In Faerun, ocean voyages had always been fraught with danger. Pirates, storms, and all manner of even worse things could easily take the lives of everyone aboard a ship. According to statistics from certain maritime associations, the accident rate for ocean-going vessels had remained around 16.5 percent. Do not think that probability was low—on the contrary, it was terrifying, because it meant that out of every ten voyages, 1.65 ships would meet with disaster.
And ships that met with disaster often had a survival rate of zero! In other words, once something happened, virtually everyone aboard would be dead! That was truly horrifying.
Yet the enormous profits of maritime trade still drew merchants into one risky venture after another. Recently, however, the danger rate of sea travel had plummeted. First, it was now October, winter had arrived, and the last wave of winter monsoons had passed, signaling the stormiest period of the year was over. At the same time, with winter's arrival, fish schools had begun moving into the deep sea, and the sea monsters that pursued them had followed them into deeper, warmer waters. As a result, the number of sea monsters had dropped dramatically.
On top of that, Solam's Blood Sacrifice had brought Faerun's western coast into an unprecedented period of safety. The ocean-going captains were overjoyed—after all, who would not want to make money comfortably? In the past, for the sake of their own safety, ocean-going ships had needed to maintain speed, which meant compromising on cargo capacity. The logic was simple: the more cargo a ship carried, the deeper its draft, and the slower it naturally became.
If a ship surrounded by all kinds of dangers lost its speed, that meant death. So although ocean-going vessels looked large, their cargo capacity was not actually that great.