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Here is a photo from the North Sea for a change. Yes, there's still stuff going on out there. This is the Canadian anchor-handler Atlantic Kestrel preparing to grapple for a mooring of the Ocean Patriot (out of frame), out at the Pierce Field, in the background its FPSO the Haewene Brim, which has been out there more or less continuously since 1999. The grappling business is one of the techniques employed to recover moorings when the pennants have been laid out on the seabed.
Here is a Bruce Drag Embedment Anchor on the deck of a Maersk anchor-handler out in Brazilian waters back in 2003. You will note that the guys are standing about wondering what to do with it. It is one of a number of designs which are intended to be laid conventionally and then, as the mooring is tightened up or the ship applies a hundred tons of bollard pull, a link at the bottom of the shaft breaks and the angle of the flukes changes to ninety degrees to it; therefore making the mooring more or less permanent. It is possible that the men on the deck don't have the instruction book, and so are having to work it out for themselves.
One to the less enviable tasks carried out by seafarers is that of manning and operating offtake tankers, and here is one, the Navion Bergen attached to an FPSO out in Brazilian waters. So these ships will trog across the oceans until they get to a location out of sight of land where a larger tanker shaped object is collecting oil from the subsea wells. They then go through the fairly complex process of attaching themselves by a single large rope, and taking on the loading hose, then receiving the oil. Anyone who joined one of these ships hoping to see the world would be disappointed. If the weather deteriorates the captains are often required to wear their brown trousers.
