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The Suez Canal closed on 5 June 1967, the day the Six-Day War began, and fourteen freighters were caught inside: German, British, Swedish, French, Polish, Czechoslovak, Bulgarian and American. Egypt sank ships and laid mines at both ends. The fourteen dropped anchor in the Great Bitter Lake, the salt basin the canal cuts straight through, and there they stayed for eight years.
The crews did not sit and wait. In 1968 they founded the Great Bitter Lake Association, lashed the ships together in pairs and shared out the jobs: one vessel ran the cinema, another the chapel, another a swimming pool in a spare hold, another the post office. They printed their own stamps by hand and Egypt ended up letting them through: the letters reached Europe franked by a country that did not exist. That October, while the Mexico Games were being held, they staged their own: football on deck, shooting, sailing and the high jump.
Desert dust covered everything until the hulls turned ochre, and that is where the name they are known by comes from: the Yellow Fleet.
Egypt began clearing the canal in 1975. In May two German ships, the Münsterland and the Nordwind, started their own engines and sailed to Hamburg, where some thirty thousand people were waiting on the quay; the canal reopened to traffic on 5 June. The Münsterland arrived still carrying part of the cargo it had loaded eight years earlier.