The Yellow Fleet was stuck in the Suez Canal for eight years

When the Suez Canal was closed in 1967, 15 ships trapped there with their crews stayed eight years. Encrusted with desert sand, they became known as the Yellow Fleet.

The MV Ever Given container ship trapped in the Suez Canal in March this year. Picture: AFP

Early in the morning of March 22, a 400m-long container ship ran aground at the south end of the Suez Canal. The Ever Given is 80m longer than the height of Australia’s tallest building, the Gold Coast’s Q1 tower. It weighs 200,000 tonnes and had on board more than 18,300 containers.

Piled up on deck, these acted like a sail when a local phenomenon known as a khamsin wind whipped up tonnes of sand reducing vision and making navigation complex. The Ever Given breached the canal, stayed stuck there for six days and caused a traffic jam of 350 ships. Egyptian authorities have seized it, demanding from its owners $A1.16 billion in salvage costs and damages and the Ever Given’s crew has been warned it might be aboard for up to a year as the parties wrangle a solution. They can count themselves lucky. The last time the Suez was closed – also for six days – was in 1967, and the 15 ships trapped there with their crews stayed eight years.

Five cargo ships, part of the Yellow Fleet, pictured at anchor stranded in the Great Bitter Lake section of the Suez Canal at the start of the Six-Day War.

Ever since the establishment of Israel, its Arab neighbours had been poking sticks into their enemy, launching terror attacks – snipers picking off farmers and fishermen – and broadcasting endless existential threats. Egypt’s President Nasser announced on May 27, 1967, that “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel”, as he massed battalions and tanks in the Sinai. Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan, with others, were about to eliminate Israel with a combined army of about 550,000 troops and almost 1000 aircraft. Tiny Israel, in just 132 hours of war, defeated its enemies and reset the Middle East.

But the Egyptians had blocked the Suez at either end with mines, scuttled ships, dredges and even parts of a bridge. And trapped in a broad area in the middle known as the Great Bitter Lake was a motley collection of ships carrying everything from cow hides, eggs, rubber, sheet metal, wheat and plastic toys. Three of them – the British MS Port Invercargill, German MS Münsterland, and Swedish MS Killara – were travelling from Australia.

Together, as they became encrusted with fine desert sand driven by khamsin winds, the ships became known as the Yellow Fleet. In those first days, the crews stayed on their ships and bunkered down, frightened, as war raged overhead.

Sean Dring was aboard the Port Invercargill, one of four British ships, which was loaded with fruit at Fremantle. Years later he recalled that first week: “We don’t know if the Israelis are going to push further, from where they’d stopped on the Sinai side, further into Egypt.” A crew mate, Mick Miles, agreed: “It was a worrying time for us not knowing if and when we were going to get out … once it was over it was just a waiting game.”

Stranded at the same time as the 1968 Mexico Olympics, sailors devised their own rival competition.

Nearby was John Hughes on another British ship, the MS Melampus: “Obviously when you see a conflict like that and you watch it on the television war looks glorious, but to be honest it is not, it is completely horrific.”

“I was 19 years old at the time and it was quite a surprise to find myself right in the middle of a war, the front seat …,” remembered Peter Richmond aboard the MS Agapenor, the crew of which had more reason than most to be fearful. Richmond explained that he was aware of his ship’s cargo: “The first week was a very anxious one … we had loaded a lot of ammunition (former British Forces arms from Singapore) in holds one and two ... Had we been hit the probability is that the ship would have suffered catastrophic damage.”

He was relieved when a ceasefire was called on June 10. At first the crews stayed with their ships, hoping soon to be on their way north. Terror soon turned to amusement, even if the Israelis on the east bank and the Egyptians on the west would exchange gunfire and the odd shell from time to time.

But their confined circumstances and inactivity inevitably led to boredom. The crews of 14 of the ships – one from America was stranded further up the canal – met together that October aboard the Melampus and formed the Great Bitter Lake Association, later roping their ships together in the middle and before long they were planning Great Bitter Lake Olympics to coincide with the Mexico Games. The British hosted the soccer, and there was weightlifting, water polo, and sailing, of course – conducted around the fleet using some of the lifeboats – high jumping, table tennis. The Killara, which had a pool, organised the swimming.

Rather like the Hutt River Province, this little kingdom’s principalities made stamps they used on letters home. These were cut from lino using a razor, and inked and pressed on paper.

Often they were accompanied by genuine Egyptian stamps, but many made it overseas on GBLA stamps alone (and with handmade airmail stickers) and are highly collectable.

The soccer players of Yellow Fleet.

The shipping companies told their employees to feed themselves from the holds of canned fruit and frozen food that included tonnes of Australian lamb on the Melampus, while another ship that had passed through Vietnam was loaded with large quantities of frozen prawns. Other ships had clothing – and all goods were shared around the cargo-ship micronation.

Eventually, even frozen food has a use-by date, and it was expensive to keep the refrigeration systems running, so tonnes of perishables went overboard.

Over the eight years of the Yellow Fleet, crews were rotated on and off the ships and eventually 3000 men would serve on them. Towards the end most had skeleton teams keeping up basic maintenance, all of them endlessly repainting the hulls to avert rust.

Things came to ahead in October 1973 with another attack by the Arab nations, this time assisted by Cuba, supported by Russia, and known as the Yom Kippur War. Egypt’s new leader, Anwar Sadat, reportedly said that he was prepared to “sacrifice a million Egyptian soldiers” to win back the territory his country and allies had lost in 1967. Once again, the Arabs and their allies were defeated.

After the Yom Kippur conflict, and aware their Jewish neighbours were here to stay, the combatants – led mostly by western navies – were given the green light to clear the Suez Canal and allow world trade to go back to business as usual.

In the end they cleared the sunk ships and a total 686,000 mines along with another 13,500 other pieces of unexploded ordnance. By early 1975, the Yellow Fleet was free to go.

In a nod to the precision of German engineering and maintenance, when the ships restarted their engines, only the two German-flagged craft were good to go. The ships Münsterland and Nordwind went on to Hamburg as planned, Münsterland setting an unlikely record: the longest ever journey from Australia to Europe: eight years, three months and five days.