Dutch tugboat arrives at Suez Canal to help free stranded Ever Given

Two additional tugboats will help refloat the stranded freighter in the Suez Canal on Sunday. One of them is the Dutch ship the Alp Guard, shown in satellite data from the Marine Traffic website.

On the orders of Egyptian President Sisi, preparations are being made to remove some of the containers from the ship. The head of the Suez Canal Authority reports this to the Egyptian news channel Extra News.

If unloading is actually done on location, the ship will be lighter and easier to move. But experts fear a significant delay if a large part of the cargo is unloaded.

The 400-meter-long Ever Given has been blocking Egypt's indispensable sea route for world trade since Tuesday morning. At high tide, another attempt was made to tow the ship away. The local authorities hope that the two additional tugboats will be the deciding factor, but on Saturday, they could not predict how long the crisis would last.

The Dutch company Boskalis has been in charge of clearing the Suez Canal. The company sent a team to Egypt to get rid of the 400-meter container ship earlier this week. The CEO Peter Berdowski announced last Thursday that the process could take days to weeks before one of the most important trade routes would be freed again.

The supply of the required material, in particular, has caused delays, says the Papendrecht salvage and dredging company. The Dutch team that landed in Egypt on Wednesday started with conducting calculations to establish how to remove the freighter. That team has carried out several measurements along the canal. The Boskalis experts boarded the stranded ship to make the best possible estimate of how the Ever Given can get back into the fairway the fastest.