From the comfort of a beach chair, myriad facts can be learned about a passing foreign vessel: its name, owner, location, speed, length and width.
On an August morning, the rectangular lines of a massive car-carrying ship that has traveled to New England from West Africa, via Baltimore, grow sharper as the vessel nears the craggy mouth of the East Passage of Narragansett Bay.
In the distance, vehicle carriers like the 600-foot Pagna look a bit like shoe boxes on the water.
That changes as the behemoths power closer to the shores of Newport and Rhode Island’s interior waterways — a place that offers many pleasures to people who like to spot big ships and yachts.
The geography of the Bay has always enhanced this ancient pastime.
These days, ship-spotting gets another boost from something that wasn’t around in the heyday of sailing ship news: An ocean of highly networked information about ships, all of it accessible by smartphone. And during this summer of 2019, a sharp spike in marine traffic has further enriched the hobby locally.
From the comfort of a beach chair, myriad facts can be learned about a passing foreign vessel like the Pagna: its name, owner, location, speed, length and width. If you care to look deeper, a little poking around can uncover information that provides some perspective on Rhode Island’s place in the global economy.
Ship-spotters can be as casual as an out-of-state visitor relaxing on an Adirondack chair on the lawn of the Castle Hill Inn.
Or as sharply attuned as Christopher Waterson, the 34-year-old general manager of the family-run company that was waiting to provide terminal services to the Pagna at Provport in Providence.
Each morning, Waterson boots up the free MarineTraffic.com app on his phone. He checks the progress of ships bound for berths where Waterson Terminal Services will provide assistance.
He adjusts schedules accordingly as the little markers on MarineTraffic’s worldwide tracking map move closer to port facilities in Davisville, Providence or New Bedford.
His interest in the movement of ships is largely job-oriented, but it stays with him when he’s away on vacation or sitting with his wife on the lawn at Castle Hill. In these places, Waterson is keenly aware that he’s not the only one interested in the green-hulled tanker plowing through the chop.
“People are always interested,” Waterson says. “Our waiter says everyone always gets excited when something big comes by.”
People want to know, he says. Where is that ship from? Where is it going? What is it carrying?
On Aug. 5, the morning of the Pagna’s arrival, retired physician Robert S. Smith was adapting to his new digs — including sweeping waterfront views — in the Kettle Point area of East Providence.
The 80-year-old recently moved to Riverside from New York to be closer to family.
He and his wife, a bird watcher, are equipped with binoculars and a spotting scope.
It wasn’t long before Smith found himself studying the enormous boats, one by one, as they glided into a cove, ending a voyage deep into the gut of southern New England.
“When I see a big ship coming,” says Smith, “in the water, right where I can see it, I get excited. I run over. I grab my binoculars, and I run outside and look at it. I try to read the name or the number on the ship. In a little while, I go online and I read about it and see where it came from and where it is going to go next. It lights me up when a ship comes in.”
The Pagna, operating under a Gibraltar flag, was an irresistible curiosity.
Most of the vehicle carriers that travel into Rhode Island are delivering new foreign cars to New England by way of the port at Quonset Point. The Pagna does something quite different.
Smith hasn’t yet found his way to MarineTraffic.com. But that’s likely to change if his interest in ship-spotting continues to develop.
The extensive ship-tracking data gathered and disseminated by the online platform, and some others like it, is a growing factor in economics, politics and the diplomacy of nations around the world.
Earlier this year, tracking data from MarineTraffic helped bring attention to ships that appeared to be defying U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports. The data showed some ships were trying to conceal their movements by turning off their location information.
Tracking data showing the proximity of yachts owned by Robert Mercer, a major campaign contributor to President Donald Trump, and by Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev drew attention in 2017. So did the dash last summer of the Peak Pegasus, a cargo ship racing to deliver soybeans to China in time to avert a 25% tariff imposed during the opening salvos of U.S.-China trade war.
In late April, Tiger Woods was a no-show for the Wells Fargo Championship in North Carolina. But the next month, his pursuit of the PGA Championship appeared more certain to anyone who knew where to look: MarineTraffic had confirmed the arrival of his 155-foot yacht, the Privacy, in Oyster Bay, New York, a short distance from the course in Farmingdale.
Much of MarineTraffic’s online offerings, including ship locations, are based on data generated by the Automatic Identification System devices on ships.
The origins of AIS technology can be traced to the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.
Such AIS systems use a combination of technologies, including GPS, VHS radio and digital processing, to send vessel-specific information to shore stations that send that information to other ships and aircraft.
The system has been adopted by the International Maritime Organization. In 2003, the United States developed rules that called for most commercial vessels to be outfitted with the AIS system. In 2015, the rules were changed to call for any commercial vessels 65 feet or longer to use AIS when in U.S. waters. Yachts that are chartered can qualify as commercial. Many other boaters are choosing to use AIS for situational awareness and safety.
One outcome is the dynamic ship-tracking map, a worldwide chart that allows anyone to see the locations of ships around the world.
All together, more than 500,000 vessels were transmitting their locations in 2018, and 40 million users accessing tracking info on MarineTraffic’s website, according to a post on the platform.
Some financial analysts and hedge funds keep an eye on the platform as they follow the flow of commodities around the world.
MarineTraffic has set up a network of more than 3,000 stations in 140 countries.
With the help of ship-spotters who tend these stations, the network collects the AIS information sent out by ships and other boats, according to Georgios Hatzimanolis, a Greece-based spokesman and media strategist for MarineTraffic, who spoke to The Providence Journal in a telephone interview.
Hatzimanolis tallied seven stations in Rhode Island: in Providence, Tiverton, Cranston, Warwick, North Kingstown, Narragansett and Newport.
“That’s actually a pretty good number for such a small area,” he said.
A MarineTraffic data analysis provided to The Journal shows a sharp spike in AIS communications that document visits by commercial vessels to Davisville on Quonset Point, and Providence.
After 1,732 commercial vessel arrivals in 2017 and 1,067 in 2018, Davisville already had 1,016 arrivals by mid-August this year. In Providence, there had been 1,235 arrivals by mid-August, compared with 1,257 for all of 2017 and 962 for 2018.
The numbers reflect a panoramic shot of commercial marine activity on the water in Rhode Island, from the arrivals of huge freighters and barges to the smaller tugs that tend them in port, and from the docking of commercial vessels that tow boats to the docking of ferries.
The stats include the arrival of the Pagna in early August, after its trip from Lagos, Nigeria, through the lower channels of the Bay, past Quonset and Prudence Island to Conimicut Point and Providence just beyond.
In Providence, a vast formation of used cars, lined up in a big lot, awaited the Pagna. Smith watched as workers drove the cars into the hold of the Africa-bound ship.
It was a testament to the fact that not all of America’s forsaken cars end up in the scrap yard.
Based on the destination of the Pagna, as reported by MarineTraffic.com, the cars and SUVs were headed to the nation of Benin.
The business of exporting cars from the United States to Benin has an interesting history.
In 2011, federal prosecutors in New York filed a forfeiture action, asserting that Lebanese financial institutions had wired hundreds of millions of dollars to car buyers in the United States who purchased used vehicles that were then transported to West Africa, including Benin.
The transactions, said prosecutors, were part of a scheme that had laundered money for drug traffickers and for Hezbollah.
The government settled with the Lebanese bank in 2013, but the activities of used-car importers in Benin have continued to draw media coverage, including that of The Wall Street Journal, which followed a Georgia woman’s Toyota Land Cruiser to the country in 2016.
Neither that article, which noted that exporting used cars to the West African country from the United States is a legitimate business, nor the prosecutors’ original complaint implicated the companies involved with the job of moving cargo through ports and across the ocean on vehicle carriers.
On its own, the Pagna’s itinerary represents nothing more than an association with a small country in Africa, a continent with lots of need for functioning cars and trucks.
It’s still interesting. All part of the fun of spotting foreign ships in Rhode Island waters.
On Wednesday morning, MarineTraffic’s online map showed that the Pagna had completed its pass through Benin. The ship was back in Lagos, Nigeria, nestled into a berth on Tincan Island.
