Set sail with maritime historian Sal Mercogliano as we dive deep into the enduring mystery of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a legendary ship lost on the Great Lakes 50 years ago this week. From chilling tales of mariners’ lives and the critical role of iron ore trade, to the evolving challenges facing commercial shipping, this episode explores what really happened that stormy night in 1975—and why the story resonates today. Join host Jeff Malec and Sal for a wide-ranging conversation about Great Lakes lore, the economics and environmental impact of shipping, and what the future holds for this vital but often-overlooked industry. Whether you’re a shipping enthusiast or new to the story, you’ll come away with fresh insights and a newfound appreciation for the ships and people that keep goods moving around the globe. SEND IT!
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From the Episode:
Sal Mercoglianos Youtube Channel – What’s going on with Shipping?
Highlighted Seafaring movies:
Action in the North Atlantic
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
When the Gales of November Come Early: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and Modern Maritime Trade with Sal Mercogliano
Sal Mercogliano 00:19
Hi, I’m Sal Mercogliano. We’re here to talk about the Edmund Fitzgerald and shipping on The Derivative.
Jeff Malec 00:24
The derivative by our same alternatives, send it you in
Jeff Malec 01:02
South thanks for coming on. How are you?
Sal Mercogliano 01:04
Thanks for having me on. I’m good. There’s a there’s a lot of shit going on around the world.
Jeff Malec 01:11
Campbell University, Maritime College. I love the background here. What? Tell us quickly. Where’s Campbell? Sure.
Sal Mercogliano 01:18
So Campbell is in North Carolina, so about halfway between Raleigh and Fayetteville, North Carolina, I’ve been a professor here for 15 years. I’m the Chair of the Department of History, and I’m a maritime historian. So back in a former career, went to Maritime College, New York Maritime College, and I sailed as a merchant mariner for about seven years till I swallowed the anchor.
Jeff Malec 01:41
That’s That’s what they say when you retire. Swallowed the anchor.
Sal Mercogliano 01:44
That’s it. I didn’t retire, just I kind of transitioned out of shipping. I came down with a condition that precluded me from continuing my sailing career. I got married.
Jeff Malec 01:55
What were those trips like? Tell us a little bit about that life. You’re going great months at a time.
Sal Mercogliano 02:01
I love sailing. It was, it was one of my favorite jobs in the world. As a kid, growing up in New York, I wanted to get out and go see places. I used to see the ships coming in and out of the channel, Ambrose channel, into New York Harbor. And to me, that was, that was my opportunity to see the world. And I did. I loved it was a great job. It’s just it was a very lonely job at the time. And one of the big problems with being a mariner is you’re away from home for huge periods of time. Little bit better today, with some technology that allows you to be a little bit more connected. But still, it’s a very tough and very quiet life. Big problem today that ships don’t spend much time at all in port, so shore leave is not a big thing. You’re you make money by moving the ships, not by sitting in port.
Jeff Malec 02:42
And what kind of ships were you on?
Sal Mercogliano 02:46
I sailed for, actually the US Navy, for an outfit called military seal of command. So I operated a lot of ships for the US Navy. So some underway replenishment vessels. I was on some cargo ships, the hospital ship comfort during the Persian Gulf War. And then I worked for military sea of command, chartering vessels, and so I worked on a batch of a float pre positioning ships for the Army and the Marine Corps. So I got a chance to work on the private sector, working with those ships that we leased and chartered, and then working for government owned ships.
Jeff Malec 03:15
Did those become Navy, part of the fleet when they become chartered or they’re still public?
Sal Mercogliano 03:20
No, they Well, they’re, they’re owned by the government. But what most people don’t know is that about one out of five ships in the US Navy have civilian crews on board, and so they’re mainly the auxiliary vessels. And so I was part of those crews that operated
Jeff Malec 03:33
them, even in God forbid, if we had a war or something. What happens with that setup? Yep,
Sal Mercogliano 03:38
they say civilian man. And so civilian Manning of Navy ships is not actually uncommon. We’ve seen it before. Sailing masters. Ships that are owned by the Navy but crewed by civilians have been around for a very long time. The Royal Navy has it with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. It’s been around since 1905 Yeah.
Jeff Malec 03:55
What was that movie Dunkirk, where they’re all going over in their in their private boats to rescue everybody,
Sal Mercogliano 04:02
yep, and they impounded the vessels and took them over. Most of them were actually in Dunkirk. Most of them had military crews put on, but some civilians did take their vessels over. All
Jeff Malec 04:18
right, well, I’m wearing my T shirt my Edmund, Switzerland, which I got from the Great Lakes Maritime Museum, I believe, like in Duluth or something. So 50 years ago, Edmund Fitzgerald, so let’s one. I want to ask you, as a historian, is it do you get sick of this? Are you like, Oh, this is overdone. Why does everyone only care about the Edmund Fitzgerald? Or is it fun? Like someone plugs into history every now and
Sal Mercogliano 04:44
then? No, I, I like that. People get interested in it. I mean, I don’t think people know about this, this story, unless it’s Gordon Lightfoot making the muse of the song. But to me, it’s, it’s a, you know, ideal, you know, I have a YouTube channel where I talk about shipping. All the time, and lots of times where I see a lot of upticks in my channel is when there’s a disaster or something happening, and I try to take those moments to educate people about it. It’s kind of what I did in my most recent video on the Fitzgerald. I didn’t recap the Fitzgerald because there’s plenty of people out there have done that and done it very well. What I wanted to do was kind of talk about why the Great Lakes matter, and what the crew, the 29 mariners, were doing on board Edmund Fitzgerald back in November of 1975 Holding, holding iron ore from Duluth heading to Toledo, Ohio, you know, because that’s a key trade route, and it’s essential for US manufacturing to get that ore out of Minnesota, over to Ohio and into the steel plants.
Jeff Malec 05:43
So did Gordon screw it up? Didn’t he say they’re bound for Cleveland? They’re bound for Toledo. Well, they,
Sal Mercogliano 05:50
I don’t think Toledo sounded good in the song. So, and they offloaded in several ports, so they were heading to Toledo and Cleveland. So, I mean, you’re, you have a little literary license when you’re when you’re making a song. But I think, I think the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald really resonates. Because, again, we tend not to think that a vessel 730 something feet long can just disappear and take all the crew with them. I mean, no evidence of the crew has ever been found. There was, you know, and there was a ship the Arthur Andersen right by it at the time, and yet one ship survives, one doesn’t. And I think that’s the nature, and we’ve seen that happen recently with stories like The ever given in the Suez and the Dali in Baltimore, how these ships can really Captivate all of a sudden people’s imaginations.
Jeff Malec 06:38
So 737, feet, and that design, what do you call the design of that ship?
Sal Mercogliano 06:44
She was a, she was a seaway Laker. So she was designed to navigate all the canals in the Great Lake and get out into the St Lawrence Seaway. So the welling Canal, which connects Lake Erie to Ontario, it has a has a constraint. It has a limit to it. And so you got to be under 737 you got to be less than 75 feet wide. You have to be able to get through the canal to get up. And she was really never designed to go out into this, out into the Atlantic, but she was designed to carry or up into the St Lawrence seaway to deposit it into areas along the Seaway so that it could be loaded onto other ships to take it across the oceans.
Speaker 1 07:24
That I used to be a sailor did a lot of big boat sailing out in the ocean and whatnot, but then also inland lake sailing. So I think of it as a scow, right? If you’re in a Midwestern Lake, you have the scow very low beam, or sideboard, right? Very low sideboard, bright and skinny, yeah. So it’s not ocean worthy. Was that something going on here, right? Like the waves became ocean waves, but it wasn’t really ocean worthy. Well,
Sal Mercogliano 07:56
I mean, the great, great lakes are always a misnamed area to me, because they’re oceans. They’re seas. I mean, they’re massive. I mean, you think of a lake, and you kind of get away from what the Great Lakes truly are. She was designed for that type of sea. I mean, I don’t think that was really the issue. I mean, everybody knew the type of seas you can get. I mean, the gales and superior and Huron can be rough. I mean, you have that long area stretch where you can get some really good rollers built up to it. Obviously, her cargo was unique, because she was carrying a very type, unique type of steel pellets that were very heavy. So she was not fully I mean, she was weighted down, but she wasn’t fully loaded to the brim, which creates some problems on ships, especially bulk carriers like that, because you get the free service effect here. The cargo can shift. And then you know what we don’t know, and this is the huge mystery of Edmund Fitzgerald, is she reported a list, and she reported flooding, which means that she was taking water into the holes, which creates even a bigger problem, because then that iron ore becomes almost like a slurry. It will shift to each side, and you get instability in the vessel. So she either cracked their hole because of the waves, did she touch bottom? Did the hatch covers pop loose? We just don’t know. I mean, this is always the great mystery of Edmund Fitzgerald. And you know, we’ve done a lot of examinations of the of the wreck, and in truth, we just don’t know. We have conflicting reports from the NTSB and the Coast Guard on this.
Jeff Malec 09:21
What did they do that with their submersibles have gone down there and everyone, everything. How deep is it sitting?
Sal Mercogliano 09:26
It’s not, it’s not very deep where she’s at. It’s, it’s, I want to think it’s about just 100 feet or so. It’s not too terribly deep. When it happened in 75 they actually brought a Navy p3 Orion anti submarine plane out to find it. They actually use their magnetic anomaly detector, which detects large steel in the ocean. So they found her very quickly. And then in the spring, I think was March, they actually brought, this is 1975 or 76 at this time, they really don’t have ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, so they brought a submersible in and actually dived on the wreck. And so they found her. I mean, she was clearly identified. You can see the name, and everybody knew exactly what she was. And what they found was she had broken in half. The stern had flipped over, was separated from her, but not very far from her, which indicates she went down kind of together. At the moment, contents of her hull had spilled out, and there was, uh, damage to, obviously, the bow, where the bow implanted into the bottom. But they, you know, some of the hatch covers, the hatch covers, they had had these big clamps on them. Some of the clamps had been lost. Some of the hatch covers had been blown off. But again, what we don’t know is where the hatch covers lost during the storm or when the ship struck the bottom. And so it’s been very hard to kind of forensically rebuild the model here, because of the damage, and especially because a lot of the surveys weren’t done for years afterwards.
Speaker 1 10:51
And what was the How come no one could escape lifeboats whatnot, too rough or just wasn’t designed with safety in mind, like a titanic issue.
Sal Mercogliano 11:02
Well, I mean, I mean, this story is very reminiscent of a story that happened in 2015 with another American ship called the El Faro, which was lost in a hurricane off the coast of Cuba, down in the Caribbean. And very much in the same way, what tends to happen here is the sinking tends to be very fast and catastrophic, and the crew cannot get to the boats, plus being in a small boat in a storm like that is very difficult. Launching, launching a lifeboat in calm weather is not an easy thing to do sometimes, and doing it in extremely rough weather is even worse. And probably the crew was hunkered down in the ship they were, you know, again, they were getting close to safety and white, white fish bay that, you know, all I had to do is get around the point, and they would have been in calm waters. And so they probably did when it happened. It probably happened very quick, very suddenly, so that the crew could not go. I mean, it is a desperate act to decide to leave a ship to get into a lifeboat in the storm. It’s not something that’s done with with any sort of Yale. Let’s go do this, because you’re in a worse situation in many ways.
Jeff Malec 12:12
And when you were mentioning the story of the 29 just of what they were doing like that was their job. They were moving this iron ore, and you mentioned in your video you knew one of them, or you said you don’t usually do once you know people.
Sal Mercogliano 12:27
I’ve met some of the families. I’ve been to some events in the past where I’ve met family members. I know anybody of the crew, because it was 75 I was really young at the time, but I’ve met family members at events up and around on the commemoration of it. So it’s always hard, and I’ve seen basically all the family members give their talks and and in truth, you know, even, even as a mariner, if you don’t know somebody, you know exactly who they are, because there are certain types that sail. And you know that the Great Lakes are really unique because they’re, they’re, you know, they’re their own little area. Very unique kind of service, because you shut down in the wintertime when the lakes ice up and the locks shut down. So typically, you know, end of the season, December, January, you shut down. The Sioux locks usually shut down to maybe March, so you get about four months off. But during the rest of the season, you’re running non stop. So it’s a really laborious, you know, from March to to December, January, you’re running really crazy. You usually have multiple crews. So you’re rotating crews on the ships. It’s fast voyages, you know, you can get from Duluth to Cleveland, and, you know, less than a week. So it’s a fast voyage, you know. So you’re, you know, you’re always churning on the lake, moving moving cargo as quick, as fast as you can. And so it’s a very unique environment. And Great Lakes sailors are unique. They will always tell you they’re unique because they operate in such a unique environment. To sail on the lakes, you need pilotage for the officers, so you have to know the lakes really, really well, obviously, you’re going through canals. So su locks, which are huge, are big ones, because they can handle ships up to 1000 feet. Is much bigger. You know, there are ships that can’t get out of the Great Lakes. You know, the Welland Canal shuts them onto the four upper lakes. And so you have these 1000 footers now that run on the lakes. But it’s also an older fleet, the most the newest vessel in the US fleet, the mark Barker, came on just a few years ago, and that is the first modern Laker built in 40 years.
Jeff Malec 14:29
Where is it? Adam? They’re all out of Lake Superior. They’re all Canadian, or they’re us, us.
Sal Mercogliano 14:35
These are all US built ships. So US has this provision called the Jones Act, which is section 27 of the merch marine act of 1927, which you have to be a US, owned us, built us, flag us, cargo. Us, us. Flag vessel to operate, to move cargo between us. Ports, Canadian law is different.
Jeff Malec 14:54
I thought that was only in regards to energy, to oil that’s for everything. No, it’s for. Cargo, right? You already
Sal Mercogliano 15:01
hear it, usually anything you move. So so a ship like Edmund Fitzgerald was built in Ohio, for example. And so us, owned us, flagged us, crude us operated. Canadians are different, because Canadians will allow foreign built ships in so you see a lot of Chinese built in Korean and Japanese built vessels up on the up on the lakes, but they’ll operate on the Canadian side. They’ll come into us ports, because they’ll operate between both ports, but inherently within the US trade. You have to fit those parameters.
Speaker 1 15:30
And last bit on Edmund Fitzgerald, then we’ll go back into the Great Lakes of the crew. Like, were these guys educated? Were they making $10,000 a year. Like, what was the, what was the kind of life like for them was
Sal Mercogliano 15:46
so? So, I mean, your crew is kind of divided up into three different areas. You have the deck crew, so these are the bridge officers, and then you have the engine crew. These are the ones down in the engine room. Then you have the stewards, the ones you do the cooking, kind of the housekeeping type stuff. So that’s your basic arrangement on a ship. Crew of 29 so you probably the majority of them are engineers, because engineering takes the most on a ship. You need the most amount of crew on that you’ll have, you know your captain, your chief mate, second mate, third mate. You’ll have some unlicensed personnel on board. They probably all right from the lakes. I mean, all Great Lakes is really unique in that everybody’s usually right from that air. Right from that area. Some ways, some of the officers were educated over at Great Lakes maritime over in Michigan. Others will do what’s called come through the haws pipe. They work as an unlicensed and you work your way up through the licenses. You basically get sea time, then you sit for your Coast Guard license, and you go to your next license. And so a lot of these guys have been sailing for a long time, for many years, a couple of new guys on board too. And you know, you always get that mix of the kind of the old grizzled sailors have been doing it for 2030, years. You get your new guys coming on board, earning some money. It’s good pay. It’s one of the allures of it. It’s a really good pay. It’s a meritocracy. So, you know, you know, do your time, get your license, and you get to move up the ranks. And so for a lot of guys, they liked it. They love, I always love the idea of sailing for a few months and then being off for a few months. You know, it beats that nine to five weekends. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, you work hard for a couple of months and then you’re off for a couple of months. And so you get to do whatever you want to do. So I became a college professor afterwards, because I get my summers off. I like that deal
Jeff Malec 17:23
room and boards covered. Or they have, like, a ship store mentality. If you get
Sal Mercogliano 17:27
a no usually, room and board and food is covered for you, but they do have a ship store, so if you want to buy more stuff, and you know, back in the day, when they pull into Duluth or Toledo or Cleveland, they were in for a while, because, you know, loading ships was not the vast especially a bulk carrier, takes a bit of time to load those vessels so they were able to get ashore. Obviously, being in the United States, it’s nice you don’t have issues with visas and passports and things like that, so that you can go ashore. And you know, right outside the port in Duluth, they were there, you know, stores and restaurants and bars where you can go to and they so, you know, a lot of local Hangouts for these mariners to go, go into. So it was a very kind of unique little style. The families, you know, knew each other, you know, and then your relief crews would come on board. And you know, sometimes, you know, it’d be, you know, if you were a captain on this ship, you were captain for a set period of time, you may have a relief Captain come on board who, you know. And so you’re kind of swapping off between two people. It creates a very unique environment operating on the ships. What’s the
Jeff Malec 18:28
competition between the ocean going cruise and the Great Lakes cruise to the ocean? Guys be like, Oh, you, you wimps. You just you travel in the lakes and you’re in a port within a day, like, Come on,
Sal Mercogliano 18:39
everybody rags, everybody in the maritime industry. So it doesn’t matter if you’re ocean or Great Lakes. It depends what ships you’re on. I mean, no one’s as good as what you’re doing all the time. So if I’m on a container ship, it’s better than the tankers. It’s better than the cruise ship guys, they’re terrible. And then, you know, you get on the Great Lakes, and, oh, you guys are puddle jumpers. You guys, you know, run the Great Lakes. It’s, you know, you’re not even out in a real ocean and and in truth, I’ve sailed up in the Great Lakes. And man, it can be rough. It can be it’s a rough type of environment. It’s cold, it’s brew when that wind comes in off of the plains of Canada. Holy cow, I don’t think I’ve ever been as cold as in my life. As up on superior it is. It is a rough, rough, frigid area to be in. And plus, you gotta, you know, you gotta be tough navigating. You gotta go through the locks. It is, it is a it’s a grind. Sometimes long voyages are better than short voyages because, you know, you get time to kind of kick back and relax. Crossing the Pacific is nice. You know, when, when you leave Duluth in a day or two, you’re at, you know, you’re at the locks, and then you’re, you’re working again, yeah. And then you’re sailing between, you know, Detroit, which is always a pain because it’s shallow and it’s a narrow channel, so you’re always, kind of always fighting things. And the lakes are notoriously dangerous. I mean, more ships sunk in the Great Lakes than the Bermuda Triangle, for example.
Jeff Malec 19:54
Really, yep. Who knew? You knew? That’s why we need historian. I.
Jeff Malec 20:05
So let’s talk Great Lakes. I’m here in Chicago. Obviously love our lakes. I’ve done the Chicago to Mackinac race. I’ve done Port Huron Mackinac race. I’ve done some racing out of Bay View in Superior so have been on the water on all these lakes. You see the ships, but not as much as I would think from watching your channel and learning about how much shipping is actually going on in the Great Lakes, right? So it’s rare to be sitting here in Chicago and to see a ship out on the horizon, really. So tell us if you have just generally or if you have specific stats of like, what does the actual today’s shipping volume. What are they shipping? Where is it going? Inside the Great Lakes.
Sal Mercogliano 20:46
So if you look at the region of the Great Lakes from Duluth like Montreal, I mean, you’re talking about, I think the numbers for 2022 was roughly over 200,000 tons of cargo, or moved on the Great Lakes. That’s just, it’s American, Canadian. Everybody involved there is moving cargo in and around the Great Lakes for 2024 just the American ships move roughly around 78 million tons of cargo around the Great Lakes. The vast majority of that is iron. I mean, over 50% of that is iron ore. Then you get limestone, you get coal, you get cement, you get salt. About, about a little over a million tons of salt are moved around the Great Lakes. So a lot of Margarita is obviously being drunk around the Great Lakes at this time. What you don’t see moved around the Great Lakes a lot is grain. That’s not a big movement around that. But, you know, Chicago is key. You know, one of the things I always talk about when I do my maritime history course is Chicago is created as a city because it’s the very bottom of Lake Michigan, but it connects to the Illinois River, which connects to the inland waterway system of the Mississippi River. And so when you when you take Chicago, you take the Illinois River, you connect it to Buffalo with the Erie Canal in 1825, you create a waterway system that literally creates the eastern half of the US into an island. You can sail from Chicago down Illinois, Mississippi, out New Orleans, back up to New York, up the Hudson, across Erie to Buffalo, and then circle around. And that’s the great transportation system. It’s what opens up the Midwest to the United States, because you got the Appalachian Mountains, because it was hard to get up the Mississippi River because of the current. Now, all of a sudden you open up that area, and so, yeah, it becomes this massive inland waterway system. I always joke that the War of 1812 was fought so that we can grab the St Lawrence so that we can have an inland waterway system that wasn’t always dependent on the Mississippi unfortunately, we weren’t able to liberate the Canadians. So then, do they? They live in their squalor as Canadians and not as as good Americans. I’m just
Jeff Malec 22:50
Yeah, and what? What’s the largest ship that can make that route? Like, what it’s that? Uh, canal, you mentioned before? What was it? The
Sal Mercogliano 22:59
wall away? Well, in Canal keeps you locked in and to go
Jeff Malec 23:02
from Erie into the St Lawrence, that’s Erie into
Sal Mercogliano 23:06
Ontario, and then into St Lawrence. So you have, you have a series of locks between you gotta go through the Sioux locks, between superior and Huron. And those are the big locks. Those are the big 1000 foot long locks. Then you have the locks, the welling canal locks that go from Erie into Ontario. And then there’s a series of locks, the Eisenhower locks, and some Canadian locks that take you down the Seaway. You have to step down from Ontario into the St Lawrence when you’re on superior you’re about 600 feet above sea level, and so you’ve got to step down all the way to get there
Jeff Malec 23:41
Niagara. Yeah, right, right. And
Sal Mercogliano 23:43
that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s the big step in the welling canal. It takes you, without going over the, going over a barrel in the in the Niagara Falls, and then to go into the Illinois River. That tends to be tugs and barges. So that’s not very large vessels. It tends to be barge traffic that is going through there, because above St Louis, you’re in locks. You’re in dams and locks. And so what you tend to see here are barge and tug. So you usually, what you’ll see limited in those rivers is usually about 15 barges, about about five wide, three long, nested together. And that tends to be about the limit you can get through the lock system north of St Louis. St Louis,
Jeff Malec 24:22
I used to have a buddy worked for some company doing barge traffic. And he right. He’s like, this the cheapest transport there is
Sal Mercogliano 24:30
on the bar is, and it’s, it’s, you know, I
Jeff Malec 24:33
didn’t realize they’re still doing barges and canals. I’m like, wait, what?
Sal Mercogliano 24:37
Oh yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s massive in many ways. Barges are like, you know, they are the ant seeds of containers. And because you use barges for that, the problem you have on the Mississippi River is, number one, past three years is we’ve had massive droughts, and so it creates a lot of problems. And using it so, not so much a problem above St Louis, because you have the locks and dams which can control the water below the St Louis. Because you’re at the mercy of the river, and the river can be really a pain and and what happens is, when you start hitting low water in the Lower Mississippi, you’ve got to limit the number of barges. When you get down below St Louis, you can actually have 40 barges on a tow, but you start decreasing that once you start getting low water, plus your drafts start changing. So you go from 12 Foot draft on barges to nine and a half foot and that just reduces your your capacity. What you tend to see doing on the barges is, is, is, is bulk material, it’s grain, it’s ore, it’s coal. That’s what you’re moving all the time. They’re trying to change that now one of the things, one of the big pushes right now is to get the UP, UP river traffic to start bringing containers via the barges up that’s always been a slow transition.
Jeff Malec 25:48
And did they still do the same pellets that were in the Edmund Fitzgerald, or did they? Did they figure out a better way to do that?
Sal Mercogliano 25:55
Types of different types of war that they do that that type of ore was a very heavy type of ore that they were using. So yeah, you get different mixes and and I’m not an expert on all cargo coming out of the Great Lakes right now, but they do different levels. So the ships are also designed to carry or a little bit differently. Now, lot of the ships are self loading, self discharging, so you’ll see a lot of the ore carriers now have their own cranes on board, that gets you away from having to use facilities on shore, that that’s a little bit more effective in cost to do it, because a lot of the problems was a lot of infrastructure costs in the ability to load ore and coal on facilities, and it gives you a little bit more versatility with the ships.
Jeff Malec 26:38
And meanwhile, I think Chicago is planning take out this whole area and basically that used to be steel plant, and turn it into, like a quantum mechanics Research Center or something. So right at the same time, you’re losing a lot of the infrastructure, right? They’re not building more of it.
Sal Mercogliano 26:55
That’s happening everywhere. I mean, unfortunately, you know where you know key loading and facilities are for shipping. It’s also hot real estate area for developments, whether commercial or residential. And so we see that transitioning everywhere. It’s a really tough thing. You know, especially if you look at shipbuilding in the United States, a lot of shipbuilding facilities are right there in urban areas. So the land is worth more for its real estate value than it is for maybe it’s shipbuilding value.
Jeff Malec 27:23
Where do they build all the ships these days? Or are we building ships? Like, let’s get into that for a second. Like, right? I think there was some news a little while ago. Most of the shipbuilding is in Asia, I believe.
Sal Mercogliano 27:33
Oh, yeah. 94% of all ships are built in three countries, China, Japan and Korea. And China builds last year, 51% of all the world ships. They’re on track to build over 60% this year. And that kicked off a big issue by President Trump. We had an executive order come out from him. We had this US Trade Representative, section 301, report come out about port fees for Chinese owned Chinese built ships. We had the introduction of what’s called the ships act by Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat from Arizona, and then Senator Todd Young from Republican from Indiana, pushed this in. So they’re trying to rekindle commercial shipbuilding back in the United States. What the US has done, largely since the 1980s is outsource our domestic ship building overseas. Literally the only ships we build in the United States right now are Navy warships. So we’ve got a series of shipyards that do that. Bath Iron up in Maine, electric boat in Groton, Connecticut, Newport News in Virginia, you have Pascagoula, which is Huntington Ingalls down in Mississippi. And then you have NASCO in San Diego.
Jeff Malec 28:46
Then you have Jimmy Buffet song, Pascagoula run, Oh, yeah. And because
Sal Mercogliano 28:50
there’s a big shipbuilding place down there, and then we have one yard that’s doing commercial and that’s really the old Philadelphia Navy Yard, which was bought by Han WA, which is a Korean shipbuilder. And so they’re doing commercial shipbuilding. They’re building three container ships right now for Matson lines that operates between the west coast and Hawaii and Alaska. But what we’re trying to do is kind of restart shipbuilding in the United States. The problem is it’s expensive. Anything you stop doing and you try to restart is going to be expensive, and the Chinese heavily subsidized. Give a lot of of support to that sector of their their industry. And matter of fact, what they’re trying to do is run the Japanese and Koreans out of business. So they’re they’re doing everything they can to undercut the big competition out there. And it’s one of the reasons why we see Hanwha from Korea, Hyundai from Japan coming over to the United States and trying to start doing shipbuilding in the United States. They see the US market as a viable market.
Jeff Malec 29:49
So if I’m, if I’m one of those Korean firm building it in the US that counts under the these new laws that it’s us built, well,
Sal Mercogliano 29:58
it depends on what sector you’re building. To, and it depends on what percentage of the ship is actually built in the United States. Ship building has changed since that law was passed back in 1920 a lot of things that we do with ships today are shipyards or assembly yards. You bring the components together and you build it together. So your propeller may come from Germany, your engine may come from Italy. And it’s really a measure of what percentage of the ship is built in the US to whether or not you can do domestic trade, the coastwise trade. You can be a foreign built ship and be engaged in international trade. There’s no problem with that. You can be a Korean built, Japanese built, we even have Chinese built ships that fly the US flag and conduct international trade. You can do that. What they’re trying to do is try to get us domestic shipbuilding back up again. The US is us is very strange in that we have the 23rd largest Merchant Marine in the world, so we’re tiny in terms of overall scale of fleets. However, Americans are the fourth largest investors in shipping, so we’re willing to put money in the shipping. We just don’t put them into American shipping, and that’s because we want to see that return on investment. And you get more of a return on investment with foreign shipping than you do with American shipping. And one of the things I testified before Congress the other week was we have to create the environment where Americans want to invest in American shipping. What can we do to promote that shipping environment?
Jeff Malec 31:20
You’re just casually dropping that, like when I testified before Congress the other week. Yeah, it’s first time I’ve ever done it. So it’s how was it nerve wracking or or weird? It
Sal Mercogliano 31:30
was nervous. It was I was very nervous. I got called by Senator Sullivan Velasquez office, and I thought they were calling me to ask questions for the Senator to ask a panel. And then about halfway through the discussion, they said, Do you want to come testify? It’s like I never testified before, and so I did the testimony. And it was very disconcerting to see senators who you see on TV, yeah, right there before when Ted Cruz comes rolling in. It’s kind of weird. It’s a weird feeling when you see him come in. Nothing strange. He was, he was great. He was, he was he was he was the only guy who got my name right, by the way, only one who nailed my name perfectly. I
Jeff Malec 32:06
want to ask if there is dumbest they seem on TV, but we’ll leave that for a different podcast. Their
Sal Mercogliano 32:11
staffs are very interesting because they ask a lot of questions. And I will say on the shipping aspect, they’re asking a lot of good questions right now. What’s really interesting about it was the Senate Commerce Committee. I’ve watched tons, a lot, I’m sure, like you have Jeff, you watch, I’ve watched tons of testimony with this. It is not like a judiciary or a typical congressional hearing where the Democrats and Republicans are going at each other. They’re going for the sound bites and and points, right? This was the most bipartisan. And this is a topic that really does draw bipartisanship, because I think they all realize the importance of trade and shipping to the American economy.
Jeff Malec 32:48
Are we? So we’re 23rd maritime. That means just the the people in the industry and whatnot,
Sal Mercogliano 32:54
number of ships and tonnage in the ship. So that’s what we start talking about when we talk about 23rd
Jeff Malec 32:59
in the world. But we’re number one in terms of incoming, in terms of stuff coming to us from ships.
Sal Mercogliano 33:05
Oh, yeah, it was definitely the number one importer and trade. So you definitely see that China is very close, but China, understand, China is a massive importer, largely of raw materials and components or assembly in China. I was just at I did a visit over to Australia to give a talk, and I went to this port in Northern Australia called Port Headland. No one’s ever heard of this place. When I was at Port Hedland, it’s loaded with ore carriers, kind of like what you see with the Edmund Fitzgerald, but these are ocean going vessels. There were two dozen of these ships in Port Hedland, and they’re loading coal, iron and lithium, and it’s like a line of ants coming out of Port Headland in Northern Australia, heading to China, Korea and Japan. I’ll give you the number. Last year, they loaded 778 million tons of cargo. 778 million tons. That’s 10 times what the US carries on the Great Lakes, 778, that’s 5% of global tonnage comes out of that one
Jeff Malec 34:07
port, one Harbor, which I’ve never heard of before. Yeah, right. And it’s crazy.
Sal Mercogliano 34:11
It’s insane because the port is like I was in a tugboat in the middle of the harbor, and you see all the boats wrapped around and it is, it is an insane environment. And they have 40 ships anchored off the dock, off the port, waiting to come in, because they don’t want every every hour. You know that they’re not moving cargo is $5 million and so they want cargo moving all the
Jeff Malec 34:32
time. I thought China had all the lithium and all that stuff. So they’re, they’re still want some from elsewhere as well.
Sal Mercogliano 34:39
Oh yeah, they’re importing massive from Australia. Australia is a huge feeder into that system, and that goes to Chinese imports. China is a massive import of raw materials, oil, natural gas, you name it. I mean, you just see the amount that they import. It’s it’s absolutely fascinating. We tend to think China is this massive exporter, but in truth, they import more than they export in terms of tonnage, mm.
Jeff Malec 35:04
You mentioned natural gas, so I’ll have to for all our energy trader listeners, LNG, vessels and infrastructure. What’s, what’s that future look like? Seems like we kind of always start and stop and start and stop there.
Sal Mercogliano 35:19
Well, I mean, since 2016 we’ve become the largest exporter. I think last year, last month, was the biggest month in American exports. Over 100 million tons of LNG went out last month. Obviously, the Trump administration’s got a favorable environment now, so we’re seeing LNG licenses and port port construction going on, we’re definitely seeing that there’s an effort to try to build liquefied natural gas carriers in the US. Hanwha is talking about building one, if not two, liquefied natural gas carriers in it. I’m a big proponent. I think we should be doing everything we can to be reflagging in liquefied natural gas carriers into the US registry, even waiving the build requirement temporarily in the United States to get that LNG, so we can move it within the United States, particularly Alaskan LNG coming out of Alaska down to the lower 48 LNG coming from the Gulf Coast up to New England. Because New York won’t allow them to build that pipeline into New England. I think it has to do with the Red Sox. So, you know, starving them of that same thing over to Puerto Rico, I think, you know, I’m
Jeff Malec 36:26
that’s back to that Jones Act where it has to be a US flagship to bring that into another US port, right?
Sal Mercogliano 36:33
And one of the things I said when I I did my testimony, I sat there and said, Listen, we need to reform it. I’m the, you know, I’m a staunch stone ex guy. I believe that. I don’t believe in repealing it. I do believe we need to reform it, and we need to have that discussion. Problem you have in this Jeff is there’s two camps. There’s there’s the anti Jones Act and there’s the pro Jones Act. And those two do not get along, and none of them want to take a step down their mountain top for fear that the other one pounces. I don’t care. I’m a tenured professor. I could say whatever the heck. I feel like, yeah, I will tell you that the right decision here is to have a good discussion about reform so that we can do what’s best. I think LNG is our big export. It’s a massive export. We’ve seen it happening, but there are issues with LNG exports. In the United States. Last year, we had low water in the Panama Canal that disrupted LNG exports to Asia tremendously. It created problems, because when the big Lane in the Panama Canal, the new lane that opened in 2016 that only handles 10 ships a day, when low water hit the Panama Canal, it went from 10 ships a day down to eight, down to six at some points, and then you had a reduced draft on the vessels. And what Panama did is they started bidding out processes so that you can basically pay millions of dollars to get through the canal. And what we saw was LNG shipments shifted from we were fortunate in the US that we could shift our LNG shipments to Europe at the time, because natural gas shipments from Russia were down,
Jeff Malec 38:02
and what, what’s it look like to build one of those LNG ships? That’s as expensive as it gets.
Sal Mercogliano 38:08
It is, I wouldn’t say it’s the most expensive, because we there are some very elaborate drilling platforms and ships, because drilling platforms are ships, yeah, but they are expensive. It’s the cooling process. The way we load liquefied natural, the way we liquefy it is cool it. I mean, we just super cool it. And so you’ve got to put on the it used to be pressure. We used to use pressure vessels, which were really dangerous. Now, what we do is we super cool it down to, I think it’s like 210, 270, I forget what it is, below zero and and it’s a very expensive process. The plants are really expensive to build. The ship itself isn’t that expensive. The hull and the engineering, you know, is kind of bait. It’s kind of a big, huge, open tanker. It’s the LNG tanks you put in them that are the expensive
Jeff Malec 38:53
aspect. Those big balls they look like, right? Looks like
Sal Mercogliano 38:57
pressure vessels. Most LNG carriers you’ll see today have it almost looks like, almost looks like a shed on top of it. It’s kind of a little bit of a slope, almost like a roof structure, and that’s where you do the cooling. And so it’s the refrigeration process on board, because what you have to do is, is refrigerate the gas as it comes on board, and then you have to kind of re gasify it coming off the vessel. And so they were very expensive. If either you have a facility on shore, they do that, or you have a vessel that does it for you. So that’s where the ships get really expensive.
Speaker 1 39:33
And when natural gas is at four bucks, starts to not make sense at some point, if you have to spend all that money on the but if we’re pulling it out of the ground, basically for free, to where it makes sense,
Jeff Malec 39:52
let’s talk the future. So one, if you have all these ships or buildings, would you say China built 50 some.
Sal Mercogliano 40:02
Um, world ships. Oh, 51%
Jeff Malec 40:04
like, how many ships is that? Like, hundreds?
Sal Mercogliano 40:06
Oh, you’re building roughly each year, maybe around 1200 ships. So you’re talking about six, 700 ships a year. They’re building.
Jeff Malec 40:14
How many are coming offline? Like, a couple 100?
Sal Mercogliano 40:18
Well, that’s one of the one of the big problems we’re seeing right now is we’re not scrapping our recycling ships the way we should. So what we’re seeing is the fleet’s aging. We’re going from average was about 19 years for a ship now down to 21 ship. Ship owners buy ships when they have cash in their pocket. That’s when you buy ships. So for example, what we saw happen during the supply chain crisis was container companies, which had cash in their pocket, because they made huge amount of money invested in buying large container ships, tanker market. LNG, carriers are starting now to buy some money because the market, the tanker market, has always been tough. They I’ve been hearing for decades now, hey, the tankers are going to rebound. And like, tankers don’t LNG a little bit better because of the demand that’s out there. So we’re seeing LNG carriers being built. But building ships right now are a real big issue, because you may have you know, and your viewers may have seen the US opposed this new net zero framework over in the International Maritime Organization, this was an effort to reduce carbon emissions on shipping substantially by 2040 with potential to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 that means you’ve got to build new propulsion plants that are capable of reducing carbon emissions. If you build a ship today, in 2025 that ship is going to be good for 15 to 25 years, you’re conceivably building a ship that, in 2040 has got it regulated out to be modified to reduce that carbon emission. If you can’t reduce that emission, you may have a ship that you have to get rid of early. And what we’re seeing right now is people are running ships longer than before because they’re they can, because they don’t want to invest in new ships. It’s like having just like buying a new car. Today, new car prices are through the roof, so let me run my old car as long as I can, and then everybody doesn’t know what the International Maritime Organization is going to do. Because if you would have, if you would have asked me the Monday the vote was going to be held, I would have told you it was going to pass. But Trump and the US delegation was able to swing enough votes so that they didn’t vote it down. But what they did is they got a one year extension, so it’s on hold for a year. I don’t know where this goes right now.
Jeff Malec 42:34
Well, if I put on my that’s where I was going with that question. So you know, of like putting on my environmentalist hat on 1000 new ships a year. Like, when does it get to be too much? When is there just overtaking the ocean? And I guess, or if we’re saying the oceans are all massively polluted to begin with, and it doesn’t matter, I was thinking about that in the Great Lakes too. Like, people are going to start if there’s 100 ships a day passing your view in the Great Lakes, people are going to start complaining. Well,
Sal Mercogliano 43:02
ironically, you know, like on the Great Lakes, being a protected sea, a lot of the emission issues don’t apply. So you have steam ships still operating up on the Great Lakes, which can’t operate anywhere else. You’re right about. But I would say this, that that, you know, ocean shipping only contributes 3% to global pollution or carbon emissions, I should say it is a very clean process. And one of the things that we’ve seen change over the past
Jeff Malec 43:28
30 years, and they’re all mostly diesel, sorry, largely
Sal Mercogliano 43:32
diesel. And so you’re using diesel propulsion. The problem you have with it is, is, you know, if you go, you know the amount of carbon per ton. It’s very small. It’s smaller than aircraft, small in trucks, small in trains. The problem is it’s heavily concentrated, because a ship doesn’t come in holding a ton, it’s hauling 200 tons. So you know, you get these big kind of carbon plumes because of the ships. And you know, there are ways to mitigate that. You can burn cleaner fuel inside these environmental control areas within territorial waters, you can shift over to shore power. You know, one of the things that everybody talks about is, well, when a ship comes in, we’ll have them turn their engines off and we’ll plug them into the grid. Well, most grids can’t handle getting ships plugged into them because they’re too much of a drawer. They try that in Miami with the cruise ships. And the cruise ships draw too much power. It just it would do, would cause brownouts in Miami. And so what we need is realistic, you know, kind of emission standards. The problem that I have with, with what the IMO was doing was they were pushing this on to the ship companies and the ship builders. It’s like, okay, you’ve got to get greener. You’ve got to get greener at at all expenses. And in truth, this is a national issue. Usually, where we saw this innovation come up is with government innovation. It’s with, you know, navies and government funding. Now we’re doing it through commercial so much so that what you’re going to see is, even if you open up, for example, the Red Sea, the Houthi go away. And now, all of a sudden, you don’t have to send ships around Africa anymore. Well, rates are still going to be kind of artificially high, because shipping companies got to invest in these new ship constructions, because they got to buy these cleaner ships, because if they keep burning the old fuel and keep doing the same pollution, they’re going to get dinged, especially by the European Union.
Jeff Malec 45:20
And what are there? I’ve seen those concept drawings of ships that unfurl these huge spinnakers or electric ships. Is any of that realistic? Yeah.
Sal Mercogliano 45:30
So, I mean, you have ships with these big rotor sales, these big kind of look like big towers, yeah, you know? And you put a rotor sale on a bulk carrier, tanker, it gets you a 10% fuel saving. The problem is, you can’t put enough rotor sales on before it becomes, you know, inefficient, plus it takes away tonnage, capacity. It’s maintenance issues. But we’re seeing very, you know, innovative fuel. So like, one of the big fuels that everybody’s talking about now is ammonia. We’re going to use ammonia for fuel because ammonia doesn’t have carbon in it. It’s great. You burn ammonia doesn’t create carbon emissions. It’s clean. The problem with ammonia is it’s ammonia. It’s really dangerous. It’s really flammable, and it’s really corrosive. And I deal with ammonia with people I know who have, you know, refrigeration facilities. I’m a volunteer firefighter. I deal with, you know, ammonia as a hazardous material. It’s really nasty. It’s not something you want on a ship
Jeff Malec 46:22
you want to be stuck on in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with, yeah, well, you’re not going to be stuck on,
Sal Mercogliano 46:26
because I can tell you right now, if you have an ammonia leak, you the way you handle ammonia leak is, if you can’t seal it, you get off the boat and you leave the boat, and that’s what you do. And that’s, that’s what tends to happen. And I think the problem we have is, is, IMO, International Maritime Organization, the UN shipping arm, has got these great ideas. You know, everyone loves the idea of being green and efficient. The problem is the practicality of it. What’s the practicality of doing this? Plus, if you want to shift over to ammonia fuel, you better have a bunch of ammonia fuel set up around the world. Because if I have got a ship that needs ammonia, I need it. Diesel is everywhere. You can find diesel everywhere that you need marine diesel is great because it’s it’s literally everywhere, and it’s a lot cleaner than previous fuel that we’ve used in the past. Ammonia is tough, especially when you have diversions because of things like the Houthi and geopolitical issues. You know, I set up an ammonia fueling point, and next thing I know, my ship has got to sail away from there because of a geopolitical threat. Now, where do I get the ammonia to fuel it? And how expensive is that ammonia, by the way, versus Diesel fuel, which is fairly, you know, affordable.
Jeff Malec 47:34
What about why does has anyone thought or it’s what use small modular nuclear reactors like the
Sal Mercogliano 47:41
Navy, that’s a that’s a big issue for the United States. Us. Has been talking about this. Korea is talking about this. I think small, modular nuclear reactors are the way to think about in the in the future. It’s a lot different than Navy reactor. Navy reactors are very high power. I mean, they get 95% fuel power emissions from their reactors. We’re talking maybe about 5% the key thing in in like a molten salt nuclear reactor is number one, it’s it’s extremely safe, especially in a salt water environment, it’s extremely safe. The other thing is, you got to make it modular, so that at the end of the life cycle of the ship you can pull it out and recycle it. Like if you look at the British Navy, the British Navy has an entire area a lock, you know, in Scotland, full of every nuclear submarine it’s ever had, because it can’t recycle the nuclear plants. So they just park their old nuclear submarines up there and can’t get rid of them. You’ve got to create a system where you can recycle it. And I think we can do that. I think one of the things I would I would propose, is, you know, hey, maybe vessel replacement on the Great Lakes is we build a replacement ship and we put modular nuclear reactors in them, and we try that out, and we see how that works. The problem with modular nuclear reactors is they’re really expensive. You need really well trained engineers. You need a batch of engineers to do it, but you will see the cost savings over the life of the vessel. The problem is you don’t see that cost savings up front. So you’ve got to do something to offset the upfront cost of that boat and the crews to operate it. What are we going to do to offset that? We’ve done this in the past 1936 merchant marine act, we put what we call National Defense features and shipbuilding, where the US would pay some of that money up front to defray that cost, to build that capacity. I think modular nuclear reactors could be the new technology that the US propels itself forward in if it embraces it.
Jeff Malec 49:31
That’s my I’m talking up my book because that’s my biggest personal holding all these nuclear uranium stocks and modular reactor stocks, because I think it’s the only answer to AI data centers and everything. So now you have another use case for me. I love it. And you were talking about Miami, like, put one in the port there, like, plug into the shore power of the Modular Reactor right there in the port, right?
Sal Mercogliano 49:55
Well, not only that, I mean the ships actually plug into the system and feed power. Power back into the system. That’s the other element about it is, you know, back in guy was like 1920s Tacoma, Washington had an earthquake or something like that, and the power went out. The power system in this in the city was destroyed. They brought a US aircraft carrier, the Lexington in, plugged it into the power grid and fed into the power grid. Just think, if you have modular nuclear ships, they come into port, they plug in and you use because you can’t turn the power plant off. It’s always up and running. It’s generating power, but it’s generating power it’s not used. It can feed back into the system, and now you’re generating power back in. You’re basically selling power from the ship into the power grid of where you’re at, and you’re actually easing the power situations,
Jeff Malec 50:41
and that’s how you solve the cost problem. I love it. Get back in there with Congress. We’ve got a solution.
Jeff Malec 50:52
You got anything else you want to tell us? Any good nuggets?
Sal Mercogliano 50:56
I would add is shipping is undergoing this kind of revitalization. People are paying attention to it. You know, it’s been really interesting. Four and a half years ago, I started a YouTube channel that was talking about, ever given stuck in the Suez. And I thought this was going to be a fluke. I’m going to talk about this ship for a couple of weeks, you know, a couple of days, and it’s going to go away. And since then, you know, my YouTube channel has just grown. It’s just gone up over half a million subscribers, you know, 100 million views. It’s crazy. It’s just they’re not tuning in to look at this mug, that’s for sure. So they’re obviously interested in in shipping. And, you know, I think it’s things like Edmund Fitzgerald, those stories fascinate people. It’s something they don’t do. And, you know, it’s a involves risk, whether it’s your life risk or financial risk, you know, in doing this,
Jeff Malec 51:44
waiting for your ship to come in, yeah, yeah, the proverbial,
Sal Mercogliano 51:47
it’s proverbial that, and it really is. It’s, it’s a, it’s an amazing thing we’re, we’re fascinated by, and it’s an industry that’s kind of, you know, closed off to us because it’s behind a barrier, and people don’t talk about and one of the things I think I do is kind of be a ship whisperer. I can, I can talk shipping to people, make them understand it. If you talk to people within the shipping industry, they’re really tough to talk to, because they they can talk among themselves, but they have a very hard time talking to people outside their industry,
Jeff Malec 52:14
and even whether in one lane within the industry.
Sal Mercogliano 52:17
Yeah, exactly. You know, if your tanker guys, you don’t talk to the container guys. You don’t talk to the bulk guys. It’s really, really tough. I like to do that 50,000 foot kind of view and really talk about it. And so I’ve been very lucky you
Jeff Malec 52:30
ever mess around with the bulk freight futures.
Sal Mercogliano 52:33
I haven’t done the futures at all. I’ve invested in stocks. I’ve done, you know, stocks, and I have not gotten into the
Jeff Malec 52:39
futures. But that’s like, one of the most volatile things. Oh yeah, it is for good
Sal Mercogliano 52:44
reason, because when you start looking at the bulk futures, and even container futures, which another aspect is, you can see the volatility. There’s so many fat whenever I hear anybody tell me, it’s like, hey, you know, we’re predicting the end of the quarter to be like this, like, man, all it takes is one thing and it throws it off. Now there’s a moment where you can jump on that, because usually, if you’re fast, you can capitalize on it. But, you know, I remember when the Houthis came out, and I sat there and said, it’s like, this is going to cause massive disruption, because I knew the insurance was going to go up. And insurance is what you have to understand about shipping is everything. Banks on insurance, and minute insurance goes up. Shipping Company. You know, shipping companies understand risk. Risk isn’t risking a ship, it’s risking profit, and they will shift to what’s going to be the most profitable thing for them
Jeff Malec 53:31
is that still shut down with the Houthis? Or what’s happening there?
Sal Mercogliano 53:34
Well, we did. The big story right now is the Houthis just announced that they’re going to stop attacking ships. The question is, do the shipping companies. Come back, and that’s, I’m very gonna work on a video on that. That’s Stockton. Do you trust them?
Jeff Malec 53:47
Draw them in. Yeah. Not
Sal Mercogliano 53:48
only do you trust the Houthis, but, oh, by the way, we’re seeing a resurgence in Somali piracy, and I think they’re actually connected. I think it’s one and the other is actually connected there. So, you know, do you create this distrust in the area? It’s gonna be interesting to watch.
Speaker 1 54:03
Last bit, favorite shipping, shipping, tangential movies, right? You mentioned the Somali pirates, the Captain Phillips movie I’ll give you. I’ll throw in my Mount Rushmore would be Captain Phillips perfect storm. Not really shipping. They’re on the fishing boat, but Master and Commander, I see your tall ship back there. What else? What else you got put on the oh,
Sal Mercogliano 54:28
one of my favorites is a world war two movie with Humphrey Bogart action in North Atlantic. And it’s the merchant marine in World War Two. It’s like the only merchant marine movie action and action in the North Atlantic. It is. It is a crew on a Liberty ship doing the Murmansk run to Russia. I absolutely, absolutely love that movie. It’s one of my favorites to watch. Mastering commander is great too. I love that movie. There’s probably no other one that does shipping better than that. I love the old Gregor. Pack Moby Dick talking about whalers. Whalers was a terrible industry. It was a horrible, horrible sector to be in. But, you know, you really get the crew on the ship. There courageous, another old black and white one of the fishing industry out of Gloucester really shows, you know that that types any, any movie that really shows the crew and what it’s like to be at sea. I laugh all the time. You know, realism in movies isn’t really there, but every now and then there’ll be little, tiny, you know, snippets of like, okay, that’s exactly true. They nailed it, yeah, hey. You know, in action in North Atlantic, when the crew is sitting there in the chow hall just griping and moaning, that’s it. That’s as realistic as you can get. Same thing Captain Phillips, when they’re all in there having coffee and they’re griping and moaning, it’s like, that’s it. You’ve nailed it. That’s the perfect scene. You’ve, you you’ve, you’ve captured merchant mariners. It’s like, the beauty
Jeff Malec 55:50
of we’re traveling the world, but we’re gonna complain about it on our journey, yeah, oh, we’re gonna gripe
Sal Mercogliano 55:54
moan, man. We’re gonna, we’re gonna bitch and moan about it, guaranteed, if you’re a merchant mariner and you’re not griping and moaning about you. Can be the best condition you’re in. But, man, there’s something I can argue about that’s it awesome.
Jeff Malec 56:05
Sal, thanks so much. This has been fun, and we’ll put links to the YouTube and everything, and some of these movies
