Name: These tiny ships have a serious purpose
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T15:09:58.000Z
Duration: 10 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Do you remember that container ship, the Ever Given, that got stuck in the Suez Canal back in 2021?

The final report into what happened came out a few months ago, as I record this, and there were a lot of things that went wrong.

It was travelling too fast, there were communications problems between the crew and the local pilots, and there was the bank effect.

There are two ways to learn what that is.

You can get the theoretical explanation that big ships get sucked to the sidewalls by pressure differences when travelling at speed along canals.

But if that seems a bit abstract, you can learn it hands-on.

Because this is the Port Iwawa Ship Handling Research and Training Centre in the north of Poland, and this is one of the places where the folks who steer those big ships learn how to do it.

Just to be clear, I'm not getting a full training course.

That takes days and includes a huge amount of theory work and study as well.

I'm just going to drive a miniature container ship for a lap round the lake and hopefully not get it stuck in the Suez Canal.

We have started our training activity in 1980.

In the 90s, we have moved from the old lake towards this one, and practically first training here was realised in 1991, more or less 30 years ago.

We are performing training in ship handling.

We have a lot of different mock-ups presenting different waterways.

Everything was built using exactly the same scale, 1 to 24, deep waters, shallow waters, different restrictions, rivers, canals, and what is more important, of course, ship models.

This is bigger than I thought it was going to be.

It's one of the biggest in the world. 400-metre ship. 400-metre.

Scaled down one in 24, that's still... 16 and a half.

I assume that means just keep it going straight.

Oh, I don't feel guilty about you taking the controls here.

I was meant to be asking all sorts of questions here, and I'm just slightly nervous about driving a tiny boat.

It's not a tiny boat, it's a 400-metre container ship.

So you have controls there that simulate the effect of tugs on the boat.

I don't know why, but I thought I was going to spin that like the wheel of a pirate ship, and it's just a...

OK, so now we can go through the lock, if you like.

Basically, we go that direction, south of the island.

We have had, in our history, more than 6,000 pilots, masters and chief officers from more than 50 countries.

We have beginners, but we have also very experienced masters.

We will have only two centimetres of water under keel.

If we have too high speed, we touch the bottom.

So the faster I go in shallow water, the more the boat is going to get sucked down to the ground.

We have to come in the line with the lock.

Sooner we do that, more time we have to apply any correction, if necessary.

That is such a tight spot to navigate through.

The minute I feel like I've got this, it's all going to fall apart.

There's some very strong work being done by the tugboat here.

Did we clear that?  I think we cleared that.

The basic training programme takes five days.

Line arrest scale 1 to 24 means that time scale is equal to more or less five.

It means everything happens five times faster than in reality.

But on the other hand, five days of training will correspond to 25 days of training in reality.

More the helmsman than the captain at this point.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

These tiny ships have a serious purpose

stick

absolutely

privilege

instinct