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Running Aground
Some years ago I wrote a short story which won a prize. Not the easiest thing to do in a world which seems to be full of creative writers. And I thought I might include it here as a sort of Christmas gift for my readers, who still visit the site. So have a great Christmas and enjoy the story.
Before he got to the bridge the captain could smell the heat of the Indian morning. The odour was a mixture of dried wood, tar, diesel oil and very faintly overlaying it all, the musky smell of tropical blossoms. Closer to the land the smell might be obscured by the overwhelming stench of a million people living in close proximity to each other.
My moment of fame has come and gone, as I was featured in an article in the Daily Mirror, but nevertheless I quite liked it. Although the article said that I was in favour of continued oil production in the Uk sector of the North Sea, I also said that it was in decline anyway. Anyway here it is. You might have to do some scrolling if you want to read it.
One assumes that after the Ulstein organisation had sold the UT designs to Rolls-Royce they had pledged not to produce any further offshore vessels for a period. This is usually five years, but in 2002 they were back with a bang. Four anchor-handlers rolled off the stocks at Ulsteinvik, the Normand Mariner, the Normand Master, the Olympic Hercules and the Olympic Pegasus. The very first was the Olympic Hercules (Photographed by the author in Bressay Sound in 2007) which was named at Ulsteinvik on 12th January 2002. They were designated the Ulstein A101 and don’t forget the “Ulstein” they said. It is difficult to put a finger on it, but it could be that the “100” part of the “101” could be a celebration of the 100th year of the yard’s existence. The Ulstein A101’s Wartsila engines developed 23,330 bhp giving them a bollard pull of 280 tons. Their thrusters gave them plenty of sideways power and to keep everything under control they were provided with DP2. These were ships which seemed to have no limitations. They had what seemed to be unlimited power they could be fitted with an A-frame and they had enormous winches and storage drums, so that they were useful for the increasingly frequent task of inserting fibre rope into the moorings of semi-submersibles which were working at the extremes of their capabilities or else where the moorings were to pass over pipelines. In the first decade of the new century fibre rope was the new material for securing rigs to the seabed. The advantage was that it was buoyant and so could be of unlimited length in the mooring, but the disadvantage was that it was of extremely large diameter. When required to insert chain into moorings the captains of the A101s would be likely to put the ship into DP and then pay out the new chain onto the seabed, and when that was done run it out on the correct bearing. Importantly for charterers, the bridges were extremely well appointed and I always felt that they gained some charters on the basis of how good the oil company representatives felt when they were sitting on the leather sofas at the edges of the wheelhouse (The luxurious bridge of the Hercules photographed in 2002). Their reliability has resulted in the four ships being almost continuously at work throughout their lives and the most recent information I can find about what they are up to indicates that they are still busy, and still in their original ownership. During 2016 the Hercules and the Pegasuswent off to West Africa with others of the Olympic fleet and at the same time the Normand Mariner went to work on an extended contract for Technip.
