So the pirates have taken one of the shipping containers. From the middle. And the stack didn’t fall down, even with a hole in the middle. Was that the goal? Did they win? Is the pile of containers on the big ship really just a single thickness?
Carpe cargo
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think there’s a Jenga reference in here somewhere…
Giant Marine Jenga.
Why does it look like water in the empty spot?
Andrea, I think that’s the mountain in the background.
I also thought of Jenga. But not being myself a player, I ask if leaving an interior hole is part of a good strategy.
I don’t think cargo ships are one container wide . . . think how precarious the balance would be.
Pirate Jenga.
Andréa, in reality of course container ships could not be loaded just one box wide. But in this drawing, isn’t that the inference we take, from seeing that removal of a single box has left a gap that we can see thru to the opposite shore?
Lo Hicimos!
It is possible, although not at all what is intended, we are looking at the short axis of the containers on the cargo ship. If true, the way the ship is loaded would be stable. This is just to note that a ship could be loaded single wide and still be stable if the single width is in the long axis. Many reasons why this isn’t true for this depiction, but it could be.
Those look like 20′ containers, so, Empty Weight: 4,850 lbs – Load Capacity: 61,289 lbs. Figure half capacity, the total load is about 17 tons. Wrangling that by hand is, yup, pretty impressive.
The boxes are loaded one wide because otherwise there would be no way of seeing that one is missing. Then we would have a real CIDU. 🙂
“I also thought of Jenga. But not being myself a player, I ask if leaving an interior hole is part of a good strategy.”
If you can pull it off, yes. The resulting structure is less stable making the next players turn more difficult. The problem of course is it will be less stable for the current player and likely to collapse in the attempt.
The more I think of it the more it seems the joke is a jenga reference. It would explain the exhilaration of the pirates in what seems, monetarily, a not all that impressive a heist.
Are containers loaded onto cargo ships in some way secured together, in case of rough seas? Does anybody know? Although now that I know the average weight of a container, maybe that’s really unnecessary.
Wikipedia has an article about twistlocks, which are used for the purpose: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistlock
All I know about container ships (and it still isn’t very much) is from the one that blocked the Suez Canal . . .
Is it a My Fair Lady reference? https://youtu.be/j3PCjQyqcsk
PSA: When posting a link to Wikipedia, remove the “.m”. Mobile users will still see the mobile site, but desktop users won’t.
You did it! The crazy son of a bitch, you did it!
Lord Flatulence: Pirate Jenga: https://youtu.be/oZecKsm0Mfw
MiB, thanks for that Pirate Jenny link! I’m among those who got to know the song from the 1960s Judy Collins album, which was also great in its way. But when I later encountered the Lenya recordings of selected Weill songs, I was captured by her German version. (Also Mackie Messer and several others!) “Und das Schiiiffff, mit acht Segeln…”
If the pirates were playing Jenga, then other containers may have already been removed by other pirates. So being able to see through that hole doesn’t mean the containers are otherwise a single thickness.
Robert did not find it funny when I showed it to him.