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Rogue Container Money $$$ ? Anyone?

4K views 23 replies 13 participants last post by  cockeyedbob 
#1 ·
Hey guys,

When Ocean Crossing how often do you see floating containers? That fall off from container ships?

If anyone is up for it, I know how to sell these and make a great profit.

I know a guy who a few years ago made about $1Million a year retrieving these distressed containers and selling the contents.(usually, clothes, cars, etc)

Just to give you an example, a container of clothes is worth from $30,000 to $400,000

Once in the Ocean it is legally salvagable property.

There are several techniques for retrieving these, a power boat is necessary. Or sailingdog, maybe your trimaran? :)

By the way, try to be civil, I'm being serious here and this is a business proposition :)

Kacper
 
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#3 ·
Kacper...seriously...you need a different idea. Not practical at all. In 5 years of cruising we didn't see 1 ....Estimates are that 4-6 thousand containers are lost each year. Unless they have flotation (like the recent Doritos containers that ended up in NC's outer banks!)...they sink.
If it were indeed profitable to salvage these containers while still afloat, the shipping companies would do it so since they KNOW where and when they lost a container. If you have to search the oceans for one...it is kind of impossible.
 
#4 ·
camaraderie said:
Kacper...seriously...you need a different idea. Not practical at all. In 5 years of cruising we didn't see 1 ....Estimates are that 4-6 thousand containers are lost each year. Unless they have flotation (like the recent Doritos containers that ended up in NC's outer banks!)...they sink.
If it were indeed profitable to salvage these containers while still afloat, the shipping companies would do it so since they KNOW where and when they lost a container. If you have to search the oceans for one...it is kind of impossible.
Were I to come across one awash in dead calm seas and had scuba gear handy and the idea that sharks weren't around (they could contain 50,000 packets of beef jerky, after all!), then I would lanyard up some bolt cutters and have a look, perhaps. But fending off such a thing would be tricky and I can easily see one getting hurt from just the mass moving about in the water.

How you would get the door open (never mind that it might immediately sink completely!) is another issue. I wouldn't want to be actually inside the thing if it decided to roll and go to the bottom.

I think I would be more interested in GETTING it to sink completely than in salvaging it. The odds are that it's either filled with clothing or electronics are high, and neither like sea water much. In fact, I can't think of too many items I could salvage that would be worth putting on the boat. Canada's year's supply of anchors? Ain't gonna float. 5,000 miles of polypropylene rope? Will float, but not worth finding. The world's output of sextants? Maybe, if I could be quick about it!
 
#5 ·
You see in England where they had a bunch washing up to shore and they were trying to keep the people from taking the stuff form them?? I say: Good for them! Take the stuff. Next time try a little harder to keep that crap on your boat!! I know the guys that do this for a living are serious about safety and keeping the containers... but I bet they could come up with a better system if it was really important to them.

- CD

PS Kacper - I have NEVER seen one. I even mentioned in a thread a long time back whether anyone had seen one and I don't think anyone on this forum had... not floating, anyway. Besides, I understand that even the floating ones sit just under the water surface, so you pretty much have to hit it to know its there (which, there in lies the problem).
 
#6 ·
CD-
The recent situation in England was a bit different from the usual. The entire SHIP had run aground and was being pounded, the containers were falling off and coming ashore within sight of it. They weren't just flotsam on the high seas.

Cam-
"Hello my name Imbabwe Ngeri, my uncle send many valuable things to America in container that has gone overboard. I am knowing exactly where is container and have contracted with American salvage company to retrieve it but need $15,775 US to make fuel deposit before the salvage can proceeed. If you can be sending this to me I will reward you many times over!"
Come on, let's make a buck and have some fun.<G>
 
#8 ·
cam-

Let me guess... you started banking in Nigeria... ;)
 
#9 ·
Hey guys,

What this person I knew did was:

1. Go to china

2. Rent a cheap BIG diesel boat from the locals, with a crane rig to pull things out of the water.

3. He would simply travel up and down the shipping routes, find the containers, and either bring it aboard or tug it back to shore.

50% of the stuff in these containers is mostly clothes, name brand jeans, shoes.

Most of the containers are airlock tight so they have air inside and float.

I'm depressed no-one wants to persue this business venture :( Back to my regular business then.

Kacper
 
#12 · (Edited)
Kacper, if it was so simple, do you think there would be any shortage of natives already doing it? China has a huge population, much in abject poverty and extremely willing to do many clever things to get out of it. They do have fisherman and sailors, and they're not so stupid they'd ignore floating treasure troves.

Odds are your buddy was puffing a bit, or covering for money made in the drug trade. No one, nowhere, has ever said salvors make big money. They've always done hard work for what is only sometimes a reasonable return.

Airtight shipping containers? Most unusual. More typically leaky sieves and the actual clothes are poly-wrapped to keep the water and bugs out.

"simply...find the containers," Yeah, if it was so easy to find the right ones full of treasure...That must be why he retired and came back here, too much money.<G>

(Nothing personal, some of us are just awfully skeptical of "quick easy money" plans that don't involve simple bank robbery.)
 
#13 ·
Hello,

There you go again!!!! Being all negative and lacking any insight. Now leave me and Kacper alone. I have went out and bought me a MacGregor with a forward facing sonar to track the little bastards down.

- CD

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP... wait, is it!!! nope another damned US Submarine smacking me bottom side...BEEP-BEEP-BEEP... wait is it... nope another damned US Submarine smacking me bottom side... BEEP-BEEP-BEEP... wait, is it!!! nope another damned US Submarine smacking me bottom side...BEEP-BEEP-BEEP... wait is it... nope another damned US Submarine smacking me bottom side...

HEY Kacper!! Take the bloody Japanese Flag down for God's sakes... the Macgregor just can't handle it!!
 
#14 ·
CD-
Oh DUH!@ That's it, that's why my BS detector went off. Speaking about taking down the flag (and the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans traditionally all hate each other almost as badly as they resent wide-eyed hairy barbarians) the salvage story can't be true for one reason:

No one runs a business in China without 51% Chinese native ownership, do they? Am I mis-recalling that? I seem to remember China and Brazil are among the major places where outsiders are welcome to leave their money--but not allowed to run any shows.

Or, gee, maybe I've got it all wrong and there's SO MUCH money to be made, there's enough to pay off the native partners too. WooHoo! Riches in China! Shores paved with gold! <G>

(The caffiene will start wearing off soon.<G>)
 
#15 ·
kacper as one who hauled cont. i can assure you they are not airlock tight unless they are refrirated containers. all regular dry-dock (shipping term) cont. have vents in the top sidewall. this allows for pressure equalization and humidity control. having off loaded cont. from the orient/far eastyou can tell when shipped in the monsoon season/humid season. if your freind made that kind of money finding/retreiving lost cont. he was either very gifted at finding them or was working with someone insidethe steamship cos. that lost them. very few stay on the surface after a few days because they get (the contents) gets waterlogged, and the weight of the cont. will cause it to sink. used to get in cast cont. (CANADA STEAM TRANSPORT) they would loose on some trips do to weather 30-40 at a time and salvage approx. 5-15 depending on weather cond. at time of loss. most sank pretty fast, but there is always the exception.
 
#16 ·
Oh, crap Hello... are you telling me i am going to have to sell my macgregor now?

That's great. Just great. And I was about to put a mast off the front of it too. Well, if nothing else, maybe I can rub it off on Giu.

GIU... GIU, YOU THERE.... I GOT A PERFORMANCE CRUISER I WANT TO DISCUSS WITH YOU... EXCELLENT INCOME POTENTIAL AS A SUBMARINE, ER, HMM, CARGO CONTAINER HUNTER... GIU... COME BACK GIU... I WILL EVEN THROW ON A PORTUGESE ANCHOR ROLLER THAT IS REMOVABLE... LITTLE POLLUTED WITH SNOW, BUT THAT IS OK...
 
#18 ·
Poor old Kacper... all he wanted was to help his fellow sailors with some income potential, and he has to put up with the likes of Hello, and Mike, and PB... I am the only one that has been on his side.

- CD

Kacper - got your back, Buddy. How does that song go... "You got a friend in me..."
 
#19 ·
After 30 plus years working and playing on the Gulf of Mexico, I have never come across a floating or partially submerged shipping container; however, there is some money to be made on something else, that believe it or not, is somewhat prevalent in the northern GOM, and I assume, other parts of the world as well. Seismic vessel tail sleds. Seismic vessels (usually 200-400ft) used for oil exploration will “drag” cables in excess of 5 miles in length behind them. At the end of those cables is a sled usually constructed similar to a small lake pontoon boat, usually strapped with a number of highly visible “Norwegian” buoys, a high intensity strobe, several radar reflectors and some sort of GPS beacon, transponder or transmitter, an electronics package that is used by the towing seismic vessel. This package is primarily used to give operators on the vessel the location of the sled while towing the cable, not after it has broken loose. Reeling in a six mile long cable(or less if something has gone awry in the cable) in heavy seas after a sled has departed takes hours, and by that time the seismic vessel is long out of range of the locating transmitter. Although more and more seismic fleets use chaseboats, which usually follow close behind the tail buoy and sled, which could possibly retrieve a “loose” sled, some fleets still do not. I have had three instances where I have profited from finding these sleds, or the remnants of one. First one, about 40 miles out of Galveston, I was on a sixty foot sportfisherman, we put a line on what appeared to be an almost undamaged sled, towed it to town, made a call, and a few hours later, a guy from Houston came down and gave us a check for 4 grand. He had a crane truck pick it out of the water and put it on a flatbed. Second time, off of the Mississippi coast, one night, calm seas, came across a radar target, put a light on it, turned out to be what was left of heavily damaged tail sled, grabbed the electronics package off of it(it was just heavily taped), then removed the buoys which sent it to the bottom. After making a call at the dock a courier came to pick it up, handed us five hundred cash, which was the reward on the beacon. We had tried to bargain for more, but the guy said, “if that is not enough, keep YOUR beacon”. Also the rep told us that sled had been lost for about three months. And the third was an almost identical to the situation off of Mississippi;however, this was off of North Padre Island. These companies, I believe, really want you to either tow it or sink it (I don't think any of the three I had business with weighed more than a ton), and they really appreciate the lat and long where you found it, which you would certainly have in your log. Any sailors that have had any sea time in the Northern Gulf, and I suppose in other offshore oilfields in other parts of the world have probably experienced one of these seismic operations (my knowledge is limited to the GOM). They start screaming on 16 if you get within 10 miles of ‘em, especially if your cpa will be less than that. And they just adore shrimp trawlers on AP with the “captain” either asleep or out on the back deck. They start shining some real "badboy" spotlights, start shooting flares, sending chaseboats, oh man, it can get exciting. One sure isn’t going to make a million like Kacper and his bud, but if any of you ever come across one, depending on the situation and your destination, you might make a few bucks for the fuel or bar kitty. You can usually always find some phone number somewhere on what you find. Even the lat and long may be valuable, I just never left one alone.
 
#20 ·
hellosailor said:
Kacper, if it was so simple, do you think there would be any shortage of natives already doing it? China has a huge population, much in abject poverty and extremely willing to do many clever things to get out of it. They do have fisherman and sailors, and they're not so stupid they'd ignore floating treasure troves.
Hey Hellosailor,

I don't think most chinese natives can afford a big steel rig cargo boat for the weekend.

Secondly, selling this cargo requires you speak english and have access to the Internet and some marketing / sales skill and some connections in America. So that takes out a lot of chinese natives.

Most people in poverty also stay in poverty simply because of a "poverty" mind-set from childhood. They don't sit around thinking of Entrepreneourial ideas during the day or seeking out million dollar oppertunities, lol :) That's a fact of human psychology.

So, there are many many oppertunities out there.

Answering another question by someone else, you don't need to find a "special" container, any will do. You can sell a container full of thumb tacks as well as rubber poo. Just post it on www.Recycle.net and you'll have buyer leads :)

I'm pretty sure this guy went out into the shipping lanes after a storm...

Now about that 5 mile length of cable... how much is that worth ;) ?
 
#21 · (Edited)
Kacper-
Most Chinese can't afford a big cargo boat, but then again, neither can most Americans. If the boat is over there--someone can afford to use it. If it isn't over there, now you've got transportation, need working papers, business permit, commercial visa and 51% native business partner...Lots more expenses.
And a surprising number of Chinese speak English, or YnGlitch as it is sometimes known. There's a big national program to teach it before they host the Olympics, literally whole villages are being ordered to report to movie theatres and halls to take group lessons. "English, it ain't just for Lufthansa pilots anymore!"
Opportunities, yes. But as the Mandarin glyph for opportunity can also be read as chaos...Yes again. If you vet your source and he's legit, all you have to risk is a couple of grand in travel expenses and charter fees. OK, maybe ten fifteen grand by the time you buy some diesel. And, well, possibly the loss of a kidney or two while in a Chinese prison if you don't follow the commerce rules properly.
I honestly hope it makes you a millionaire like he is, I just wouldn't take bets on it. Even as a bookie!<G>
 
#22 ·
Here goes one of those "I seem to remember reading somewhere"... that there were 50,000 containers lost and floating at any given time. Also that they were floating because the highest ones stacked were packed with the lightest materials so as not to affect ship's stability.
In the article they were discussing ways that would remove these floating containers from being hazards to navigation, such as beacons and doors/panels that would fall off after being exposed to saltwater for a period of time.
 
#23 ·
Listen up guys,alot of these are inside jobs.Some of these containers are being filled with worthless items and tossed over for the over inflated insurance.Then there`s filling the container with Kilo`s of coke,breaking the seal at sea and removing the dope,to toss over to a waiting boat near a port of entry.When leaving a source country it`s much easier to have it loaded on a container than to be brought on piece at a time.The container can be ditched anywhere along the way.When you are talking hundreds of millions ,participants can always be found.
 
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