Picture of the Day
Here is the Gulf Fleet 36 in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2002. There is a lot we can learn about the status of the offshore supply business in the Gulf from this photograph. The first is that this is a Halter 180 footer, a class of ship which has been in the field for more than 20 years, and by now is long in the tooth. It is one of the Gulf Fleet fleet, which was bought earlier by Zapata, and by now is part of Tidewater. On the fore end of the deck is a Smatco winch, powered by its own V8 GM engine and almost certainly it is powered by two EMDs producing 2000 bhp each. The funnels, known in the gulf as "North Sea stacks", appear to be placed so as to avoid getting seas down the exhausts, but actually the exhaust pipes still emerged from a point half way down the deck and were piped forward behind the crash barriers. According to one website it is still out there now call "Red Sea Diamond".
Although I am locked in my house, with many thousands of offshore photos I seem to have lost a bit of enthusiasm for the site. It may be something to do with the whole shut away thing, reminding me that I had spent many years stuck on board ship with limited access to the outside world. I have not heard anyone ask a member of a tanker crew who had been slow steaming from the Gulf round the cape, how you survive long periods of lockdown. They know, and in the current environment they may be doing it again. But anyway, here is the Seaway Aimery a modern cable ship, which I think is employed in the wind farm business. A splendid craft.
I have been thumbing through my files - while locked down here in Spain - with the intent of choosing a ship at random to put on this page. Here is the Vega Chaser, which interested me when I looked at the photo, but can find out nothing about the ship. It has been, or is, owned by Vega Offshore, said to be a Norwegian company. The ship is up the river in Macao and seemingly has been there since January. It drew my attention because it has stag horns on the barriers, suggesting that it is an anchor-handler, and there appears to be a winch hidden away at the fore end of the deck, but it does not have a roller. Since it seems to have a panama lead at the bow, this ship might have been built purely to act as a heading control ship for off take tankers. But really, who knows.