An itinerant shipping container.

By John Charles Hopkins

Barrels, bottles, buckets, buoys, cargo slings, coconuts, crates, nets, planks, poles, roots, rope, sea grass, seaweed, stumps, and tree trunks: an alphabet of flotsam abounds along the shores of Bay Cay and other outlying barrier islands that flank North Caicos. 

This stunning photo is an aerial view of Greenwich Channel, just south of the container’s location in 2023.

The locus is Spanish Point where the Caicos Bank protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean, exposed to the prevailing easterly winds and the west-flowing Antilles Current. Three large “cuts”—kilometre-wide semi-circular breaks in the fringing reef—capture the floating debris.

Occasionally over the past 40 years, more substantial vessels have washed in: a small freighter (a rumoured ganja boat), a couple of pleasure yachts, and a mysterious sponsored trans-ocean rowing-boat inscribed LES PUREE DE LEGUMES FRAIS. Two substantial iron anchors hint of other vessels, centuries past, in distress on a leeward shore. But of all the debris, none is quite as extraordinary as a 6-metre long (20 feet) shipping container that came in through one of the cuts a decade ago.

The shipping container must have floated in, presumably being water-tight or carrying buoyant contents, and grounded off Sand Bar Point, Bay Cay. By January 2016, it had been reduced to a skeleton, a steel frame, the walls and contents gone. An assemblage of gulls had taken possession of the frame, established an ephemeral hierarchy of perches, and were using it as a fishing platform. At that time, the container seemed grounded, and would slowly rust and disintegrate over a period of years.

In 2018, a somewhat more weathered container appeared off the east end of Horse Stable Beach, some 5.5 km to the west of Sand Bar Point; a similar assemblage of gulls jockeyed about possession. And in 2023, the frame of a container and a group of argumentative gulls graced the tidal delta off the mouth of Bottle Creek, 1.5 km to the east of Horse Stable Beach.

As there was only one container frame off North Caicos at any one time, it was obviously the same container frame that had moved, but how? It couldn’t float and seemed firmly planted on the sandy substrate. Also, there was no question about locations and times—I had photographed the frame at each location and recorded the co-ordinates by GPS. Google Earth Historical Imagery independently substantiates these observations.

The positions and dates shown on this Google Earth image show how the itinerant shipping container has moved over time.

Variably fuzzy but unmistakable images of the container frame off Sand Bar Point can be found on four Google Earth images acquired in 2016. There are three fuzzy images recorded between 2018–2022 off Horse Stable Beach. It is clearly visible off the mouth of Bottle Creek on the 2023-06-22 image, which is also its current position (March 2024).

The collation of four images from 2016 offers a unique record of local movement. Not only is the container frame present in each image, but in a 7-month period its position changed over a distance of about 12 metres and the orientation through 30 degrees. Some of this apparent movement may be due to variations in geo-centering the images (also seen among adjacent similar-size patch reefs) but these effects are in the order of a few metres at most. In any case, the changes in orientation substantiate movement. Similar evidence of local movement can be inferred among the images from the Horse Stable Beach location.

An inescapable conclusion is that the container frame has intermittently moved across the sandy sea floor. The 5.5 km passage from Sand Bar Point to Horse Stable Beach was probably in response to Hurricane Irma in 2017 that blew east to west, oblique to the strand along Bay Cay; toppled Casuarina trees along Bay Cay record this wind direction. In contrast, the eastern retreat from Horse Stable Beach to the mouth of Bottle Creek may have been affected by winter storms driven by cold fronts from the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Coast. A familiar winter storm pattern on North Caicos occurs when the prevailing East–Northeast tradewinds diminish, then, after a couple of still days, the wind blows hard from West–Northwest turning to North with accompanying heavy swells.

These photos of the itinerant shipping container prove that it moved over the years, a testimony to the power of natural processes.

Local movement as seen on the 2016 images is probably a response to lesser storms or interacting swell trains, especially in the Spanish Point area where wave refraction around the reef stacks induces variable currents. One can envisage that movement of the container frame is the result of waves incrementally pushing and lifting the frame, coupled with undermining of the sandy substrate by wave turbulence. Confirmation of these processes by direct observation would be interesting but potentially hazardous.

The story of the North Caicos container is testimony to the power of intermittent natural processes that move sand, erode rock, and sculpture the northern shore of the Caicos Islands. Will the container move again before it inevitably breaks up? As with all matters geological, time will tell. Meanwhile, the container frame in its current position is a useful navigation marker for finding the shallow-water entrance into Bottle Creek.

John Hopkins is a retired geologist who has been a regular visitor to North Caicos since 1982, and homeowner since 1989. Over the years he has been observing sedimentation processes and shoreline changes among the Caicos Islands; more recently he has started to compile some of these observations as a retirement hobby. This article is intended to be a collection of topical events that emphasize geological process that form and modify the Caicos Islands.