Good morning. It is half past six in Rotterdam, the fog signals along the Maas have been sounding since four, and one of our reporters spent the night ashore in a control room, watching a ship with nobody on its bridge. Here is what our desks are following today.
It is a busy morning for a quiet stretch of the year. Three of the four stories below are still moving, so the links go to pages that will change through the day. If you read this on the train, check back at lunchtime.
A ship with no crew
Nordvik Feeder Lines' Skarv is due in Rotterdam this morning at the end of the first crewless feeder crossing of the North Sea: twelve thousand tonnes of cargo, a watchkeeper ashore and nobody aboard. I was in the operator's control centre for most of the night. The crossing ran to plan until about three in the morning, when the ship met a fishing fleet working close together in the dark and had to decide for itself how to pass. The full story is here, updated as the ship comes in.
Fog on the Elbe
Dense fog at the mouth of the Elbe has stopped pilot boardings, and ships bound for Hamburg are queueing at anchor in the German Bight. More than twenty were waiting at six, and the pilots expect no change before late morning. Our live page follows the anchorage ship by ship, and the terminals as they rework their berth plans.
A few hours of fog on the Elbe rarely makes news on its own. What matters is the knock-on: ships that miss their window in Hamburg arrive late at their next port, and a feeder schedule built around tight connections has little room to absorb a lost morning.
Copper's road
A landslide overnight has closed the only road into the Cerro Alto mine in the Andes. Nobody was hurt, but the trucks that carry concentrate down to the coast are parked, and copper rose in Asian trading. Tomás Reyes is following the price, the trucks and the estimate for reopening from Santiago.
The dollar at quarter end
Asian exporters are converting their dollar receipts before the quarter closes, and the dollar is slipping against the euro and the yen. That matters to anyone who earns freight in dollars and pays crews, ports and banks in another currency, which describes most of the shipping industry. Jonas Halvorsen has the live picture from Frankfurt.
Figure of the day
12,000: tonnes of cargo aboard the Skarv for its crossing, the most a ship without a crew has carried across the North Sea. For scale, that is a little under a thousand loaded containers on a feeder that would normally sail with eleven people aboard.
That is all from me. The fog should lift by lunchtime. The copper road will take longer. Same time tomorrow.
Maren Okafor, shipping editor
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