The Suez Canal runs for a hundred and ninety-three kilometres between Port Said on the Mediterranean and Suez on the Red Sea. About fifty ships transit it on a typical day, in two convoys: a southbound that forms before dawn at Port Said and a northbound that forms at midnight at Suez.
Each ship takes two pilots. The first boards at the entrance and works through the first half of the transit. The second boards at Ismailia, midway down the canal, and works the second half.
The pilots are employees of the Suez Canal Authority, which is an arm of the Egyptian government. There are about three hundred of them, working out of stations at Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez.
Captain Tarek Mansour has been a Canal pilot for nineteen years. He was on duty in March 2021 when the Ever Given ran aground on the eastern bank south of the Great Bitter Lake and blocked the canal for six days.
He was not the pilot on the Ever Given. He was, however, on a ship two convoys behind, and he watched the response in real time.
The grounding cost the global container trade an estimated nine billion dollars in delayed cargo. It cost the Suez Canal Authority about ninety-six million dollars in lost transit fees and about another nine hundred million in salvage and reputational damage.
It also produced, in the five years that followed, a substantial overhaul of the canal's operations.
The southern bypass, the second parallel channel that runs through the southern portion of the canal, was extended in 2023 to allow two-way traffic over a longer stretch. The northern bypass was deepened in 2024 to allow the largest container ships to pass each other in the central section.
The pilotage training was extended. New pilots now spend two additional years as assistants before they are licensed for the largest ship classes. Senior pilots are now required to attend an annual refresher course at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport in Alexandria.
The minimum tug requirement was increased. The largest container ships are now escorted by two tugs through the entire transit, where before 2021 they had often used only one in the central section.
Captain Mansour boarded the CMA CGM Antoine de Saint Exupéry at Port Said at 04:40 on a Tuesday morning in late May. The ship was a twenty-thousand-TEU container vessel inbound from Tangier and bound for Singapore.
Her master was a Frenchman named Captain Lamy who had been on container ships since 1995 and through the Suez perhaps three hundred times.
Mansour took the conn and began the transit. The ship moved through the first ten kilometres of the canal at eight knots, then accelerated to eleven once she was clear of the entrance channel.
The transit was uneventful. Mansour worked the radio in three languages, monitored two AIS displays, gave helm orders in clear English, and drank three cups of strong sweet tea between Port Said and Ismailia.
He disembarked at Ismailia at 09:15 and was replaced by Captain Yehia Abou Zeid, who would take the ship the remaining hundred kilometres to Suez.
Abou Zeid was a younger pilot, thirty-eight years old, with twelve years on the canal. He had begun his career as a deck officer on Egyptian-flagged feeder vessels in the eastern Mediterranean and had joined the SCA pilotage in 2014.
He worked through the Great Bitter Lake, where the southbound and northbound convoys passed each other, and onto the southern section where the bypass channel allowed parallel traffic. The Antoine de Saint Exupéry reached the harbour at Suez at 14:50 and was met by the southern pilot boat.
Abou Zeid disembarked. The ship took on her departure pilot for the Gulf of Suez and continued into the Red Sea bound for the Bab el Mandeb and the Arabian Sea.
The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping that had begun in late 2023 had reduced canal traffic substantially through 2024 and 2025. Container lines had rerouted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, adding ten to fourteen days to the Asia-Europe run.
By mid-2026 the traffic had partly recovered. The ceasefire in the southern Red Sea, brokered in early 2026, had brought a number of lines back to the Suez route, though some continued to route the Cape on a permanent basis.
The SCA had lost an estimated seven billion dollars in revenue between late 2023 and early 2026. The Egyptian government had absorbed the loss as a strategic cost.
Mansour, the senior pilot, took his afternoon meal at the SCA cafeteria in Ismailia with two other pilots and a junior assistant. The conversation was about the recovery of the traffic, the new training requirements, and the cricket match between Egypt and Sri Lanka that had been on the small television in the cafeteria the night before.
He would be on another ship at 22:00, a northbound LNG tanker out of Qatar bound for Spain. He would board her at Suez, work her to Ismailia, and be home in his flat by morning.
