The Widest Ship Ever Built Is Mostly an Empty Slot on Purpose
Spider Hennessy, Field Correspondent · the field desk
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The field correspondent files from the deck of a supply boat in the North Sea, downwind of a vessel so wide he had to stop counting it as one thing.
I spend most of my working life waiting for animals to get fatter. I sit in a hide, I keep a log, and once a year I watch a brown bear in Alaska turn itself into a barrel because winter is coming and the bear has done the math. Last June I filed a whole column on a bear named Chunk and the discipline of watching a body widen on schedule. The desk sent me to the North Sea this month to look at something else widening on schedule, and I want to report that I have never in my life seen anything take up this much horizon and still float.
It is called the Pioneering Spirit. It belongs to a Swiss company, which is its own kind of joke, the largest ship on Earth registered to a country with no coastline. It is three hundred and eighty-two metres long, which is already most of four football pitches, but length is not why I am writing. A ship being long is not news. A ship being long is the entire idea of a ship. Long is fast, long is cheap, long is what you build when you want water to get out of your way.
This one is one hundred and twenty-three and three-quarter metres wide.
I need you to sit with that ratio the way I sat with it from a pitching deck at six in the morning. A normal cargo vessel is something like seven times longer than it is wide, a knife laid flat. The Pioneering Spirit is barely three times longer than it is wide. It is not a knife. It is a dinner plate that learned to navigate. Somebody took the most slender thing humans build and overruled it, on purpose, at a cost of two and a half billion euros, because the job required width and the naval architects were not allowed to argue.
Here is the job, and here is the part that put my pencil down. The thing is the heaviest vehicle ever made, a million tonnes when it ballasts down, and the Senior Cataloguer would normally have my head for leading with weight, because the standing doctrine of this desk is that heavy is not thiccc. He is right, and the weight is not the argument. The width is the argument. The Pioneering Spirit is a catamaran. It has two hulls and a slot cut between them, a deep notch open at the stern, and it drives that slot over the top of an offshore oil platform like a man stepping over a fence post, lifts the entire platform off its legs in one piece, forty-eight thousand tonnes of it, and carries it home. It cannot do that job narrow. It does that job only because it is wide enough to have a gap in the middle big enough to swallow a building.
So the most important feature of the widest ship ever built is the part of it that is not there. The slot. The hole. The empty water down its spine. I have watched a lot of animals and I have never seen one whose defining organ was an absence, and yet here is a billion-euro machine whose whole reason to exist is the space between its two enormous flanks. It is girth arranged around a purpose. It is the opposite of a show.
That is what got me, standing there cold. The bears I watch widen because they have to, and you can see the reason in the fat, the reason is the winter. This ship widened because it had to, and you can see the reason in the slot, the reason is the platform. Neither of them is wide for the sake of being looked at. The masthead has said since the beginning that girth is width with intention, and I have spent six months thinking that was a line. It is not a line. It is a specification. Somebody wrote it on a blueprint in South Korea and Daewoo built it to the millimetre.
I came out here expecting to file a piece about the heaviest thing ever moved. I am filing a piece about the widest thing ever justified. The bear earns its barrel against the winter. The ship earns its breadth against the platform. Both of them are exactly as wide as the work demands and not one inch wider, and that, the desk has been telling me from the top of the page the whole time, is the only kind of thiccc that was ever real.
The ruling: Thiccc, and the cleanest case of girth-with-intention the desk has filed. Entered under Maritime, with a note that the weight is incidental and the slot is the evidence. The Pioneering Spirit is not big to be admired. It is wide to do a job no narrow thing could reach, which is the whole word in one hull, or rather two.
This correspondent is returning to Alaska, where the subjects are warmer and the widening is seasonal. The supply boat, for the record, is a knife. Seven to one. It got out of the ship's way like everything else does.