At 07:40 local time on 23 March 2021, the Ever Given — 399.94 metres, 220,940 gross tons, twenty thousand boxes of consumer goods — was making her northbound transit of the Suez Canal in a gale. Sand was blowing off the desert hard enough to blank the visibility. In the single-lane southern section, the ship began to sheer, corrected, over-corrected, and drove her bulbous bow into the eastern bank at 13 knots. Her stern swung across the channel. The Suez Canal was now closed by a single ship, wedged diagonally, bank to bank.
What six days actually cost
About twelve percent of global trade moves through Suez, and none of it moved for six days. Lloyd's List put the value of goods held up at roughly $9.6 billion per day. More than 400 ships anchored at the canal's ends or slowed mid-ocean to avoid arriving; some carriers turned for the Cape of Good Hope, adding around 6,500 kilometres and ten days. Supply chains already stretched by the pandemic found out what a single point of failure looks like when it fails.
| The blockage in numbers | |
|---|---|
| Ship length vs canal width | 399.94 m ship · ≈200 m channel |
| Days blocked | 6 (23–29 March 2021) |
| Ships queued | 400+ |
| Trade held up | ≈$9.6bn per day (Lloyd's List estimate) |
| Sand dredged to free her | ≈30,000 m³ |
| Tugs on the final pull | 13 |
How you unstick 220,000 tonnes
The refloating was a straightforward siege. Dredgers cut some 30,000 cubic metres of sand and clay from around the bow, where the bulb had buried itself in the bank. Tugs — thirteen at the peak — pulled in coordinated bursts. Ballast and fuel were shifted within the ship to change her trim. And the moon helped: the spring tide of 29 March lifted the water level enough for the final pull to swing her stern free, to synchronized horn blasts from the fleet at anchor.
The strangest chapter came after: Egypt impounded the ship — cargo, crew and all — in the Great Bitter Lake for three months while negotiating compensation down from an opening claim of $916 million to a confidential settlement.
The ship was never the story
Ever Given is a thoroughly ordinary megamax: Japanese-built, Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, Panama-flagged, one of eleven near-identical sisters. That is the real lesson of the six days. It did not take an extraordinary ship or an extraordinary failure — one routine transit in bad weather was enough to close the most important artery in world trade. The canal has since been widened and deepened in the southern section, and every insurer, charterer and navy planner now keeps a Suez-closure scenario in the drawer. The ship, for her part, went quietly back to work; you can read her full specification, and her place among the giants, on her page.
- The Suez Canal carries ≈12% of global trade and about 30% of container traffic.
- The 2021 blockage was the canal's longest closure since the 1967–1975 shutdown after the Six-Day War.
- Ever Given returned to Suez — successfully — in August 2021, five months after the grounding.