If you want to pilot a container ship into Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, you’d better be good. Navigating the Long Tau river requires these deep-sea leviathans to turn on a dime, making for some spectacular viewing.
It’s not just the precariously narrow width, which squeezes down to a couple of hundred meters (650 ft) in places, or the depth of the navigable channel, which can be as little as 8.5 m (28 ft) depending on tides … It’s the wickedly tight turns that big ships have to make to get through.
Put it this way … When the Australian Navy’s long-range frigate HMAS Toowoomba made the trip in 2023, navigating officer Loren Angel described the 4.5-hour experience thus: “It was 87 km (54 miles) from the start of the actual pilotage with hundreds of bends along the river … This has been the hardest pilotage of my career. I did a similar river pilotage in Bangkok last year but this has been very long and exhausting.”
That was with the help of a Vietnamese pilot, too – and the HMAS Toowoomba is a little over half the length and a tiny fraction of the gross tonnage of the star of the video below: SPIL Nirmala, a 212-m (696-ft) cargo beast capable of hauling more than 2,500 20-ft shipping containers.
Shot by ShipSpotting Vietnam, the video shows a number of big ships making their way though the tightest turn on the channel, tilting at a rather jaunty angle as they whip around impressively quickly. The Nirmala appears around the nine-minute mark, and you can really sense the scale of the forces she’s dealing with as she wheels about, heavily laden with containers.
Mind you, the ShipSpotting Vietnam channel has seen fit to slap an egregiously dishonest thumbnail on this video, clearly faked up using AI. Indeed, it seems these clowns do the same on every video they post, to make things look more extreme. That’s naughty behavior, and not something we’d normally encourage, so please jump in and leave an angry comment on our behalf.
But thumbnail aside, the video footage itself is legit, and bears testimony to the genuine skill of the pilots, not to mention the impressive agility of the ships themselves. Take a look:
MAXIMUM DRIFT of 18-Year-Old Container Ship’s Risky Sharp Turn #shipspotting
It certainly changes my understanding of how quickly a container ship can change direction when it needs to!
Source: ShipSpotting Vietnam