Frens, here's your Sunday evening (evening in Egypt, anyway) Ever Given update: It's 7:30 pm, local time, and the convoys are leaving the Great Bitter Lake. Who's left? Big EG, the Chinese heavy load carrier, XIANG RUI KOU - it's reported that this vessel is carrying a dredger and plans to offload it somewhere to dredge something (will keep tabs, but my guess is the section of the canal at the extreme southern edge of the lake where two other vessels briefly ran aground last week).
Aaannnnd.....as of 4 hours ago, the mystery cargo ship satellite ping is back! Right alongside EG, where it was spotted yesterday. What is it, what is it doing there? I don't know - but it's definitely something to watch!
The UHL FAME, with its big cranes, anchored for a while in the lake about 2.5 nm away from EG. It got our attention, but never got very close to EG for any length of time, and is now transiting north in the canal, so no lifting maneuvers out of that one.
At the moment, there are no tugs in the lake, but there are two of them (SALAM 9 and SALAM 6) headed that way from the south.
I'm watching, and I've noticed that this ship that I've been referring to "mystery cargo ship" has separated a bit from EG (it was previously butted right up against her, which made me consider the possibility of a second EG beacon, but I can't think why that would exist) but now that it has separated a bit from EG, it makes me believe that it is indeed a second ship, one that shows up on vesselfinder.com (but not on marinetraffic.com - weird!) I'm scouring every open source resource I can think of, but I'm just an amateur boatfag, so anyone with more insight, I'm all kinds of interested! If I discover what ship that is, I'll make a new post with the update. UPDATE: After 2 hours of watching this beacon sitting next to EG (about .1 nm away) it just vanished. Poof. I'll keep watching, since it has done this before.