We might be thinking by now that the only offshore vessel designer in Europe in the 1990s was Ulstein, but we should remember that in the early years of the decade the industry was still recovering from the debilitating problems resulting from the desperately low price of oil, and as a result the appetite of the industry for new vessels might have been blunted. But the Ulstein design house has never been put off by bad times, and amongst the various offerings produced during the period was the embrionic UT 722. The first two appeared in 1993, and although UT 722s have carried on into the new century, large numbers having been built, the first two, the Far Fosna and the Far Grip are unique, and embody everything that I thought was necessary for effective manoeuvring and anchor-handling in the choppy waters of the North Sea. The ships have a high bow, and the triangular fronted wheelhouse is set well back from the forecastle, providing two advantages. Firstly you can see which way the ship is heading – not so easy if you have no point of reference when looking out of the forward bridge windows, and secondly the same windows are less vulnerable to heavy seas over the bow. I have been on a ship which took a wave through one of the bridge windows in the far North and it was a frightening experience. Every later UT 722 has at the very least an extra deck beneath the wheelhouse, which increases the windage and hence either required more thruster power, or an acceptance on the part of the driver that sideways manoeuvres might be hampered. The Far Fosna and the Far Grip were still provided with 2400 bhp of thruster power forward and 1200 bhp aft and could muster 14,400 bhp from their Bergen diesels. This gave them a bollard pull of about 150 tons. It could be that their inelegant shape made them no-one’s favourites but mine, although they followed the Star Sirius and Star Spicato become Shell’s anchor-handlers of choice in Aberdeen. Thereafter in 2007 I was given the formal task of assessing their capability for carrying fibre rope. Sadly they were not quite up to it, the one problem with the low upperworks was that there was nowhere to put the vast storage reels then becoming fashionable for the carriage of the quantities of wire or rope being incorporated into the mooring systems of semi-submersibles, particularly in deeper waters out in the Atlantic. So they were released by Shell and ventured out into the oceans of the world, both going to work in Australian waters and at one point out at Sakhalin. Later the Far Grip was to move on to New Zealand where, at the time of writing it still seems to be operating. Late last year Farstad disposed of the Far Fosnaas part of their rationalisation and it is now probably somewhere in the Far East. The photographs by the author are of the Far Fosna entering Aberdeen in 2004, and of the afterdeck of the ship in 2007.