Anwar Hadid is himself Palestinian. 

After Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel, Gigi, 29, offered her condolences to those affected.

"My thoughts are with all those affected by this unjustifiable tragedy, and every day that innocent lives are taken by this conflict - too many of which are children," she wrote on Instagram.

"I have deep empathy and heartbreak for the Palestinian struggle and life under occupation, it's a responsibility I hold daily."

She added: "While I have hopes and dreams for Palestinians, none of them include the harm of a Jewish person."

Bella, 27, said in May that she was "devastated at the loss of the Palestinian people and the lack of empathy coming from the government systems worldwide".

The United Nations food agency has said it is unable to feed most civilians in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. 

Only 27,000 people in Rafah are currently being reached by the World Food Programme (WFP), according to its local director Matthew Hollingworth. 

Roughly one million Palestinians are living in the area, many of them displaced from other parts of Gaza. 

"The sounds, the smells, the everyday life are horrific and apocalyptic," Mr Hollingworth told journalists. 

"People sleep to the sounds of bombing, they sleep to the sounds of drones, they sleep to the sounds of war, as now tanks roll into parts of central Rafah, which is only kilometers away. And they wake to the same sounds." 

A ceasefire proposal consisting of three phases has been outlined by Joe Biden. 

What do those phases entail, what have Israel and Hamas said about the plan and how does it compare to the last proposal?

Read more below...

The French president has backed the ceasefire proposal set out by Joe Biden last night. 

Emmanuel Macron said he supported the proposal for "a durable peace" and that the war "must end". 

France is also working with partners in the region on "peace and security for all", he said. 

A high-level official has said Egypt is undertaking "intensive efforts" to "resume negotiations" for a ceasefire and hostage deal, according to a report. 

The official, quoted by Al-Qahera TV, said this was "in light of the recent American proposition". 

Last night, Joe Biden detailed a ceasefire and hostage deal proposal that he said Israel had put to Hamas. 

However, Israeli officials have told our correspondents they were "blindsided" by the announcement. 

If it works, then this will be a smart and cunning diplomatic move.

If it doesn't then President Joe Biden will look foolish.

He knows the huge risk of once again being taken for a ride by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Few knew that he was due to make this announcement.

Read more from our US correspondent Mark Stone below...

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has said 33 of its employees have been killed in Gaza since the war began. 

Of those, it said 19 were killed "while performing their humanitarian duties". 

The organisation today buried Mohammed Jihad Abed, an employee in the disaster risk management department. 

He was killed in an Israeli attack on his home in Rafah last night. 

American, Egyptian and Israeli officials will be meeting tomorrow in Cairo to discuss the reopening of Gaza's Rafah crossing, according to a report. 

Egypt is insisting that Israel withdraw its forces from the crossing, a high-level source told Egypt's state-linked Al Qahera TV. 

Israel seized the Gaza side of the crossing last month during its offensive in the city of Rafah. 

Earlier this week, a member of Egypt's security forces was killed in a shooting incident near the Rafah crossing.

An Egyptian soldier stationed on a watchtower had reacted to seeing an armoured vehicle carrying Israeli troops cross a boundary line near the border while the soldiers pursued and killed several Palestinians, two Egyptian security sources told Reuters news agency. 

The soldier opened fire and Israeli forces fired back, killing him, the sources said, sparking an exchange of gunfire between the two sides. 

The British prime minister has praised the proposed ceasefire deal set out by Joe Biden, saying it is "welcome news". 

Rishi Sunak said he hopes Hamas "takes this opportunity to take this deal that is on the table, [and] that would ensure hostages can be released and be back with their families". 

He also expressed hopes to "flood Gaza with far more aid than has been getting in" and to "use that pause in the fighting to build a sustainable and lasting peace". 

Mr Sunak joins a growing group of world leaders expressing support for the deal, which will only put more pressure on Israel and Hamas. 

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The Mayday Call: How One Death at Sea Transformed a Fishing Fleet

The opioid epidemic has made a dangerous job even more deadly. And when there’s an overdose at sea, fishermen have to take care of one another.

Hollis Nevells aboard the Karen Nicole, a fishing vessel based in Massachusetts whose owner adopted a Narcan training program because of rising opioid overdoses in the industry. Credit... David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Supported by

By C.J. Chivers

C.J. Chivers is a staff writer for the magazine. He reported from fishing ports in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey for several months.

• June 6, 2024

The call from the Atlantic Ocean sounded over VHF radio on a midsummer afternoon. “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” the transmission began, then addressed the nearest U.S. Coast Guard command center. “Sector Delaware Bay, this is the vessel Jersey Pride. Come in.”

Listen to this article, read by James Patrick Cronin

About 40 miles east-southeast of Barnegat Light, N.J., the Jersey Pride, a 116-foot fishing vessel with a distinctive royal blue hull, was towing a harvesting dredge through clam beds 20 fathoms down when its crew found a deckhand unresponsive in a bunk. The captain suspected an overdose. After trying to revive the man, he rushed to the radio. “Yes, Coast Guard, uh, I just tried to wake a guy up and he’s got black blood in his nose,” he said, sounding short of breath on Channel 16, the international hailing and distress frequency for vessels at sea. “I got guys working on him. Come in.”

The seas were gentle, the air hot. In cramped crew quarters in the forepeak, the deckhand, Brian Murphy, was warm but not breathing in a black tee and jeans. He had no discernible pulse. Dark fluid stained his nostrils. A marine welder and father of four, Murphy, 40, had been mostly unemployed for months, spending time caring for his children while his wife worked nights. A few days earlier, while he was on a brief welding gig to repair the Jersey Pride at its dock, the captain groused about being short-handed. Murphy agreed to fill in. Now it was July 20, 2021, the third day of the first commercial fishing trip of his life. Another somber sequence in the opioid epidemic was nearing its end.

“Captain,” a Coast Guard petty officer asked, “is there CPR in progress?”

“Yes, there is,” the captain replied.

About 17 miles to the Jersey Pride’s southeast, the fishing vessel Karen Nicole was hauling back its two scallop dredges and preparing to swing aboard its catch. Through the low rumble of the 78-foot boat’s diesel engine and the high whine of its winches, the mate, Hollis Nevells, listened to the conversation crackling over a wheelhouse radio. Nevells had lost a brother-in-law and about 15 peers to fatal overdoses. When the Jersey Pride’s captain broadcast details of his imperiled deckhand — “His last name is Murphy,” he said — Nevells understood what he heard in human terms. That’s someone’s son or brother, he thought.

Nevells knew the inventory of his own vessel’s trauma kit. It contained bandages, tape, tourniquets, splints, analgesics and balms, but no Narcan, the opioid antidote. Without it, there was little to do beyond hope the Jersey Pride’s captain would announce that the other deckhands successfully revived their co-worker. Only then, Nevells knew, would the Coast Guard send a helicopter.

Murphy remained without vital signs. His pupils, the captain told the Coast Guard, had dilated to “the size of the iris.” The Jersey Pride swung its bow shoreward toward the Manasquan River, where medical examiners would meet the boat at its dock. Another commercial fisherman was gone.

Since the opioid crisis hit the United States in the late 1990s, no community has been spared. First with prescription painkillers, then with heroin after tighter prescription rules pushed people dependent on opioids to underground markets, and more recently with illicitly manufactured fentanyl and its many analogues, the epidemic has killed roughly 800,000 people by overdose since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With fatalities averaging more than 80,000 a year for three years running, it is the nation’s leading cause of accidental death.

The death toll includes victims from all walks of life, but multiple studies illuminate how fatalities cluster along occupational lines. A 2022 report by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health noted that employees in fishing, forestry, agriculture and hunting had the highest rates of all industries, closely followed by workers in construction trades. The news affirmed what was visible on these jobs. Federal data had long established that such workers — at risk from falls, equipment mishaps or drowning — were the most likely to die in workplace accidents in the United States. Now opioids stalked their ranks disproportionately, too.

In fishing fleets, the reasons are many and clear. First is the grueling nature of the job. “The fishing industry and the relationship to substance use is the story of pain, mental and physical pain, and the lack of access to support,” says J.J. Bartlett, president and founder of Fishing Partnership Support Services, a nonprofit that provides free safety training to fishing communities in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic.

The risk is also rooted in how fishery employment is organized. Crew members on fishing vessels are typically independent contractors paid a fraction of the profit (a “share,” in industry jargon) after each trip. They generally lack benefits or support common to full-time employment on land, including health insurance, paid sick time and access to human-resource departments or unions. Physical conditions factor in, too. Offshore fishing boats tend to operate ceaselessly. Captains divide crew work into long, overlapping watches that offer little sleep and require arduous labor on slick, pitching decks, sometimes in extreme weather. The work can assume an ultramarathon character. When a valuable catch is running, as squid do in summer south of Nantucket, many boats will fill holds or freezers over several days, return to port to offload, then immediately take on food, fuel and ice and head back out, a practice known as “turn and burn” that can leave crews haggard. Stress, pain and injuries are inherent in such circumstances, including common musculoskeletal injuries and, on scallop vessels, an unusual and excruciating affliction known as “the grip” — caused by constant shucking — that can make hands curl and seize up for days. No matter the suffering, deckhands are expected to keep pace. Those who can are rewarded with checks, sometimes large checks, and respect, an intangible more elusive than wealth. Those who can’t are not invited back.

Its hardships notwithstanding, the industry is a reservoir of human drive and ocean-roaming talent, providing good wages and meaningful work to the independent-minded, the rugged, the nomadic and the traditionally inclined, along with immigrants and people with criminal records or powerful allergies to the stultifying confines of office life. On the water, pedigree and background checks mean little. Reputation is all. In this way, the vessels preserve a professional culture as old as human civilization and bring to shore immense amounts of healthful food, for which everyone is paid by the pound, not by the hour.

Taken together, these circumstances pressure deckhands to work through fatigue, ailments and injuries. One means is via stimulants or painkillers, or both, making it no surprise that in the fentanyl era fishing crews suffer rates of fatal overdose up to five times that of the general population. “This is an unaddressed public-health crisis,” Bartlett says, “for workers without a safety net.”

Commercial fishing in the United States also operates in a gap in the legal framework governing other industries running vessels at sea. The federal regulations mandating drug-testing for mariners on vessels in commercial service — including ferries, tugs and cargo ships as well as research and charter boats — exempt all fishing boats except the very largest. Some companies screen anyhow. But with no legal requirement, captains and crews are generally tested only after a serious incident, like a sinking, collision or death on deck. Toxicology tests are also performed on fishermen’s corpses, when the authorities manage to recover them. “We always find out too late,” says Jason D. Neubauer, deputy chief of the Coast Guard’s Office of Investigations & Casualty Analysis. One of Neubauer’s uncles, a lumberjack, was addicted to heroin for decades. “I take this personally every time I see a mariner dying from drugs,” he says, “because I have seen the struggle.”

None of these employment factors are new. Working fishermen have always faced pain, exhaustion and incentives to work through both. (A weeklong trip aboard a scalloper, among the most remunerative fishing jobs, can pay $10,000 or more — a check no deckhand wants to miss.) Heroin, cocaine and amphetamines were common in ports a generation ago. Veteran captains say drug use was much more widespread then, before smaller catch limits and tighter regulations forced the industry to trim fleets and sometimes the size of crews. Contraction, employers say, compelled vessels to hire more selectively, reducing the presence of illicit drugs.

If use is down, potency is up. Much of the increased danger is because of fentanyl, which the Drug Enforcement Administration considers 50 times stronger than heroin. Fentanyl suppresses respiration and can kill quickly, challenging the industry’s spirit of self-reliance. When offshore, laboring between heaving seas and endless sky, fishermen cook for themselves, repair damaged equipment themselves and rely on one another for first aid. Everything depends on a few sets of able hands. Barring calamity, there exists no expectation of further help. The ethos — simultaneously celebrated and unsettling — is largely the same over the horizon off the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts, in fisheries bringing billions of pounds of seafood to consumers each year. When the severity of an ailment or injury is beyond what crews can manage alone, a baked-in math restricts access to trauma care. Fishing vessels routinely operate eight hours or more from land, putting employees in circumstances utterly different from those of most workers in the United States, where response times for E.M.T.s are measured in minutes. The Coast Guard runs a highly regarded search-and-rescue service, but when a vessel’s location is remote or a storm howling, Coast Guard aircraft might require hours to arrive. Urgency does not eliminate distance and weather. A fentanyl overdose can kill in minutes, a timeline no Coast Guard asset can beat.

As the epidemic has claimed crew member after crew member, the death toll has been behind a push to bring harm-reduction strategies out onto the ocean. Chief among them are efforts to train crews to identify and treat an overdose and a push to saturate fleets with naloxone, the opioid antagonist, commonly administered as a nasal spray under the trade name Narcan, that can reverse overdoses and retrieve a fading patient from a mortal slide. The initiatives have made some inroads. But in a proud industry where names are made on punishing work and high-seas savvy, naloxone distribution has also faced resistance from vessel owners or captains concerned about the message carrying Narcan might send. Where proponents have succeeded, they have done so in part by demonstrating that harm reduction isn’t an abdication of fishermen’s responsibility — but a natural extension of it.

Before venturing into commercial fishing, Brian Murphy endured a run of difficult years. He separated from his wife in 2015 and moved to Florida, where he found, then lost, employment before running low on cash during the pandemic. He returned in late 2020 to his wife’s home in Vineland, reuniting their children with both parents and putting himself within an hour or so of commercial fishing docks along the shore. He hoped to find work welding for the fleet as he co-parented and put his life in order. “He was getting there,” his wife, Christina, says. “All he needed was a job.”

The deckhand position looked like the break he sought. It paid roughly $1,000 for three days at sea. The captain, Rodney Bart, seemed more than accommodating. Though he lived about 70 miles away, he agreed to pick up Murphy before the trip. Murphy told his wife he might put his wages toward a car, which could help him find a land job. Christina had reservations. She had heard stories of captains’ working crews past exhaustion and tolerating drugs on board. But she understood that her husband needed work. The back of his neck bore a small tattoo of the letter M adorned with a crown. “King Murph,” he called himself. He longed for that old stride.

What his family did not know was that the Jersey Pride, a boat that formerly enjoyed an excellent reputation, was in decline. Its hull and bulkheads were thick with rust. Its big gray-bearded captain, Bart, struggled with addiction to opioids and meth. A friend warned Murphy the vessel was “bad news,” says Murphy’s father, Brian Haferl. Murphy took the job anyhow.

On July 17, 2021, the evening before Murphy departed, he stayed up playing Call of Duty with a younger brother, Doug Haferl. Christina worked the night shift at a trucking firm. She returned home in the darkness and gave Brian a bag of bedding and clean clothes. When Bart showed up before dawn, Murphy dipped into the bedroom to say goodbye. Christina shared what cash she had — about $15 — to put toward cigarettes. “I didn’t have much else to give him,” she says. Then her husband left, off to make a check.

For two days Christina wondered how Brian was doing and whether he was getting sleep. I hope that blanket was enough, she thought. On the third day, a friend from a boatyard called. He said that Murphy was unconscious on the boat and that the Coast Guard might be flying out to help. Christina chose hope. “I figured they’d probably get the helicopter out there and revive him,” she says. About a half-hour later, a Coast Guard captain arrived at her home to inform her Brian was dead.

The captain shared what investigators gleaned at the dock: Murphy hurt his back, was pacing back and forth and had been in an argument with another deckhand. He got into a bunk to rest, and was soon found lifeless. “They just said he was acting really weird,” she says. The Coast Guard captain also said a small plastic bag had been found with him that appeared to contain drug residue. Christina was suspicious. Her husband had no money to buy drugs, and though he occasionally used Percocet pills and meth in the past, had not been using since returning home.

The same night, a police officer called Murphy’s father to notify him. Haferl was enraged. He told the officer that someone on the vessel must have given his son drugs and that he was heading to the dock with a rifle. “The guys on that boat better duck,” he said. The officer advised against this. If he caused a disturbance boatside, Haferl recalls him saying, “We’re going to be fishing you out of the river.”

Haferl could not rush to the Jersey Pride anyhow. Fishermen are paid by what they catch. Once medical examiners took custody of Murphy’s body, the vessel slipped back out the inlet to continue clamming. Murphy had boarded the boat with a duffel from home. He was carried off in jeans, socks and a T-shirt. Not even his shoes came back. When the Jersey Pride completed its trip, his family started calling Bart, the captain, seeking answers and Brian’s personal effects. Bart did not return calls. Neither did the owner, Doug Stocker. Eventually, Christina said, the friend from the boatyard dropped off her husband’s wallet and a phone. Both were sealed in plastic bags. Silence draped over the case. “No one was telling anyone anything,” Murphy’s father said.

Stocker, the Jersey Pride’s owner, relieved Bart of his position in fall 2021, then died that December. Bart died in 2023. Murphy’s family learned little beyond the contents of the autopsy report from the Ocean County Medical Examiner’s office. Its toxicology results were definitive. They showed the presence of fentanyl, methamphetamine and the animal tranquilizer xylazine in Murphy’s cardiac blood, leading the examiner to rule his death a result of “acute toxic effects” of three drugs. (Xylazine is another recent adulterant in black-market drug supplies.)

The report also revealed a surprise: Murphy’s blood contained traces of naloxone. Why he died nonetheless raised more unanswered questions. There were possible explanations. The crew may have administered naloxone perimortem, at the moment of death, too late to save his life but in time to show up in his blood. Alternately, the fentanyl may have been too potent for the amount of naloxone on board and failed to revive Murphy at all. A more disturbing possibility, which suggested a potential lapse in training, was that after Murphy received Narcan, Bart opted to let him rest and recover, and either the naloxone wore off or the other drugs proved lethal without intervention.

The last possibility was both maddening to consider and hard to fathom, given Bart’s personal experience with the sorrows of the epidemic. His adult daughter, Maureen, became dependent on prescription painkillers after a hip injury, completed rehab and relapsed fatally in 2018. Wracked with grief, Bart, who in 2017 completed an outpatient detox program for his own addiction, resumed use, one relative said. In March 2018 he overdosed aboard the Jersey Pride while it was alongside an Atlantic City dock. Narcan saved the captain that day. His pain deepened. His son, Rodney Bart Jr., followed him into clamming as a teenager and rose to become a mate on another clamming vessel, the John N. In 2020, about a year before Murphy died, Bart’s son fatally overdosed on fentanyl and heroin while towing a dredge off the Jersey Shore.

A federal wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Rodney Jr.’s family in early 2023 sketched a work force in addiction’s grip. It claimed that for more than six months before Rodney Jr.’s overdose, he complained that “the entire crew including the captain were using heroin during fishing operations”; that the captain supplied heroin to the crew, including to Rodney Jr.; that another crew member almost died by overdose on board in 2019; that Rodney Jr. nearly stepped on a needle on the boat; and that he saw “the captain nodded out” in the wheelhouse several times. Immediately after Rodney Jr.’s death, the suit claimed, the captain discussed with the crew “fabricating a story to the United States Coast Guard that decedent had died at the dock.” That night, the suit claimed, the captain falsely told the authorities that Rodney Jr. suffered a heart attack.

The parties settled early this year for an undisclosed sum. In telephone interviews, an owner of the vessel, John Kelleher, said he had zero tolerance for drug use and was not aware his crew was injecting heroin. After the death, he said, “I fired everybody that was on that boat.” Kelleher’s vessels now carry Narcan, though he was ambivalent about its presence. “It says it’s OK to have a heroin addict on the boat?” he asked. “I don’t want to promote that on the boat. We owe millions of dollars to the bank. You can’t have crews out there to catch clams driving around in circles.”

Hours after Murphy died, the Karen Nicole’s mate, Hollis Nevells, used a satellite phone to call his wife, Stacy Alexander-Nevells, in Fairhaven, Mass. The Karen Nicole is part of a large family-run enterprise in greater New Bedford, the most lucrative fishing port in the United States. Alexander-Nevells, a daughter of the business’s founder, grew up in commercial fishing. She sensed something was wrong. “Is everyone OK?” she asked.

“I just heard someone die on the radio,” Nevells said. “It was so close, so close, and I couldn’t help.”

Hearing strain in his voice, Alexander-Nevells was swept with pain. Her brother Warren Jr., a shore worker in the family business, died of a prescription-opioid overdose in 2009. She lived quietly in that shadow. Thinking of Murphy’s fellow crew members, and of other boats listening as the captain publicly broadcast Murphy’s deathbed symptoms, she felt an inner wall fall. “That was the first time I started processing how far-reaching one death could be, especially a preventable one,” she says. “For days I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

In a conversation with a girlfriend, her friend mentioned Narcan. Alexander-Nevells knew of the drug, but thought of it as something administered only by emergency medical workers. That was no longer true. In 2018 Massachusetts authorized pharmacies to dispense Narcan without a prescription to opioid users, their families and “persons in a position to assist individuals at risk of experiencing an opioid-related overdose.” The Alexander fleet, employing more than 100 people in a high-risk industry, qualified. (Last year the Food and Drug Administration approved Narcan for over-the-counter sales, removing more barriers to distribution.) Had the Karen Nicole carried naloxone, Alexander-Nevells thought, Murphy might still be alive. Still she balked. She realized she knew almost nothing about the drug. “I didn’t know dose,” she says. “I didn’t know how to use it.”

All around the harbor there were signs of need. For as long as any commercial fisherman could remember, greater New Bedford suffered from widespread substance use. Before recent pockets of shoreline gentrification appeared, some of the city’s former bars, notably the National Club, were the stuff of coastal legend. Older fishermen say there was little in the 1990s like the National during nor’easters and hurricanes, when scores of boats lashed together in port, rain and gales blasted the streets and crews rode out the weather at the bar. Booze flowed. Drugs were easy to find. And fishermen between trips often had wads of cash. “We were basically pirates back then,” one older scalloper says. “The way we lived, the way we fished. It was a free-for-all.” The scalloper, later incarcerated in Maine for heroin possession, says he stopped using opioids before fentanyl tainted the heroin supply. “I got out just in time,” he says. “It’s the only reason I’m still alive.” (His girlfriend’s son, a young fisherman, overdosed fatally the week before; to protect his household’s privacy, he asked that his name be withheld.) Capt. Clint Prindle, who commands the Coast Guard sector in southeastern New England, also recalls the era. As a young officer he was stationed in New Bedford on the cutter Campbell. The tour, he says, “was the only time in my career I was issued puncture-resistant gloves” — a precaution against loose syringes on fishing vessels.

For all these stories, the fishing industry was hardly the sole driver of the city’s underground trade, and drug use there remains widespread independent of the fleet. An investigation by The New Bedford Light, a nonprofit news site, found that one in every 1,250 city residents died of an overdose in 2022, more than twice the rate statewide. (Nationally, about one in 4,070 people died of opioid overdoses in 2022.) The report also found that about one out of eight New Bedford residents had enrolled in drug- or alcohol-addiction treatment since 2012. Such data aligns with the experience of Tyler Miranda, a scallop-vessel captain who grew up in the city. “The people who had money were drug dealers or fishermen,” he says. “When I was young, I knew a few fishermen, but most of my friends were in the other business.” These conditions helped make overdoses part of the local medical routine, prompting the city, with help from organizations like Fishing Partnership, to distribute free Narcan.

The movement has still not been fully embraced. A survey of commercial fishing captains published last year in The American Journal of Industrial Medicine suggested that skepticism about stocking Narcan persisted. Of 61 captains, 10 had undergone naloxone training, and only five said their vessels carried the drug. The survey’s data ended in 2020, and Fishing Partnership says the numbers have risen. Since 2016, the partnership’s opioid-education and Narcan-distribution program has trained about 2,500 people in the industry from Maine to North Carolina, about 80 percent of them in the last three years, says Dan Orchard, the partnership’s executive vice president. But with resistance lingering, Alexander-Nevells was unsure whether she could get Narcan on her family’s fleet. That would depend on her father, Warren J. Alexander.

Alexander is a tall, reserved man with neatly combed white hair who entered commercial fishing in the 1960s at age 13 by packing herring on weekends at Cape May. As a young man he lobstered, potted sea bass and worked on trawlers and clammers before setting out on his own with the purchase of a decades-old wooden schooner. The boat sank near Cape May while returning in a storm; Alexander tells the story of hearing its propeller still turning as he treaded water above the descending hull. Undeterred, he gambled big, having steel clamming vessels built in shipyards in the Gulf of Mexico and bringing them north. By the 1990s he was one of New Jersey’s most successful clam harvesters, and odds were good that any can of clam chowder in the United States contained shellfish scraped from the sea floor by an Alexander dredge. He moved the business to New England in 1993, weathering two more sinkings and a pair of fatal accidents as it continued to grow. In the ensuing years, he left clamming and largely switched to scalloping, and now owns more than 20 steel vessels, which he watches over from a waterfront warehouse, greeting captains and crews with the soft-spoken self-assurance of a man who has seen it all.

His daughter knew him as more than a fleet manager. He was a father who lost his son, Warren Jr., to opioids. He lived the torturous contours of the epidemic firsthand. She pitched her idea with shared loss in mind. Warren listened and ruled. “I’m not going to mandate it,” he said. “But if you can get captains to agree to it, you can give it a try.”

The Fishing Partnership’s program to put naloxone on boats and provide crews with overdose first-aid training began after Debra Kelsey, a community health worker, met a grieving fisherman at an event of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association in 2015. The man’s son fatally overdosed about six months before. “He told me his ex-wife had been instrumental in getting Narcan into the hands of the police in Quincy, where he was from,” she says. Kelsey was intrigued — first by the lifesaving value of naloxone, but also by who was trained and designated to carry it.

She lived with a fisherman. She knew the industry and admired its inviolable code: Out on the ocean, fishing boats rushed to help each other. Whether flooding, fire or medical emergency, they came to one another’s aid, and in many cases were first on the scene. “In a mayday call,” she says, “a fishing vessel will often get there before the Coast Guard.” In the particular conditions of work on the water, fishermen functioned as first responders. Kelsey wondered if this ancient trait could be harnessed to save lives in new ways. Naloxone dispensers felt like a suddenly necessary component in vessel safety kits — just like fire extinguishers and throwable lifesaving rings.

In 2017, in part at her urging, Fishing Partnership introduced overdose education and naloxone distribution into the free first-aid classes it offered to captains and crews. Buoyed by a federal grant to New Bedford, the program expanded in 2019 and found an ally in the Coast Guard, which often hosted the partnership’s training sessions at its stations in fishing ports. Its officers echoed Kelsey’s view that naloxone dispensers had become essential onboard equipment.

Naloxone still faced barriers, often from fishermen themselves. Many captains insisted that they forbade illicit drugs and that carrying naloxone functioned as a hypocritical wink, a suggestion that drugs were allowed. Stigma, too, played a role. “People were like, ‘These fishermen are drunks, they’re addicts, they’re living the wild life,’” Kelsey says. She disagreed — addiction isn’t a moral failure, she’d say, it’s a disease — and pressed her message. Stocking naloxone did not mean condoning drug use. It meant a vessel was more fully aligned with the mariner’s code.

Stigma was not the only obstacle. Fear played a role as well. The Coast Guard, for all its support, is a complicated harm-reduction partner. It operates as both a rescue and law-enforcement agency, which leaves many fishermen with a split-screen perception of the organization — appreciating the former role while bristling at the latter. Worries about inviting police action on a boat already dealing with a crew member down make some captains reluctant to report drug-related medical issues, says Captain Prindle, the service’s sector commander. “Often we’ll get a case where the master of a vessel reports they have a cardiac issue or shortness of breath or anxiety issues,” he says. “They leave out the opioids piece.”

Upon returning to the region in 2021, Prindle began attending the partnership’s Narcan training sessions, at which he assured attendees that if they made a mayday call for an overdose, Coast Guard teams would focus on saving a mariner’s life, not on searching for contraband. His message aligned with the experience of service members who patrol the waters. “I don’t think any of us on this boat, when we have an opioid overdose to deal with, want to arrest anybody,” says Petty Officer Third Class Justus Christopher, who runs a 47-foot motor lifeboat out of Martha’s Vineyard. Christopher recalls a vessel with a deckhand in withdrawal. “We got a call that a guy was afraid for his life, and it was a guy dopesick in his bunk,” he says. Other crew members, seething that the deckhand stopped working for his share, were hazing him. Someone defecated in his hat, Christopher said, and smeared Icy Hot in his bedding. The boarding team removed the man. “It never went through our minds to search the boat for drugs,” Christopher said.

With naloxone now available, converts to harm reduction are becoming plentiful around ports. Nuno Lemos, 50, a deckhand in his eighth year of abstinence, moved to New Bedford from Portugal as a teenager. While in high school he did his first commercial trip, working on a trawler and earning $1,200 in five days. On some boats back then, he said, captains dispensed stimulants and painkillers as performance enhancers. His use grew heavy. Between fishing trips, he smoked crack for days, then snorted heroin to come down. “Chasing the dragon,” he says. The habit consumed his income, so he supplemented wages by pinching cash from fellow deckhands’ wallets and hiding fish and scallops under ice below deck, then retrieving the stolen product at the dock for black-market wholesalers. His professional reputation plummeted. He spiraled at home too. Lemos had a son with a woman also battling addiction. In no condition to raise their child, they both lost access to the boy. Her parents took over his care. “I was selfish and self-centered,” he says. “The drugs ran the show.”

In 2016, Lemos hit bottom. He walked off a fishing boat that was laid up in Provincetown during a storm and binge-drank for hours, then burglarized a home to fund a bus ride back to New Bedford. That afternoon he took refuge in the unfinished basement of a bakery and injected what he thought was heroin. He collapsed. His mother, who rented an apartment upstairs, summoned paramedics, who reversed the overdose with naloxone. Lemos shrugged off his brush with death. “I was in the hospital for a few hours, and I got high right after,” he says. But the experience left its impression. He got his hands on Narcan and kept two other people alive. One was a fisherman named Mario, the other “a kid on Rivet Street,” he says, whom he barely knew. Later that year, ashamed and worried he would die without knowing his son, he checked into rehab. Months later he resumed work, first hanging drywall, then back on scalloper decks. As his sobriety lasted, he reunited with his son. His praise of naloxone now borders on liturgy. “Narcan is a God-given thing that should be part of everybody’s training, especially in the business that I am in,” he says. “It’s a pivotal tool of survival that should be on every boat.”

Another fisherman, Justin Souza, 38, started fishing at age 20 and soon was taking opioid pills to manage pain. He moved to heroin when OxyContin became scarce on the streets. When fentanyl entered underground markets, he says, it started killing his friends, ultimately claiming about 20 people he knew, a half-dozen of them fishermen. His first encounter with naloxone was jarringly personal: He was in an apartment with a friend who slipped into unconsciousness and was gargling for breath. “My buddy was dying, and I had a bag of drugs,” he said. “It was either call 911 or my buddy is dead. So I called 911, hid the stuff, and they came and hit him with Narcan.” The man survived. Souza was arrested on an unrelated possession charge in 2017. In jail he changed course. “I cried out to Jesus,” he said, “and he showed up.”

Upon release he entered treatment and has been abstinent since, for which he credits God. Reliable again, Souza was hired by Tyler Miranda, captain of the scallop vessel Mirage, who promoted him to engineer, the crew member responsible for maintaining the boat’s winches and power plant. The Mirage’s crew is a testament to the power of redemption. Once addicted to opioids himself, Miranda has abstained since 2017. He became captain two years into his sobriety, and stocked naloxone onboard shortly after.

Eight days after Brian Murphy died, Kelsey and a co-worker showed up at the Ocean Wave, one of Alexander’s scallopers, to train its crew. The instructors mixed demonstrations on how to administer Narcan — one spray into one nostril, the second into the other — with assurances that the drug was harmless if used on someone suffering a condition other than overdose. The training carried another message, which was not intuitive: Merely administering Narcan was not enough. Multiple dispensers were sometimes required to restore a patient’s breathing, and this was true even if a patient resumed seemingly normal respiration. If the opioids were particularly potent, a patient might backslide as the antagonist wore off. Patients in respiratory distress also often suffered “polysubstance overdoses,” like fentanyl mixed with other drugs, including cocaine, amphetamines or xylazine. Alcohol might be involved, too. With so many variables, anyone revived with naloxone should be rushed to professional care. In an overdose at sea, they said, a victim’s peers should make a mayday call, so the Coast Guard could hurry the patient to a hospital.

After the partnership trained two more Alexander crews, Warren heard positive feedback from his captains. He issued his judgment. “Now it’s mandatory,” he said. Within weeks of the Jersey Pride’s mayday call, Narcan distribution and training became permanent elements of the company’s operation. Alexander-Nevells credits Murphy. He spent about 72 hours as a commercial fisherman, died on the job and left a legacy. “He changed my dad’s fleet,” she says. “I know for a fact that without Brian Murphy, this program doesn’t exist.”

In New Jersey, where Murphy’s family suffered the agonies of sudden, unexpected loss, followed by the humiliation of being ghosted by those who knew what happened to him aboard the Jersey Pride, the changes to the Alexander fleet came as welcome news. His brother, Doug Haferl, recalls his sibling with warmth and gratitude. Their parents divorced when the kids were young, and their father worked long hours as a crane operator. Brian assumed the role of father figure. “He took me and my brother Tom under his wing,” he says. The thought that Brian’s death helped put naloxone on boats and might one day save a life, he says, “is about the best thing I could hope for.”

Deckhands and captains come and go. Naloxone dispensers expire. To keep the fleet current, Alexander-Nevells booked refresher training throughout 2023 and into 2024. At one class, Kelsey met the Karen Nicole’s captain and five-person crew. The group gathered in the galley. Everyone present had lost friends. Kelsey recited symptoms. “If someone overdoses,” she said, “they will make a noise — ”

“It’s a gargle,” said Myles Jones, a deckhand. “I know what it is.”

He stood by a freezer, a compact, muscular man in a white sleeveless tee. “I’ve lost a son,” he said. The room fell still.

“I’m sorry,” Kelsey said. She stepped across the galley and wrapped him in a hug. Jones managed a pained smile. “I lost an uncle, too,” he said.

Kelsey continued the class, then examined the Narcan aboard to ensure it had not expired. The boat headed to sea.

In the wheelhouse, the mate, Hollis Nevells, said that Narcan fit a mentality fishing jobs require. He shared a story of a drunk fisherman who crashed a house party years ago in his hometown on Deer Isle, Maine. To prevent him from driving his pickup truck, other guests took his keys and stashed them atop a refrigerator. Furious, the man produced a pistol, pointed it at Nevells’s face and demanded the keys’ return. Thus persuaded, Nevells retrieved them. The man drove away only to call a short while later, upset. His truck was stuck in mud. He wanted help. Several fishermen drove to him, separated him from the pistol and beat the truck with baseball bats until it was totaled. “Island justice,” Nevells said. In his view, carrying Narcan matched this rough, self-help spirit: On the ocean, crews needed to solve problems themselves, and with Narcan came the power to save a life. Nevells had lost many peers to overdoses, among them the man who leveled the pistol at his face. He remembered feeling helpless as the Jersey Pride broadcast graphic descriptions at the hour of Murphy’s death. He did not want to feel that way again.

The captain, Duane Natale, agreed. He had seen firsthand how delaying death bought time for a rescue. Scallopers tow massive steel dredges that cut furrows through the ocean bottom and snatch scallops along the way. By winch and boom, the dredges are periodically lifted above deck to shake out catch, then lowered again. The procedure is exceptionally dangerous. A swinging dredge, about 15 feet wide and weighing more than a ton, can crush a man in one sickening crunch. In the 1990s, Natale saw a falling dredge shear off a deckhand’s extended right arm. A makeshift tourniquet tightened around the stump kept the man alive until a helicopter lifted him away. Had they not been trained, the deckhand would have died. Natale saw a similar role for Narcan: a means to stop a fatality and let the Coast Guard do its work. “I like it a lot,” he said. “Last thing I want on my conscience is someone dying on my boat.”

In water 45 fathoms deep the boat steamed at 4.8 knots, towing dredges through sandy muck while the crew sweated through an incessant loop. From a hydraulic control station at the wheelhouse’s aft end, Nevells or Natale periodically hoisted the dredges and shook out tons of scallops, which slid out onto the steel deck in rumbling cascades of pink-and-white shells. Working fast, Hollis and the deckhands shoveled the catch into baskets and hustled it to sheltered cutting stations, where with stainless-steel knives they separated each scallop’s adductor muscle — the portion that makes its way to seafood cases and restaurant plates — from its gob of guts. Hands worked fast, flicking adductors into buckets and guts down chutes that plopped them onto greenish water beside the hull. Large sharks swam lazy circles alongside, turning to flash pale undersides while inhaling easy meals. Music thumped and blared: metal one hour, techno the next. When enough buckets were full of meat and rinsed in saltwater, two deckhands transferred the glistening, ivory-colored catch into roughly 50-pound cloth sacks, handed them down a hatch into the cool fish-hold and buried them beneath ice. Everyone else kept shucking.

The deckhands worked in staggered pairs: 11 hours of shoveling and shucking followed by four hours to shower, eat, sleep and bandage hands, then back on deck for 11 more hours. It continued for days. Daylight became dusk; dusk became night; night became dawn. Sea states changed. Fog and mist soaked the crew and shrouded the vessel, then lifted, revealing other boats on the horizon doing the same thing. The work never stopped. As exhaustion set in, people swayed where they stood, still hauling heavy baskets and shucking. To stay awake they downed coffee and Red Bull, smoked cigarettes and spoke little. One man wore a T-shirt stenciled with a solitary word. It read as both a personal statement and command to everyone else: Grind. Early on the fifth day, the Karen Nicole reached its 12,000-pound federal trip limit. Natale turned the boat toward New Bedford, almost a 24-hour steam away, and cooked everyone a rib-eye steak. The crew showered, ate and slept a few hours, then woke to scrub the boat. On shore two days later, each deckhand received his share: $9,090.61.

Within a year of its mayday call, the Jersey Pride entered a transformation. After the death in 2021 of the vessel’s owner, Doug Stocker, the boat passed to the family of his brother, Clint. A recently retired detective sergeant from the Middle Township Police Department, Clint Stocker was not affiliated with the Jersey Pride when Rodney Bart was its captain, and he knew little of what happened to Murphy, whom he never met. His view on opioid use was clear. “I tolerate none of that,” he says. He also needed no introduction to Narcan, having administered it as a police officer. The boat carries dispensers, he says, “just in case.”

In the midnight blackness this spring after the Jersey Pride returned to port, the vessel’s mate and deckhands described a job-site turnaround. The mate, Justin Puglisi, joined the crew about two months after Murphy’s death. His personal history in commercial fishing began with a loss that resonated through the industry: His father was taken by the sea with the vessel Beth Dee Bob, one of four clam boats that went to the bottom over 13 days in 1999, killing 10 fishermen. As a teenager Puglisi claimed his place in the surviving fleet. The Jersey Pride, he said, was in rough shape when he signed on. The bunk where Murphy overdosed remained unoccupied, the subject of vague stories about a deckhand’s death. Rodney Bart, still the captain, was using fentanyl onboard. “It was blatant,” Puglisi said. “He was leaving empty bags in the wheelhouse.” Two deckhands were heavy users, too. One wandered the boat with a syringe behind his ear. Puglisi had slipped into addiction himself. He was 32, had been using opioids for 15 years and was regularly buying and snorting fentanyl and crystal meth, which he bought in bulk. “I started with pills like everyone else, then switched to the cheaper stuff,” he said.

Bart was fired in fall 2021. But it was after Clint Stocker’s family took over that the operation markedly changed. Clint and his son Craig, who managed the boat’s maintenance, hired new crew members, invested in new electronics and implemented a schedule that gave crew members a week off work after two weeks onboard. They replaced the outriggers and eventually had the boat’s twin diesel engines rebuilt. Puglisi stood at a wheelhouse window. Around him were signs of attentive upkeep: new hoses, valves and a hydraulic pump; fresh upholstery on the wheelhouse bench; a new computer monitor connected to a satellite navigation system. The owners planned to repaint the boat, Puglisi said, but focused on more important maintenance first. “They put their money where it matters,” he said.

The overhaul was more than mechanical. In summer 2022, Puglisi fell asleep in the galley after getting high. When the Stockers heard, they helped find him a bed at rehab for six weeks, then gave him time to attend 90 Narcotics Anonymous meetings in 90 days. “They were like, ‘Go, and your job will be here when you get back,’” he said. When he returned, they put him straight to work. “It was all business,” Puglisi said. He rolled up his left sleeve to reveal a forearm tattoo — “One day at a time,” it read — and described the Jersey Pride as a good boat and fine workplace, unlike when Murphy was invited aboard. “I’ve worked for a lot of owners,” he said, “and this is the best boat I have been on. They take care of their crew.”

It was 1 a.m. A cold April wind blew hard from the northeast. Below Puglisi, three deckhands labored methodically under spotlights to offload catch. One, Bill Lapworth, was a former opioid user also in recovery now. His story matched countless others: He started with pills for pain relief, switched to heroin when the pills became harder to find and almost died when fentanyl poisoned the supply. He was revived by Narcan twice: first by E.M.T.s in an apartment, then by a friend as he slumped near death in a pickup truck. His friend had picked up free Narcan through a community handout program. Smoking a cigarette in the gusts as a crane swung metal cages of ocean quahogs overhead, Lapworth flashed the mischievous grin of a man pulled from the grave not once but twice, then offered a three-word endorsement of the little plastic dispensers to which he owed his life: “I got saved.”

Read by James Patrick Cronin

Audio produced by Elena Hecht

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by Quinton Kamara

C.J. Chivers is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of two books, including “The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2017 for a profile of a former Marine with PTSD. David Guttenfelder is a photojournalist focusing on geopolitical conflict and conservation.

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The US-built pier in Gaza broke apart. Here’s how we got here and what might be next

The U.S.-built temporary pier that has been taking humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians for less than two weeks will be removed from the coast of Gaza to be repaired after getting damaged in rough seas and weather, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

These images released by Maxar Technologies show the newly completed pier in the Gaza Strip on May 18, 2024, top, and the remaining section of the temporary pier on May 29, 2024. A string of security, logistical and weather problems have battered the plan to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza through a U.S. military-built pier. Broken apart by strong winds and heavy seas just over a week after it became operational, the project faces criticism that it hasn’t lived up to its initial billing or its $320 million price tag. (Satellite images ©2024 Maxar Technologies via AP)

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FILE - This image provided by the U.S. Army shows trucks loaded with humanitarian aid from the United Arab Emirates and the United States Agency for International Development cross the Trident Pier before arriving on the beach on the Gaza Strip, May 17, 2024. A key section of the U.S. military-built pier designed to carry badly needed aid into Gaza by boat has been reconnected to the Gaza beach following storm damage repairs and aid will begin to flow soon, the U.S. Central Command announced Friday. (Staff Sgt. Malcolm Cohens-Ashley/U.S. Army via AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A string of security, logistical and weather problems has battered the plan to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza through a U.S. military-built pier .

Broken apart by strong winds and heavy seas just over a week after it became operational, the project faces criticism that it hasn’t lived up to its initial billing or its $320 million price tag.

U.S. officials say, however, that the steel causeway connected to the beach in Gaza and the floating pier are being repaired and reassembled at a port in southern Israel, then will be reinstalled and working again next week.

While early Pentagon estimates suggested the pier could deliver up to 150 truckloads of aid a day when in full operation, that has yet to happen . Bad weather has hampered progress getting aid into Gaza from the pier, while the Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah has made it difficult, if not impossible at times, to get aid into the region by land routes.

Aid groups have had mixed reactions — both welcoming any amount of aid for starving Palestinians besieged by the nearly eight-month-old Israel-Hamas war and decrying the pier as a distraction that took pressure off Israel to open more border crossings, which are far more productive.

It’s “a side-show,” said Bob Kitchen, a top official of the International Rescue Committee.

The Biden administration has said from the start that the pier wasn’t meant to be a total solution and that any amount of aid helps.

“Nobody said at the outset that it was going to be a panacea for all the humanitarian assistance problems that still exist in Gaza,” national security spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday. “I think sometimes there’s an expectation of the U.S. military — because they’re so good — that everything that they touch is just going to turn to gold in an instant.”

“We knew going in that this was going to be tough stuff,” he added. “And it has proven to be tough stuff.”

Before the war, Gaza was getting about 500 truckloads of aid on average every day. The United States Agency for International Development says it needs a steady flow of 600 trucks a day to ease the struggle for food and bring people back from the brink of famine .

These images released by Maxar Technologies shows the newly completed pier on the Gaza Strip on May 18, 2024, top, and ther emaining section of the temporary pier on May 29, 2024. A string of security, logistical and weather problems have battered the plan to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza through a U.S. military-built pier. Broken apart by strong winds and heavy seas just over a week after it became operational, critics complain that the project hasn’t lived up to its initial billing or its $320 million price tag.(Satellite images ©2024 Maxar Technologies via AP)

The aid brought through the pier was enough to feed thousands for a month, but U.N. data shows it barely made a dent in the overall need of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

Here’s a look at the timeline of the pier, the problems it faced and what may come next:

MARCH: ANNOUNCEMENT AND PREP

MARCH 7: President Joe Biden announces his plan for the U.S. military to build a pier during his State of the Union address.

“Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters,” he said.

But even in those first few moments, he noted the pier would increase the amount of humanitarian aid getting into Gaza but that Israel “must do its part” and let more aid in.

MARCH 8: Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon spokesman, tells reporters it will take “up to 60 days” to deploy the forces and build the project.

MARCH 12: Four U.S. Army boats loaded with tons of equipment and steel pier segments leave Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia and head to the Atlantic Ocean for what is expected to be a monthlong voyage to Gaza.

The brigade’s commander, Army Col. Sam Miller, warns that the transit and construction will be heavily dependent on the weather and any high seas they encounter.

LATE MARCH: U.S. Army vessels hit high seas and rough weather as they cross the Atlantic, slowing their pace.

APRIL: CONSTRUCTION AND HOPE

APRIL 1: Seven World Central Kitchen aid workers are killed in an Israeli airstrike as they travel in clearly marked vehicles on a delivery mission authorized by Israel.

The strike fuels ongoing worries about security for relief workers and prompts aid agencies to pause delivery of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

APRIL 19: U.S. officials confirm that the U.N. World Food Program has agreed to help deliver aid brought to Gaza via the maritime route once construction is done.

APRIL 25: Major construction of the port facility on the shore near Gaza City begins to take shape. The onshore site is where aid from the causeway will be delivered and given to aid agencies.

APRIL 30: Satellite photos show the U.S. Navy ship USNS Roy P. Benavidez and Army vessels working on assembling the pier and causeway about 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) from the port on shore.

MAY: THE PIER OPENS … THEN CLOSES

MAY 9: The U.S. vessel Sagamore is the first ship loaded with aid to leave Cyprus and head toward Gaza and ultimately the pier. An elaborate security and inspection station has been built in Cyprus to screen the aid coming from a number of countries.

MAY 16: Well past the 60-day target time, the construction and assembly of the pier off the Gaza coast and the causeway attached to the shoreline are finished after more than a week of weather and other delays.

MAY 17: The first trucks carrying aid for the Gaza Strip roll down the newly built pier and into the secure area on shore, where they will be unloaded and the cargo distributed to aid agencies for delivery by truck into Gaza.

May 18: Crowds of desperate Palestinians overrun a convoy of aid trucks coming from the pier, stripping the cargo from 11 of the 16 vehicles before they reach a U.N. warehouse for distribution.

May 19-20: The first food from the pier — a limited number of high-nutrition biscuits — reaches people in need in central Gaza, according to the World Food Program.

Aid organizations suspend deliveries from the pier for two days while the U.S. works with Israel to open alternate land routes from the pier and improve security.

MAY 24: So far, a bit more than 1,000 metric tons of aid has been delivered to Gaza via the U.S.-built pier, and USAID later says all of it has been distributed within Gaza.

MAY 25: High winds and heavy seas damage the pier and cause four U.S. Army vessels operating there to become beached, injuring three service members, including one who is in critical condition.

Two vessels went aground in Gaza near the base of the pier and two went aground near Ashkelon in Israel.

MAY 28: Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh says large portions of the causeway are being pulled from the beach and moved to an Israeli port for repairs. The base of the causeway remains at the Gaza shore.

She also says that aid in Cyprus is being loaded onto vessels and will be ready to unload onto the pier once it is back in place.

MAY 29: Two of the Army vessels that ran aground in the bad weather are now back at sea and the other two near the pier are being freed, with the aid of the Israeli navy.

WHAT’S NEXT?

In the coming days, the sections of the causeway will be put back together, and by the middle of next week will be moved back to the Gaza shore, where the causeway will once again be attached to the beach, the Pentagon says.

“When we are able to re-anchor the pier back in, you’ll be able to see that aid flow off in a pretty steady stream,” Singh said Tuesday. “We’re going to continue to operate this temporary pier for as long as we can.”

AP writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed.