The series begins with a story about a giant ocean truck. The ship is going to Europe. We are watching the crew of the ship, which appears to be composed almost entirely of people from South and Southeast Asia. They're doing well. The vessel is interestingly shown, its feature is the ability to change the height of cargo decks in a matter of minutes, that is, if there are cars or construction equipment with high growth, then for them the height is greater, and on another deck you can drive cars and reduce the height of the deck under them. Plus, the vessel to facilitate loading has its own folding ladder of several hundred tons of weight, it is more like a folding bridge. It is interesting to see how this works in the European context.
In the second series, the container ship is relatively small (not exactly a giant), but it should be so, since it is specially designed to transport relatively small consignments of goods between small settlements with severe geography and including narrow water approaches to loading sites. And we have Europe again, a purely Scandinavian-looking crew. In one of the coastal settlements, an interesting story once happened: lava after the eruption narrowed the navigable passage, that is, it could generally block it, but its special watering was watered to make it freeze faster. Such interesting historical references sometimes appear in the film.
The third series features a cruise ship, but by today’s standards is not so modern (not surprisingly, part of the film is devoted to its minor repairs right on the road). Although many of them did not rest. This time we moved from Eurasia to the United States and the Caribbean, although the ship itself is 3,000 passengers Italian-made. We recognize the device of our target again, briefly, over. We are told about the life and life of a team of about 1,200 people (among officers and other command staff, many people of European appearance, and the rest of the staff, apparently, again South-East Asia and the Middle East, as well as immigrants from the former Soviet Union), about their current tasks.
That's the way it works. There is no tension, no impossible tasks or dangerous difficulties. Everything is simple and simple.
Episode 4. Finally, a large container ship (one of the real trading whales of the world economy, without which global trade is simply impossible in modern realities) with an engine almost as high as the Soviet five-story building, can accommodate 14,000 containers (but it is not always possible to take on board as much, since at maximum load the draught of the vessel will not allow you to go to certain ports) - we are told in relatively detail how they are attached to each other and to the deck, plus they will show how oversized cargo of large mass is loaded instead of containers. And the vessel is very young, literally new (at the time of filming), naturally, built in Asia, specially for the new dimensions of the recently expanded Panama Canal, the size of which is oriented in the construction of ships like ours. And we're again hooking up some of the ship's service in Europe. The team is from Asia. A funny and interesting fact from history will be shown again, telling us how shipping containers first appeared and how much the world trade accelerated. It was an interesting passage under the bridge, so close that you can almost touch it. In one of the ports, containers to the place of loading were transported by platforms without drivers, that is, completely on autopilot.
So far I see one thing: ploughing on ships on the main routes of ocean immigrants from Southeast Asia and the surrounding area. Perhaps there is a lot of labor there, and willing to work for a long time and not for as much money as the European or the American demands. Most of our ships are built in Asia. Here in the leaders of South Korea, partly Japan.
Episode 5. The largest sailboat travels in the waters of the Caribbean basin. 5 match, 42 sails, which means there will be a lot of rigging work on show. This is a modern ship, equipped with engines, although it is no longer young, so everywhere you can see rust in the technical compartments, something breaks periodically. The sailboat arranges cruises for its guests. The team, with the exception of the senior officers from Asia again, is probably all Indian (and not surprisingly, as there are already more of them than the Chinese). The commander, as you understand, is a person from a post-Soviet country.
Episode 6. A huge floating crane (actually two) in the form of a large platform, able to change its sediment, goes to the oil platform to load something weighing many hundreds of tons from it (the operation is carefully prepared, even a very beautiful computer model is made and shown to those who will supervise the execution of the work). On board our ship hundreds of crew members, half a thousand, in my opinion (if the translators correctly translated and I heard correctly), but this is not a fact (I did not see more than 50 at a time) - probably most of the team performs secondary functions that are not related to the main work. In short, among them again engineers (more than 10 people) and senior almost all Americans or Europeans. The lowest composition is hard-working in appearance from Southeast Asia.
7. Transportation of dry cargo, i.e. coal in our case, in North America between the United States and Canada on lakes (including with ice cover and through a channel with locks - the ship is specially designed for the size of locks) with the North American team. Very well explained the principle of operation and the device of the bulk carrier (in our case, quite modern and automated), as well as auxiliary equipment for transshipment of coal on the shore.
8. A vessel to install wind turbines. Europe again, again, the North Sea region, where we have often been in this series. This time we have a ship that can rise above the water, standing on its own feet! It’s like an oil platform that could go down and float on without its legs.
Of course, the show is interesting. But if you have watched Discovery and National Geographic, then you have already heard and seen something similar about similar or even the same ships, although these channels like ours are no longer officially broadcast.