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Quite a lot of the time on this site I feature shiny well painted vessels, possibly because they are attractive, but there is other stuff out there, so here is the pride of the Saipem fleet the pipe layer Castoro II which it seems, is still working out there somewhere although it was photographed in Pointe Noire. It is one of those old pipe layers which is equipped with numerous anchors on the ends of long wires requiring a couple of ships to be constantly moving them as the pipe is welded together and deployed over the stern. To learn more about this process have a look at the "Stevns Power Accident" on this website.
Over the last year or two we have seen Sealion Shipping going through some painful reorganisation and sale of some of its assets. Certain of its associated companies have filed for Chapter 11 in America and most of its offshore vessels have been laid up in Hull, and some of them sold.It was said in 2017 that the company had debts of over one billion dollars. This is the anchor-handler Toisa Elan, a VS 4616 photographed when things were looking brighter for the company. If it still matters the ship was built in China in 2013 and has bollard pull of 219 tons.
Here is the ME303 Far Sky, back at the turn of the century one of many of the vessel type operating out of Uk ports. This one from Aberdeen. Back in the day the ME303 was one of the largest available anchor-handlers working in Europe, the first one being built in Korea as the Edda Sun, but due to some construction problems the company refused to accept it. It was subsequently purchased by Star Offshore and went to work as the Star Orion. I was captain of it for a bit and it was not the easiest ship in the world to operate.