In 2021, we started to put the spotlight on our passionate ship spotters. Each month, we introduce another ship spotter of FleetMon.com. In April, you’ll meet Joana (User name: Joanapen), an inland skipper from Bavaria, Germany.

What is your maritime background?

My name is Joana; I‘m 60 years old and live in a small village in the Dachau district near Munich, Germany. I am an inland skipper by profession, mainly driving as a pilot on the Danube between Straubing and Vilshofen. I shoot vessels once a week. From time to time, I also go to other waters as a replacement (vacation or illness replacement) for about 14 days.

Welcome to the first edition of the FleetMon Maritime Gallery. Each month, you’ll find a special section on our blog featuring the best maritime photos in a certain category. You’ll not only get to view the most popular photos being voted by our community for “Photo of the Week” and “Photo of the Month”. You also have the chance to view special shots and photos which are less popular but in the same way extraordinary.

This month, we’ll start with showcasing a selection of the best tugboat photos in our monthly Maritime Gallery. Enjoy great vessel photography!

The French philosopher Voltaire gave this as a reference to the famed shipwrecks in the Bay of Biscay, a gulf of the northeast Atlantic Ocean located south of the Celtic Sea, off the coast of Spain.

The history of human navigation extensively documented shipwrecks off the infamous Spanish Bay, known to many as “The Valley of Death,” “The Vomiting Venus,” and “The Trunk of the Atlantic U-Boat Menace.”

Albeit with the advent of modern technology, improved vessel route prediction, as well as improvements in vessel designing, the number of fatalities in the Bay has considerably reduced. But this shouldn’t stop us from delving into the past! But before we do that, let’s explore the historical context so you know just why the Bay became so infamous among the sailing community back in the days.

Each month, we announce an update on how we extended our terrestrial AIS coverage worldwide. Become an AIS Partner and contribute to Global Maritime Transparency. Please have a look at our latest achievements on the AIS receiving station network.

FleetMon supports students and research partners when it comes to providing AIS data for academic purposes. In 2020, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford reached out to us to receive certain AIS data for a project on the decarbonization of crucial shipping routes.

Read a guest article provided by Professor René Bañares-Alcántara, Reader at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford.

As speed to market is currently critical in tackling the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines are only shipped by air at the moment. In the future, delivery by sea may become a viable alternative. We show the potential that shipping the vaccine by sea holds.

In January 2020, we announced on our blog that we support Steffen Krones, a German film producer, and his project team who reached out to FleetMon seeking a sponsoring partner. They planned to produce a documentary called “Flaschenpost aus Dresden”, covering the question:

Is it possible that trash produces in Germany moves all the way along German rivers ending up in the North Sea or even in the Arctic Ocean to pollute the coast of the Lofoten?

To get answers they built buoys equipped with GPS devices and tracked the buoys’ journey to understand and visualize the influence of human behavior on our world.

2020 has passed quickly and we asked the project team for an update on their documentary project.

In 2021, we started to put the spotlight on our passionate ship spotters. Each month, we introduce another ship spotter or maritime enthusiast of FleetMon.com on the corporate blog. In March, you’ll meet Malcolm Cranfield (User name: Cranfield) from Great Britain.

He became a member of our community in September 2020 and uploaded 55 vessel photos for 33 different ships to FleetMon. Malcolm has an extensive maritime background spanning his entire life.

The maritime folklore of ghost ship, “Flying Dutchman” happens to be very popular and it has inspired hundreds of paintings, books, operas and movies. Are ghost ships only limited to the folklores and Halloween stories? In the world of modern maritime, the term ghost ship has a much more practical meaning.  

Ghost ships are vessels floating with no living crew onboard. These abandoned vessels drift in the ocean and appear suddenly at some coast or are spotted midsea giving rise to a series of questions about ownership, crew safety, environmental hazard, security of state, etc. These vessels could have been abandoned under any unknown circumstances. Later these ships become subject to horror stories as these abandoned vessels have many unanswered questions, such as: What happened to the crew? From where did the vessel arrive? and many more attached to them. It is interesting to learn the reasons behind the abandonment of vessels which later turn up as ghost ships.

The pandemic has been hard on almost all sectors, where many global economies were headed towards a close recession. It was only after when lockdown restrictions eased worldwide that the economic situation began to improve.

One of the sectors that suffered a deadly blow was the shipping industry. Consumer demands dried worldwide and ports were the first to feel the crunch. With declining tonnage throughout 2020, compared to 2019 levels, the only ports that benefited were transshipment hubs like Panama, where ships had to stop over when the US declared a complete lockdown.

Ever since consumer demands began picking up to pre-pandemic levels before Christmas last year, the port sector has seen significant changes. Now, American ports, being backed by considerable investments are eying for the future. New container terminals are being built with private-sector partners, showing the way for construction companies worldwide.