Those of us of a certain age, who were active in merchant shipping, remember the tanker industry in the 1980s. And none too fondly. After a period of rising charter rates and robust new construction, the market effectively collapsed in the 80s, resulting in a large fleet of laid up tankers. Some new ships steamed straight from the shipyard to lay-up. It is too soon to tell if conditions will turn as dark as they were thirty years ago, but the signs are not encouraging.
Charter rates are now the lowest they have been in 14 years and the number of large tankers in lay up are approaching levels from the 80’s. To reinforce the comparison, a new Aframax tanker, managed by Wilhelmsen Ship Management, recently sailed directly from being delivered by a shipyard to layup in Malaysia, the first recorded tanker to go directly from delivery to lay up since the 1980s.
Most Supertankers Idled Since ‘80s Still Won’t Buoy Charter Rates: Freight
In August, we 
The future of the oldest, just barely surviving, composite clipper ship in the world, the 
Jeffrey Allison is a fascinating gentlemen. Now 73, from Middleton Tyas in the UK, he only started sailing when he retired from a career in engineering. Since then, he has sailed across the Atlantic six times, as well transiting the Panama Canal, and sailing the Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans. He has just returned from a 40 day circumnavigation of the Arctic. Allison and his crew, Australian crewmate Katherine Brownlie, 28, are the first to circumnavigate the Arctic in a clockwise direction. Two yachts previously circumnavigated the Arctic counter-clockwise in 2010.
We are rapidly approaching the bi-centennial of the 
