Egypt Today Magazine notes tugboats have led to the vessel’s partial refloating, and the stern is now 102 meters away from the bank of the canal. There will be additional maneuvers later today once high tide arrives to fully refloat the vessel and position it in the middle of the channel.

As a result of the positive news, crude prices retreated, with Brent crude futures dipping as much as 1.5%.

Peter Berdowski, chief executive officer of Boskalis Westminster, the salvage team’s parent company, told Bloomberg with the vessel partially refloated, the stern of the ship is “still very stuck in the mud.”

“Putting the rear end of the ship afloat was the easy part,” Berdowski said to Dutch NPO Radio. “The challenging part will be the front of the ship. Now, we will start working at the front.”

There are still no timelines for when the vessel will be fully refloated. More than 450 ships have been stuck around the canal, waiting to transit the canal. Global supply chains have already been affected as some vessels have rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.

Even when Ever Given is refloated – the backlog of vessels, 450 and counting, would mean that it would take at least ten days to resume normal activity in the canal, meaning the Suez crisis is not over.

Source: Bloomberg

“It’s one thing to refloat the ship, and it’s another thing to clear the canal of traffic completely,” Hugo De Stoop, CEO of oil-shipping firm Euronav, said to Bloomberg Television. “Whatever has been accumulated so far will take time to clear. The tentative timeline is probably two to three weeks because the Suez canal was used probably at full capacity.”

With the vessel partially refloated, and once high tide returns, the vessel’s own propulsion system might be used in conjunction with the dozen-plus tugboats.

The good news is that the worst-case scenario of unloading the vessel might be avoided. As JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic told clients last week, any reloading of the vessel risks “ship breaking.”