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The International WorkBoat Show returns to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans December 2-4. More than 1,000 exhibitors, upwards of 13,000 attendees, and the one US trade event where the inland, harbor towing, and offshore support segments all show up in the same building. Nord Young will be there. Not exhibiting this year, just walking the floor. The conference program has not been fully published yet, so this is a preview of the exhibit floor rather than a

[Image from Wikimedia Commons, from User Unukorno, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0] On January 9, 2025, a 152,000 dwt crude tanker suffered a total blackout in the Baltic Sea. She drifted unmanned in heavy seas, lost all maneuverability, and came into German territorial waters off the island of Rügen. German authorities towed her to an anchorage off Sassnitz to prevent a spill. She is still there. The Eventin has now been at anchor off a German resort island for more than ni

On the weekend of August 16, the bunkering vessel Haigang Zhiyuan delivered 8,016 metric tonnes of domestically produced green methanol to the dual-fuel container ship CMA CGM Osmium at Yangshan Port in Shanghai. Shanghai Customs supervised the operation. It is the largest single green methanol bunkering on record. The operation brought together Shanghai Electric, Shanghai International Port Group, and CMA CGM, with the fuel supplied principally from Shanghai Electric's Taona

[Chattogram Coastal Road Photo by Samina Khondkar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148921351] On the morning of August 14, workers at the Ferdous Steel yard in Sitakunda, Bangladesh, were cutting an opening in the bottom of a ballast tank aboard a beached LNG carrier. Hydrogen sulphide escaped. Two men died where they stood. Seven more died in hospital. Among the dead was Motiur Rahaman, aged 17. Another was Abdul Alim Sujon, a safety

Two years after Houthi attacks pushed the container trades around the Cape of Good Hope, the largest carriers are transiting the Red Sea again. MSC sent seven boxships through the Suez Canal this month. Maersk returned its MECL service to the trans-Suez route in August, having made its first tentative transit in December. CMA CGM has been running services through the corridor since late last year. What is striking is not that the return is happening. It is how it is happening

Every towing vessel subject to Subchapter M holds a Certificate of Inspection, and every COI was obtained through one of two routes. The Coast Guard issues the certificate either way. What differs is who verifies compliance, how often, and on whose schedule. Operators frequently treat this as a procedural detail settled once at the start of the phase-in and never revisited. It is not. The choice determines your annual cost structure, your exposure to scheduling risk, the amou

Speaking at a campaign event in Garden City, Long Island on August 14, President Trump told an audience of law enforcement officers that "after we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States." He added, "Essentially, that's what it is. We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to." Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded on X within hours. Th

An oil spill off the coast of Oman has spread across somewhere between 390 and 2,000 square kilometers, depending on whose satellite analysis you accept, and reached roughly 40 kilometers of mainland coastline near Ras Madrakah on August 12. The source is a half-sunk tanker called the Caroline Bezengi, aground in the Arabian Sea, leaking crude for approximately six weeks with no effective containment. The vessel is 81,085 gross tons. It has held no classification from an IACS

[Image: USCGC Munro (WMSL-755), the cutter that pursued the Bella 1 across the Atlantic] On August 7, 2026, a 47-year-old Georgian national named Avtandil Kalandadze was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to ten months in federal prison. He will be deported when the term is served. The coverage framed it as a shadow fleet prosecution, which it is. What the coverage mostly did not say is that Kalandadze was not convicted of a sanctions offense. H

On July 19, 2024, a deckhand named among the five crew aboard the towing vessel Miss Peggy drowned in the galley of his own boat after it was struck from behind and rolled over in the Houston Ship Channel. Four of his shipmates got out. He did not. The National Transportation Safety Board released its investigation report on August 6, 2026. It runs 92 pages, and the finding at the center of it is one that every safety manager in the industry should read carefully, because it

Most operators treat renewal as a price negotiation. The broker goes to market, quotes come back, and the conversation is about which number is lowest and whether last year's terms can be held. That framing misses where the leverage sits. By the time quotes are being compared, the underwriter has already formed a view of the risk, and that view was built from the loss runs, the survey report, and a set of judgments about how the operation is run. For a small fleet, those judg

Ten years after it took effect, Subchapter M is no longer a new regulation. It is the operating framework for the entire U.S. towing industry, and the phase-in that occupied everyone's attention between 2016 and 2022 is long finished. What has replaced it is a renewal cycle, and that cycle is producing a specific set of problems right now for operators who obtained their first Certificate of Inspection early. Requirements that were deferred for five years are coming due, and

There is a gap at the center of the marine fuel industry that catches operators out with striking regularity. A cargo of fuel can be delivered fully compliant with the ISO 8217 specification stated in the contract, pass an independent laboratory test against every parameter in the relevant table, and still wreck an engine. The specification and the engine's tolerance are two different things, set by two different bodies, for two different purposes, and the distance between th

For five months, the working assumption across the industry has been that the Strait of Hormuz crisis, however severe, was a single-chokepoint problem with a single-chokepoint solution. Cargo could move west. Saudi crude could reach the Red Sea overland and load at Yanbu. The Cape route was expensive and slow but it existed. Every contingency plan drafted since February rested on the premise that one door was closed and another remained open. As of last Monday, that premise n

Every year, Allianz Commercial publishes its Safety and Shipping Review, a data-driven analysis of global shipping loss trends, incident causes, and emerging risk themes drawn from claim data, industry reporting, and their own underwriting experience. This year's edition landed at a moment when the industry is navigating a degree of geopolitical disruption not seen in decades, and the report reflects that context directly. What it also reflects, however, is a more complex and

"Some careers are chosen. Mine was shaped by the sea, by the contracts signed before cargo leaves port, the disputes that arise when it doesn't arrive as planned, and the infrastructure of global trade that most people never think about until something goes wrong." Where This Comes From My name is Richard Young, and I've spent the better part of my career working inside the maritime industry. Not from the shore, not at sea, but deep in the operational and legal machinery that