A Day Sailing

Today, I got out of the casita and made my way down to the Royal South Australian Yacht Squadron to help crew on a regatta.  FUN.  Thanks for kicking me in the butt, Sally.  The alternative was shampooing carpets in the townhouse I just rented.  NOT FUN.

Here's Cap'n Ron.  He's a Kiwi that's been in Adelaide for 30 years.  We're on a 35-foot boat build in South Australia called the Day Star, except it sounds like Death Star when Kevin, the British guy who gave me a lift to the club says the name.  HA.

This is Barbara (pronounced Bah-brah -- there are no R's in Aussie English), Ron's wife.  The weather has been unseasonable cool and rainy the past few days.  It's what they say is "rather ordinary" weather (meaning not very good) for this time of the year, except it's rather extraordinary since it should be 95F and no humidity!

Because the wind was blowing over 20 knots on the Gulf, today we were confined to tacking back and forth behind the breakwaters of the Port River.  Good arm work out on the winches...

Adelaide is also a port town.  Here's the OOCL (Orient Overseas Container Line) Friendship that was busy unloading its cargo as we sailed by.  For more information see:

www.oocl.com/eng/ourservices/vessels/fclass3218

The Friendship is similar to the OCL Initiative that carried my little cargo from the States. She's at:

http://club.telepolis.com/VIS10/MOLInitiative.htm

Not exactly a looker like the QE2, but she works...I actually saw her rounding the bend into Adelaide from the hill at Flinders University walking to work last week.  It was hard to find this picture of her on Google, because reports of an engine fire that completely disabled her in 2006 swamped the search results.  Apparently, she was towed back to Tokyo and caused a small cargo insurance shit storm, from the number of links I found.

Each one of these 300-meter ships carries about 3,000 containers -- the biggest that can't fit (yet) through the Panama Canal (it's undergoing expansions now) carry about 8,000 containers.  Wow.  My stuff was unloaded off the Initiative last weekend.  So, perhaps that's a ship like this per week going through Adelaide.  

Let's assume (sorry, I'm a scientist) that only 10% of the cargo is unloaded in Adelaide -- it's a smallish city of about 1 million, and if you're coming all the way from Singapore (starting in LA), you probably are going to call at Sydney, Melbourne, and maybe Freemantle in Western Australia.  So, what if each week 300 containers are unloaded in Adelaide, that makes about 150,000 containers annually supplying everything this city and surrounding sparse population needs... imaging that!!!  All the car parts, plasma TVs, tricycles, cans of coconut milk, rubber dog chew toys, and crap that we import from the Far East  -- it all comes to your store on ships like these! 

Global commerce is amazing.  How did my 2.5 cubic meters of stuff stacking in one of these 20-meter containers not get lost?  AMAZING!  Anybody out there know anything about global logistics?  2.5 cubic meters of stuff dragged out of a garage in Austin, Texas, USA, flopped on a little truck, carted to a warehouse by the Austin airport, loaded on the back of a semi and crated to Houston, then loaded on a train and shipped to Los Angeles, then loaded onto a container in the Port of Los Angeles, then plopped on the MOL Initiative can float across the wide Pacific, stop over in Singapore to pick up a load of plastic and electronics, can then land in Adelaide and be sitting in a warehouse accruing a $65/day storage charge.  Freekin amazing.