Boater Suppression

All around the world, boats carry people and cargo and fishing gear and coolers full of beer.

We also have to make sure they carry liability insurance, because here's what can happen.

Small scale:  Florida police say a 40-foot boat fell off a trailer last week, and blocked several lanes of traffic on a busy interstate for several hours. 

This took place on I-10 in Crestview, FL, the county seat of lovely Okaloosa County.  Police say the boat trailer was swaying violently like a horse dislodging flies as the pick-'em-up truck that was dragging it crossed under State Road 85 and the trailer hit a guardrail.

I hear "I-10 at State Road 85" and I see Waffle House, Waffle Hut, House of Waffles, and Cracker Barrel, all nearby.

Anyhow, the boat broke loose, flipped over a time or two and came to rest on the traveled portion of the roadway, blocking both lanes of 10. The truck wound up in the median.

No one was hurt in all this, except for the pride of the driver and the many irate Floridians who didn't get to the Piggly Wiggly on time to take advantage of the big sale on boiled peanuts.

Large scale: worldwide commerce was drastically affected when a 1,300-foot, 220,000-ton container ship blocked traffic in the Suez Canal for nearly a week, and that ain't peanuts.

The world watched yesterday morning as finally the great ship was freed and once again afloat as we see in the picture above.

The ship is called the Ever Given, and as of lunchtime yesterday it was slowly headed up north in the canal, as thousands cheered. It was a week ago today that  high winds and low visibility lodged the mighty vessel cross-ways in the canal, running it aground. That shut down all ship traffic in one of the world's most vital waterways.

Ever Given has a beam of 200 feet, making it one of the largest container ships at sea, so having the canal clear for others to pass by makes everyone beam!

Billions of dollars of cargo, and everything you and I just ordered from Amazon, has been floating around for a week. Some shipping lines were considering taking the long way around, down by the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa.

Fun fact: the Cape of Good Hope was originally named the Cape Of Storms way back in the 1480s by  a Portuguese explorer named Bartolomeu Dias. Somewhere along the way, some Chamber of Commerce people sat down and said, "Maybe calling it "the cape of storms" is bad for business. Let's hold a contest for a new name!"