That December, a tanker in Corpus Christi loaded up with crude oil drilled from the shale in the Eagle Ford and set sail for France, representing the first major export of US oil abroad since the 1970s.
That shining sea was the Arctic Ocean. That ship was a fishing boat which had wandered east from the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Now it was lying in Coronation Gulf.
So, for some ships carrying billions of dollars in cargo, it's a question of what takes longer and costs more, waiting to unload on the west coast or sailing to Florida on the east coast.
Earlier this evening, we delayed the return to the UK of British bound flights that we are on the ground of Sharm el-Sheikh while we conducted a review of security at the airport.
After a while, Stan remembered that Harry had paid for hot chocolate, but poured it all over Harry's pillow when the bus moved abruptly from Anglesey to Aberdeen.
The Sierra Leone-flagged ship will head to the port of Tripoli, Lebanon, after transiting Turkey's Bosporus Strait linking the Black Sea, which is dominated by Russia's navy, to the Mediterranean.