Container ship dumps containers in Pacific

[boatman61]

Originally Posted by sailingabe41ds

These floating containers are vital to the people of underdeveloped countries. How else can they get their free Nike shoes unless one of those containers fall over board...open up ...and let those shoes land on their shores.


They also provide a reef system and if they float little fishes can use it as shelter. Someone just mentioned how they caught a big fish hiding under a log between the Galapagos and the mainland.


The glass is always half full...


Abe

Very true.. some islanders depend on these incidents...

Cargo washed ashore from a container ship that ran aground off the Isles of Scilly yesterday causing an oil slick, began disappearing in scenes reminiscent of the film Whisky Galore, according to island officials.

Cars, vans and prams were used to carry off the contents of containers lost overboard from the 3,000-ton vessel Cita, including toys, computer parts, car tyres, clothes, T-shirts and textiles.

[capn_billl]

Originally Posted by DefinitelyMe

I think that's actually something like the probability of encountering a container within any given randomly-selected acre, assuming the containers are distributed randomly.

An acre is 43,560 feet squared. 43,560 feet is 7.17nm. So every time you sail 7.17nm you enter a 'new acre' and thus compound the probability.

Disclaimer: the above is very likely mostly probably maybe definitely nonsense. But I think the principle holds true....... :-)

They did a movie of a guy that hit one, and ripped open the side of his sailboat. Fortunately he was able to path it with stuff on board, but it was the beginning of a bad trip that resulted in a rescue.

This move was based on a true story, and there are less than a billion cruisers so 1 in 6 billion is suspect.

The odds are probably similar to running into a whale, and that has happened also.

[capn_billl]

Originally Posted by boatman61

Very true.. some islanders depend on these incidents...

Cargo washed ashore from a container ship that ran aground off the Isles of Scilly yesterday causing an oil slick, began disappearing in scenes reminiscent of the film Whisky Galore, according to island officials.

Cars, vans and prams were used to carry off the contents of containers lost overboard from the 3,000-ton vessel Cita, including toys, computer parts, car tyres, clothes, T-shirts and textiles.

I wonder what the legality is of say finding a floating cargo box full of shrink wrapped BMW's, and towing it to port?

[Cadence]

Originally Posted by sailingabe41ds

These floating containers are vital to the people of underdeveloped countries. How else can they get their free Nike shoes unless one of those containers fall over board...open up ...and let those shoes land on their shores.


They also provide a reef system and if they float little fishes can use it as shelter. Someone just mentioned how they caught a big fish hiding under a log between the Galapagos and the mainland.


The glass is always half full...


Abe

It's called a FAD. Fish congregate under them, why?

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by DefinitelyMe

....

An acre is 43,560 feet squared. 43,560 feet is 7.17nm. So every time you sail 7.17nm you enter a 'new acre' and thus compound the probability.

.....

An acre is 43,560 square feet. That’s equivalent to a square 208ft8.5in on a side.

That’s about 29.2 “acres” per Nautical Mile.

[Cadence]

I'm not sure how unit of area can be equated to a linear value. It is apples and oranges. So one side of the Ideal square acre can be divided into the length of a nm, what does it prove?

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by Cadence

I'm not sure how unit of area can be equated to a linear value. It is apples and oranges. So one side of the Ideal square acre can be divided into the length of a nm, what does it prove?

DefinitelyMe was trying to figure the odds of hitting a container. He/she got the definition of acre wrong which I corrected.

The analogy of "acres" that I had above was correcting their analogy: if you sailed along the short edges of a bunch of "acres" you would cross 29.2 of them per nautical mile rather than their value of 1 "acre" per 7.??? nautical miles.

Better would have been to reduce everything to square meters.

There are 361.9 million sqr km of ocean in the world, that's 361.9 Trillion square meters.

Lets say your boat is 3.5m wide. Sailing thru the water you are making leeway so the apparent width is slightly larger, let's say 4m to be conservative.

The great circle route from LA to Hilo, HI is 2458mi or 5432km or 5,430,226. During a sail along this route your boat will cover 21,720,904sqr-m.

Conexs are 12mx2.5m = 30sqr-m.
If there are 2000 of them floating at or near the surface and they are evenly distributed across the ocean then there is 1 conex per 180,950,000,000sqr-m

Let's assume the worst case and all of them are laying broadside to your path. That's a 12m target that you have to avoid. Your vessel beam is not infinitely small so you have to add half the beam at each end of the conex so 16m.

180,950,000,000 / 16 = 11,309,375,000m

Oh, nevermind, I lost track of where I was going with this to calculate the odds.

[Cadence]

I didn't mean to open a discussion. I just can't understand acres and nm being related in the context of the topic.

[Don C L]

Still, we know they are not distributed randomly across the oceans. Losses and loss sites are probably recorded somewhere I presume and currents are pretty well identified, so we can probably identify areas where probability of encounter is greater.

[LobeliaBlue]

Worked a software contract for a Freight Consolidator: the Industry under-reports loss. Actual numbers are about 50k containers lost at Sea this century alone.

[Don C L]

Originally Posted by LobeliaBlue

Worked a software contract for a Freight Consolidator: the Industry under-reports loss. Actual numbers are about 50k containers lost at Sea this century alone.

Do you know of any resource where losses are recorded, including location and numbers lost? Or do they try to keep that stuff under wraps?

[LobeliaBlue]

Originally Posted by Don C L

Do you know of any resource where losses are recorded, including location and numbers lost? Or do they try to keep that stuff under wraps?

I think only the Insurance Adjusters know, and they don't share or aggregate numbers. Since I had database access I was able to see the internal loss numbers were about 2-3x what the PR dept released.

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by Cadence

I didn't mean to open a discussion. I just can't understand acres and nm being related in the context of the topic.

Somebody tried to calculate odds on a per acre basis and didn't get the area of an acre right and then ...

[Dsanduril]

Originally Posted by LobeliaBlue

Worked a software contract for a Freight Consolidator: the Industry under-reports loss. Actual numbers are about 50k containers lost at Sea this century alone.

The shipping industry trade groups publicly report an average loss of ~1400 containers a year. That's 30k containers this century. It's a bit off from your 50k, but not so terribly far off that I see a huge difference - 2500/year vs. 1400/year?

[RiverRat37]

Originally Posted by capn_billl

They did a movie of a guy that hit one, and ripped open the side of his sailboat. Fortunately he was able to path it with stuff on board, but it was the beginning of a bad trip that resulted in a rescue.

This move was based on a true story, and there are less than a billion cruisers so 1 in 6 billion is suspect.

The odds are probably similar to running into a whale, and that has happened also.

Not only containers and whales but also submarines (Military). I know of an Eldridge-McInnis 39-footer that was hit by one in the Caribbean. It sank. All were rescued but the boat is in 600 fathoms of water now. The military, it's reported, never, ever takes responsibility for these collisions. The Sea Cloud (a four master) when it was named the Antarna and a high school training ship, was hit by one on the surface in a port, taking out the bowsprit. Navy promised to make good but I'm not sure if they ever did. There are plenty of hazards out there but the chances are still small. And how about running into a "garbage patch"? One is reported be as big as all Texas.