One of the amazing stories recently is the incident involving the Ever Given and how it’s stuck in the Suez Canal. I’ve never sailed anything larger than a canoe so I don’t know how or why for certain other than what’s been reported in the news.
Massive container ship stuck in Suez Canal, blocking world’s busiest shipping route
Of particular note in this article is the comparison on the ship to landmarks like the CN Tower. That’s one HUGE ship.
The Suez Canal has always intrigued me. There are so many articles written about the construction and the number of times that it’s been shut down. So, we can add one more time to that. Now, it’s been stuck for six days as I write this.
Technology is amazing at times. You can take a time lapsed trip through the canal. Many such exist on YouTube.
With all the technology in the world, you have to be amazed that there wasn’t something in place to keep the ship actually in the canal. It’s now a feature that you find on new cars.
Even more bizarre is how difficult it’s proving to be to remove the Ever Given from its current location. If you read the CBC story above, you’ll see an aerial image of the ship stuck.
Of course, the internet doesn’t let us down at times like this. We all know that we’ve seen so many memes of Bernie Sanders and his mittens. Well, now, you can plot the Ever Given any place in the world that you want. I chose to run it into the dock on Boblo Island that the ferry uses to transport homeowners from there to the mainland at the dock in Amherstburg.
This was created at the website Ever Given Ever Ywhere.
It was kind of fun picking it up and dropping it in various places. What I found personally educational about this was to put some sort of reality of size into my learning. (Check the “Boat is to scale” box)
Jaimie and I have walked the park along there many times and many times made reference to it here in the blog. You might get tired of it but he’s my thrice daily walking partner.
Of course, this is fun but I can see all kinds of educational ways to use this in your classroom. On television news, it’s just another picture on a ship. When you put it in context of something that you and your students would immediately recognize, it becomes a reality. Of course, it would be a great writing prompt.
Here, I compared it to a regular Great Lake ship, making sure that it was to scale.
It gives you a sense of how gigantic this ship is because Great Lakes boats are no small things.
Here it is compared to the Jiiman sitting in Kingville harbor. The Jiimaan transports people, cars, trucks, etc. to Pelee Island.
When you look at the size, the weight, etc. the sides of the Suez didn’t really stand a chance.
Later, after this post was written – good news.
Giant container ship that blocked Suez Canal set free
doug --- off the record 
Good morning Doug!
The Every Given Ever Ywhere Web app entertained me for a good 30 to 45 minutes yesterday afternoon. I stuck the Ever Given in the Moira River, on highway 62 on the 401 overpass, and then moved the obstruction to the Quinte Mall parking lot. It then visited a couple of locations in Toronto before heading out west to span Lake Louise and a good chunk of the Fairmont Banff Springs. I then plopped down on my brother’s favourite golf course in Victoria BC.
Given that we don’t get any huge ocean going container ships here in the middle of the continent, it was nice that you put it alongside a lake freighter for scale. There’s no doubt that there are some huge ships out there today.
I don’t know if you have been following the SpaceX Starship testing the last few months, but the Starship rockets are another example of how big things are getting. Starship SN11 is due for its test flight this week. The flight was scrubbed yesterday, but maybe today we’ll see it fly up, hover, flip over, bellyflop down towards the Earth, and then execute the flip to land again on the landing pad. I can only imagine how amazing it would be to see some thing as huge as that perform that kind of maneuver in person. It really is difficult to get a sense of the scale of the thing when it’s just seen against the sky background.
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