That can't be stressed enough!
Tankers full of oil laying low in the water stretched over the horizon as far as the eye could see to anyone flying a small plane along the coast.
I work aboard a US-flagged tanker- my captain said that he sat at anchor at the Southwest Pass anchorage at the Mississippi for 3 weeks with a full load of gas and diesel during the crisis in the 70's- with 50 + other tankers in the anchorage.
BTB- I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but we did the EXACT same thing with 268,000 bbls of gas and diesel in Feb-March. 20 days this time. Along with 15-20 other tankers. Our port agent said that this was a result of less demand for heating oil in the Northeast 'cus of the warm winter- there wasn't any storage space for the bulk of finished products that we had aboard...
PS. After 20 days, we picked up the anchor, and steamed to Houston, where, apparently, there was plenty of capacity. At 40k/day for the ship, that was an expensive boo-boo.