Ever Given: Six Days That Stopped World Trade — A Suez Vantage Point

On the morning of 23 March 2021, the Ever Given — a 400-metre, 224,000-tonne container ship carrying roughly 18,300 containers — was caught by high winds and a sandstorm while transiting the Suez Canal. She turned across the channel and ran aground diagonally, bow and stern wedged into opposite banks. For the next six days, one of the widest ships ever to pass through Suez sealed the canal completely.

The numbers that followed are now well known: over 300 vessels queued at both ends of the canal, an estimated $9–10 billion a day in delayed trade, and a single grounded hull holding roughly 12% of world trade in place. What is less known is what those six days actually meant, day to day, for the owners, cargo interests and crews whose ships sat in that queue.

We were not reading about the blockage from a desk in London or Piraeus. Our office sits in Port Tawfik, Suez — close enough to the canal that the disruption wasn’t news to us, it was Tuesday. That proximity is what our clients called on that week.

While the salvage teams worked the Ever Given herself — dredgers, tugboats, and eventually the push of a full-moon spring tide — our work was with the vessels behind her: owners and cargo interests whose ships sat idle in the queue, burning bunkers, missing laycans, and accumulating demurrage with no clear end date. Our role was to document the delay as it happened, preserve our clients’ contractual position, and keep a direct line open to the Suez Canal Authority and local port agents while the timeline stayed uncertain.

That is the side of the Ever Given story that rarely makes the documentaries: the blockage was never one legal event — it was hundreds of smaller ones running in parallel, each with its own charterparty, its own notice provisions, its own clock ticking on laytime or demurrage. For the clients who came to us that week, the six days the world watched on the news were the start of a claims process that ran for months afterward, protecting their contractual position at every stage despite real uncertainty at the outset over how those claims would ultimately be resolved.

What the Ever Given confirmed for us wasn’t a legal principle so much as a practical one: in a crisis on the Suez Canal, the firms that can actually help are the ones already standing on the bank — with a working relationship with the Canal Authority, a direct line to the right port agent, and a working knowledge of how disputes here actually get resolved, built up since 1988 — not just how they read in a textbook.

The next disruption on this canal — weather, congestion, or something no one has thought of yet — won’t wait for outside counsel to fly in. It rewards whoever is already here.