Sailing, sailing

Last March 13, the great big container ship we ironically called the "Ever Forward" stopped moving forward, backward or sideways in any direction in our Chesapeake Bay. There were 5,000 shipping containers aboard for a trip from Baltimore to Norfolk when it literally ground to a halt in the Craighill Channel shipping lane. 

This caused many a problem. Other ships had to sidestep the floating wreck, people's shipments were delayed, and the State of Maryland has sent a bill to the vessel's owners, the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen Marine, asking for $676,200 to pay for restoring oyster bars which were damaged following the grounding of Ever Forward.

(Side note: an oyster bar is not a saloon where people guzzle beer and slurp oysters, but, rather, a bay bottom where watermen bring up the bivalves right out of the water.)

So now comes the U.S. Coast Guard to issue their findings about the whole mess, and they say the Ever Forward got stuck in the bay because its pilot wasn't paying attention.  As you'll recall, it took over a month to dig out the EF and send it back to Annapolis.

In the same government-ese that once changed the term "fireman falling off a moving fire engine" to "involuntary dismount," they label the fact that someone was not paying attention as the behemoth ship cruised down the bay as "inadequate bridge resource management."

The Coast Guard says the pilot of the craft was making phone calls, sending texts, and writing emails on a cell phone instead of noticing that the ship was not where it was supposed to be. He or she was using the marine version of AutoPilot, something called the Portable Pilot Unit (PPU), to navigate the ship. There came a time when the ship was supposed to turn in a certain direction, but ooooops.

The Coast Guard wisely points out that ships "could prevent any similar problems by clearly defining when crew members are allowed to use their cell phones."

Aye aye, Skipper!