Front Line

Did you hear about Peak Pegasus, the vessel racing to get US soybeans into China before retaliatory 25% tariffs are slapped on?  More on Peak Pegasus at the end of this post.

Well, these two container ship had no need to hurry into the sixth boro, yet here’s something I’ve never seen before . . . two container ships entering the Narrows in quite close succession.

Obviously the passage accommodates all, but still . . . a new sight for me, the reason I return here again and again.

See QM2 in the distance to the right?  I caught her first arrival here 11 years ago.  Dawn was too late for me to catch it.  That ominous sky got me thinking . . . storm clouds.  Locally I was just concerned about getting spots on my lens.  But then I thought about the story of Peak Pegasus, the impending trade war.  I could see those as storm clouds, and shipping . . . this is a front line, like every seaport in the US.

Take the value of all the imported cargo on Maersk Buton and

add to it the value of whatever’s on OOCL Berlin . . . and every other ship entering a US port for the foreseeable future and add the product of that and  .25 . . . the sum’s rising.  Ditto  . . . whatever is on Bomar Caen–headed for Colombia–might just be less attractive if .25 gets added to the price of those goods.  Maybe Colombia is not affected.

I’m by no means an expert in much, and please educate me if I’m wrong, but these storm clouds seemed appropriate this morning.

All photos and sentiments by Will Van Dorp, who first read the name of the Maersk ship as butoh, which would have been much more interesting.

Peak Pegasus plowed at top speed to make port, but  . . . she failed.  More here.   Here’s a story from the same vessel from a few months back.