ShipMap
shipmap.org
shipmap.org
They would fly to Europe, and dress like rich fancy boys.
They would then rent the ships for vacation.
They would take the transponder off the luxury vessel, and put it on a toy boat. The owner would check on his vessel, and it all looked fine.
Meanwhile, the thieves would have the boat in Russia in a few days.
(I believe they got 100 boats. This article reminded me of the caper.)
[1] https://twitter.com/Eve6/status/1341031553078448131?s=20
I wonder what protections can be made against this? Tamper-proofing the transponders might go some way, but a bullet-proof solution likely isn't possible.
ID checks: presumably they must already do that - I mean, they check your ID for hiring a car/van. I wonder if the criminals used stolen ID to get around this?
Regular checks: on what?
Security guards: you mean when you hire a boat, a security guard comes along for the ride? I can't see many genuine clients being happy about that
Going into Russia through the northern sea doesn’t seem to be viable either.
Now it’s even harder due to the migrant crisis the waters are very heavily patrolled and anything bigger than a dingy will light up on radar.
They might be able to sail into North Africa and then arrange for fake papers and ownership transfer but I would really like to know how they would sail into Russia without raising any alarms.
Be curious no more
Grant it I wasn’t traveling on multi million dollar yachts, but sometimes what you expect to happen and what actually happens are two different things when it comes to enforcing laws.
The US has a much larger coast line and even then you usually have to communicate with someone if you don’t want to get a visit from the coast guard.
Also I haven’t seen a single luxury yacht you can rent without a crew, this isn’t any different than chartering a private jet you get a pilot, co-pilot and a flight attendant as part of the package. A yacht isn’t a small boat you need a proper captain, an engineer and a service crew.
A boat that can sail form anywhere in the med to Russia needs to be quite big and have quite a bit of fuel and supplies.
This doesn’t seem to be an operation that can be executed so simply you need to make sure there is enough fuel/supplies which may raise flags on shore when you book it, you need to find a way to deal with the crew, you need to be able to replace the AIS and have a valid ship registration to pass through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea.
While I’m sure an organized crime cartel might be able to pull this off but the resources and planning this job would require would be quite insane.
If anyone has any questions, AMA!
If you press the little info button at the top right, you get some basic information, including this:
Where did you get the data and who paid?
Our data sources for shipping positions are exactEarth for AIS data (location/speed) and Clarksons Research UK World Fleet Register (static vessel information). We are very grateful to our funders, the European Climate Foundation.
I found this to be a bit difficult though. I don't think there are necessarily boats of this, but it does go into basic business logistics
Theres a sequel to it, although I've never played it. First one wasn't too bad, the economics wasn't too complicated, but worthy of playing.
Sequel: https://store.steampowered.com/app/350110/TransOcean_2_Rival...
Ships taking the Northern Arctic route etc.
Found the answer in the sites FAQ:
> Why do ships sometimes appear to move across land?
> In some cases this is because there are ships navigating via canals or rivers that aren’t visible on the map. Generally, though, this effect is an artefact of animating a ship between two recorded positions with missing data between, especially when the positions are separated by a narrow strip of land. We may develop the map to remove this effect in the future.
Have you operated an antenna, by chance? I've considered building an ADS-B receiver to satisfy my curiosity about the planes I see out my window all day.
I got busy with other things so haven't done much with it, but there are some Python libraries that made ADS-B easy.
e.g. 8 June 2012 05:00 from western Sahara to English Channel, through Sahara, right the middle of Spain, parts of France.
Another on 9 May 2012 from Southeast Asia, straight through the south of India and right through the middle of Africa to somewhere on the Guinean Gulf in about half a day.
Not sure why this would be the case. Transponder turned off? Data missing for other reasons?
I've never seen a perfectly clean dataset of any significant size. Big datasets have all sorts of weirdness unless there was an extraordinary effort to keep them pristine.
There are so many edge cases and oddities that the more you look the more you’ll find.
The moral of the story here is that you cannot accept AIS data, or any single data source, to be God’s Truth; you must always skeptical of the data before your eyes, lest you fall victim to “The Analyst’s Fallacy” (believing that the data presented is all the data there is) and create false stories in your mind.
Great voiceover narration.
Weird, weird choice of pondering, melancholy rainy-day ballerina-dance music. Is it a British thing?