Into the Mediterranean

South Pacific Familyadventure 2008
Claes Brodin
Tue 25 Oct 2022 17:08
Heading out of The Bay of Gibraltar we rounded the famous cliff to port and set course due east expecting 3 days and nights under way before making landfall in Palma.
Once coming out to sea we again found loads of cargoships anchored waiting to unload. As far as I understand there`s an ongoing problem with global supplychains that started already before the pandemia. Infrastructure of ports in both Europe and the U.S is in need of investments and labour in the majority of ports is missing. Postpandemia also demands for especially private goods have gone up and obviously the capacity of ports in the western world is not enough to meet the demand.
Cargoships anchored have also become an environmental problem. Anchoring with huge anchors,long chains (5-7 times anchordepth) the ships swinging around their anchors destroys the seabed.
There's a picture showing all ships waiting to unload anchored outside Los Angeles. A great part of cargo was private stuff (read crap-sorry) for Halloween produced in Asia. Things that will be used a couple of days and then most of it will become garbage . From a satelliteperspective such globalised consumption must be madness and yet another sign of how our hysteric worldwide massconsumtion society is ruining the planet.
From a local (and egoistic) perspective I'm like most of us , happy to be able to order Gulf Coast oil filters from the U.S for Dora Mac.

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