It began with a short line in the daytime feed: a link to an archival note about ships trapped in the Suez Canal in 1967 and stranded there for eight years. A well-worn story, with its own canon — stamps, an Olympics, beer — and my hand was already moving to scroll past. One phrase caught me: the longest sea voyage in history was made by a ship that spent almost all of it at anchor. Eight years, three months, and five days — from a berth in Australia to a berth in Hamburg.
Then I started counting, and the count turned out to be bigger than the episode itself. The canal stood idle for eight years; what happened to global shipping during those years usually gets drowned out in stories about the crews. And there was another question hanging there: what were they planning to use to clear a channel that had been a front line for eight years? I checked the answer in three sources because I didn’t believe it.
The Suez Canal is a man-made sea road about 175 kilometers long, linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas and saving steamships weeks of sailing around Africa. On the morning of June 5, 1967, a convoy of fifteen merchant ships from eight countries was heading north through it. A few hours later, the Six-Day War began.
Peter Flack, third officer of the British Agapenor, was on the bridge when Israeli aircraft passed over the convoy — low, at treetop level, hiding behind the ships’ masts and the low sun as they flew toward an Egyptian airbase somewhere beyond the horizon. The crews watched the war’s first wave from the upper decks, as though from grandstands.
The war ended six days later. The canal did not. Egypt sank the steamers Mecca and Ismailia at both ends, along with barges, dredgers, part of a pontoon bridge, and laid mines: Israel stood on the eastern bank, and nobody intended to let its ships pass through the canal. Fifteen vessels were left inside. Fourteen were in the Great Bitter Lake, the natural widening at the middle of the channel where convoys traditionally passed one another; the American Observer was cut off farther north, in Lake Timsah. Eight flags: four British ships, two West German, two Swedish, two Polish, two American, one French, one Bulgarian, and one Czechoslovakian.
The lake became the middle of no man’s land. The Egyptians remained on the western shore, the Israelis dug in on the eastern one, and between them lay two hundred meters of water and eight years of undeclared truce. Something strange emerged as well: the canal, which everyone feared would be lost to silting, barely silted up at all. Ninety percent of the silt came from the propeller wash of passing vessels — and vessels had stopped passing.
By autumn, it was clear they would be stuck there for a long time. In October 1967, officers and crews gathered aboard the British Melampus and founded the Great Bitter Lake Association — an organization with neither territory nor budget, which nevertheless operated for eight years.
The captains’ motive was partly educational: there was so much free time that some crews began drinking out of boredom. The Association was meant to give people a schedule. Every ship took on a role: the Poles handled mail and the infirmary, because their steamer had a doctor; the British Port Invercargill, the largest vessel on the lake, got a football pitch; the Bulgarian Vasil Levski became a cinema; the Swedish ships supplied a gym and a swimming pool. Every Sunday, the West German Nordwind held a service its captain described this way: “We call it church, but in reality it’s more of a beer party.” The Germans had beer sent from home.
Shortages were covered through barter. Ice cream was made aboard the Münsterland, while one of the Swedish ships earned the nickname Bitter Lake Cow: it produced “fresh milk” from eggs and powdered milk. At Christmas, the Poles assembled a large tree, set it on a raft, and moored it in the middle of the lake — at night the ships approached it through the darkness, tied up around it, and sang hymns to a piano-organ installed aboard one of the steamers.
By 1969, the owners had cut crews to ten people per ship, grouping the vessels together to use fewer men maintaining the engines. Rotations lasted three months; because of the heat, the working day was six hours. Over eight years, more than three thousand sailors passed through the lake, including exactly one woman.
In September 1968, ten days before the Games opened in Mexico City, the lake staged its own Olympics. The Poles from the Jakarta came up with it and took the matter seriously: they made bows, arrows, and targets; laid out mattresses so there was somewhere to land in the high jump; swung crane booms out over the side and stretched water-polo goals between them; cast barbells; printed certificates; and minted medals in three grades.
The program included fourteen events — from sailing races in converted lifeboats and a swim between two Polish vessels to shooting and high jump; table tennis was played aboard the Münsterland. About two hundred people took part; those without enough compatriots to form a national team were assigned to an international team or a Commonwealth team, so nobody was left out. Medals were awarded on a podium to national anthems — including the anthem of a dog: Bulbul, a football-playing dog from the Sind, received his own medal and stood on the podium with complete seriousness.
The Poles took first place overall, the Germans second, the British third. The English newspaper Daily Express sponsored the teams and brought a silver cup to the lake. The BBC crew that came to film it, one officer recalled, was certain the Olympics were a British initiative, and was deeply puzzled to learn that the Poles were organizing them.
Mail on the lake had to be invented from scratch: fourteen ships had fourteen currencies, and letters had to be sent home. The Association created its own stamps. They were hand-drawn, printed with ink, crayons, and coffee grounds, carved from potatoes and linoleum. The third engineer of the Polish Bolesław Bierut, a man named Kassimir, spent two months making a series of fourteen stamps — one for every ship on the lake, with its flag and recognizable features: funnels, cranes, masts, all in the correct proportions.
The themes followed the calendar: regattas, Christmas, anniversaries of the lay-up, and, in July 1969, the Moon landing. The stamps came with a rubber “Mailed on Board” postmark bearing an anchor, the number 14, and two diagonal stripes in memory of the canal. A letter with such a stamp was cancelled by the ship’s mail service and sent to an Egyptian post office, where an Egyptian stamp was added. Official status produced an ordinary philatelic oddity: formally, the stamps remained “Cinderellas” — labels with no postal validity — and that is exactly where catalogues place them. There is evidence, however, that Egyptian post offices sometimes cancelled an envelope without adding their own stamps at all.
In 1966, its last full year of operation, 21,250 ships passed through the canal — an average of 58 a day — and it brought Egypt $220 million in tolls. After that, those ships went around.
The detour was not simply longer; it required a different design. To carry oil from the Persian Gulf to Europe around Africa at the same profit, scale was needed, and shipyards began building tankers for which the canal no longer mattered. In 1966, 74 percent of available oil traffic went through Suez; in 1976, five percent did. In 1967, 95 percent of the world tanker fleet could pass through the canal fully or partly laden, and 72 percent could do so fully laden; by 1978, 17 percent could pass through fully laden. Suez’s tonnage arithmetic jumped sharply: a maximum of 80 thousand tons in 1962, 150 thousand in 1980, 240 thousand in 2015. In other words, the canal, closed for eight years, reopened to a fleet that had outgrown it in the meantime.
Egypt counted the losses in its own way: nearly eight billion dollars in additional transport costs for the global economy, plus another four billion in lost export growth for countries in East Africa and Asia. Oil also bypassed the canal through pipelines: Israel pumped it from Eilat to Ashkelon, while Egypt launched SUMED from Suez to Alexandria in 1977. And the heroes of the story themselves were becoming obsolete: while fourteen ships stood in the lake, the container revolution began around the world, and they headed home as machines from a previous era.
The clearance agreement was signed in October 1973, after the Yom Kippur War. Four navies went to work — Egyptian, American, British, French — under overall Egyptian direction and the command of American Admiral Brian McCauley, who had previously cleared mines from Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam.
The idea was simple and faintly desperate: the canal was so clogged with wreckage that a minesweeper would rip open its hull within the first mile, while sending divers into a minefield was pointless. So they would sweep from the air. Sea Stallion helicopters dragged two devices over the water — a magnetized eight-foot pipe painted orange, intended to detonate magnetic mines, and a hydrofoil generator that simulated a ship’s acoustic and magnetic signature. “It’s like fly-fishing,” an officer explained. “You decide there’s something there, choose your bait, cast it, and wait for a bite.”
They waited five weeks. The helicopters flew 7,616 linear miles, searching 121 square miles of water, and not a single explosion occurred. The channel had never been mined.
The mines were on the banks.
American engineers trained 173 Egyptian officers, who trained nearly 1,700 soldiers, and over three months the work yielded 686 thousand mines and 13,500 other explosive items — an average of one mine every six seconds. Mine-clearing on the banks killed 96 people.
Then the divers went in, and their motto was more precise than any bulletin: “feel, dig, and tremble.” One of them described a shift as “long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of pure terror”; a French officer, looking at what they brought up from the bottom, called it “a military bouillabaisse.” They found 27 large aerial bombs, 508 small ones, 209 tons of TNT in trucks and lighters, seven aircraft, three tanks, 127 sections of pontoon bridge, and six bodies. The military scrap on the bottom amounted to a weapons suppliers’ exchange: Russian, American, Egyptian, Czech, Israeli, Danish, British, and Swiss.
The hardest job was the embankment near Deversoir, north of the lake holding the captive ships: in 1973, the canal had simply been filled in there to create a crossing. Its foundation was 29 barges of 75 tons each, each loaded with another 75 tons of sand and stone, topped with 12 thousand four-ton concrete blocks. Fifty thousand tons of concrete were dismantled block by block.
The captives were not spared by this war either, though the sources diverge here. The African Glen, an American dry-cargo ship from that same group of fourteen, sank in 1973: some accounts say it was hit by a stray shell, with no casualties; others say Israeli aircraft sank it because the Egyptians had used the vessel as an observation post. The encyclopedic version confines itself to the dry phrase “sank during the Yom Kippur War.”
The Germans were the first to leave the lake, and they did so before the parade. On May 7, 1975, the Nordwind and the Münsterland headed north into the Mediterranean, entering Hamburg on May 24 — thirty thousand people came to greet them. For the Münsterland, it was a voyage from Australia lasting eight years, three months, and five days — the longest sea passage in history. In its holds, wool, lead, steel, and a thousand tons of sand for sandpaper had risen in value over that time, while the ships themselves made it home under their own power — the only two out of fifteen to do so.
The others were less fortunate. Twelve ships had to be towed out, and most were sold and scrapped within a few years: the Melampus became the Annoula II and arrived for breaking at Gadani Beach in Pakistan in 1982; the Agapenor, renamed Nikos, was repaired in Piraeus in July 1975, and in December 1981 they began cutting it up in the same place — Pakistan.
The canal’s official reopening took place on June 5, 1975, exactly eight years after its closure. President Anwar Sadat in a white admiral’s uniform, six hundred guests, a twenty-one-gun salute, a flotilla of seven vessels, and five hours under way to Ismailia. The two main protagonists of this lay-up were absent from the parade: twelve days earlier, they had already been standing in Hamburg.
The numbers came out more modestly than the hook had promised: in the abbreviated year of 1975, the canal handled 5,579 ships against 21,250 in 1966, and only by the end of the seventies did it return to nineteen thousand. Today, the Suez Canal brings Egypt incomparably more — a record $9.4 billion in fiscal year 2022/23, collapsing to $7.2 billion when attacks on ships began in the Red Sea. Fifteen steamships and fourteen stamps are a footnote against that backdrop.
The veterans still meet: in 2017 they gathered in Liverpool for the fiftieth anniversary, while in Germany and Slovakia they meet every year. Stamps from the lake appear at auctions. And one captain, having calculated how many empty bottles the crews had thrown overboard, left behind a remark I like even more than the story itself: it will be interesting to see what archaeologists think of this civilization a few thousand years from now.