Thread by @tshugart3

There's been plenty of discussion in the news recently about the dozens of merchant ships stuck waiting off of Long Beach/LA waiting to unload due to delays caused by various factors such as COVID, port capacity, container ship demand and size, etc. businessinsider.com/shipping-delay…

To gain some perspective on just how much shipping this is, I thought it might be useful to figure out how much tonnage we're talking about, as ships come in various shapes and sizes and the raw number of hulls may not mean much to folks.

So I went onto marinetraffic.com and did a quick snapshot survey, looking at all the ships near Long Beach that looked like they were either at anchor or adrift, and took note of their dimensions and tonnages. I counted 71 at that time (this AM). marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/ce…

Now, some of you may recall that during WWII, the U.S. Navy's submarine force engaged in a crippling campaign against the Japanese merchant marine, sinking more than 1100 merchant ships of almost 5 million tons and cutting off Japan by sea. history.navy.mil/research/libra…

Back to Long Beach, then, and its idle shipping: by my rough calculations, the 70-odd merchant ships waiting off Long Beach have an aggregate displacement tonnage of about 6.5 million tons. This is more than the entire 6-million ton merchant fleet with which Japan started WWII.

What's the relationship between the WWII Pacific submarine campaign and the gaggle of modern merchant ships sitting off Long Beach? None, really. But I think this may help to provide some perspective on just how big modern seaborne trade is—and how big the problems out there are.

Notes: WWII Japanese shipping losses I found were listed in "standard tonnage" which appears to be displacement tonnage minus fuel & water.

Displacement tonnage for the merchant ships I surveyed was based on reported dimensions and current draft. Not exact, but pretty close IMO.