Back in the middle of the 1980s Maritime Engineering unveiled the ME 303, which appeared in Aberdeen in 1983 before a stunned offshore community. They appeared initially as the Seaforth Crusader and the Seaforth Centurion which were designed by Maritime Engineering, built in South Korea and brought into service by Seaforth, then a major British offshore ship-owner. Also built at the same time was the Edda Sun, of which the Norwegian company refused to take delivery, claiming that it was just not up to the required standard. Aberdonians were surprised because they were even larger than the Viking Queen. While the main deck was commensurate with vessels of a similar age at 540m2, the accommodation seemed to tower over the other ships alongside which they were moored in the port. They were powered by four Nohab diesels, which offered 14,400 bhp and in order to drive the ship sideways, taking into account the additional windage caused by the upperworks, they were provided with two bow thrusters and a stern thruster. If they had a limitation it was the towing and work winch, which had limited capacity for wire, and so were unsuitable for the deeper water mooring into which the industry was just dipping its toe. In those days rigs were anchored in what was then considered to be deep water, using great lengths of wire connected to smaller diameter wire, connected to surface buoys. This required considerable wire storage capability on the part of the vessels involved. Later the Barra Supplier, built in Germany, and owned by the embryo Barra Shipping Company arrived, and this vessel was followed by the Star Orion, which had been the Edda Sun, bought by Star Offshore at a rumoured bargain price. Your scribe was briefly master of this vessel and what a difficult beast it was. To keep it stable a lot of ballast was required which gave it minimal freeboard and as a consequence very wet decks, and this in turn resulted in a requirement to lay dunnage (usually in the form of old mooring rope) to prevent the deck cargo sliding about. It had a high pressure winch system which would sometimes fail randomly without anyone going anywhere near it, and the controls could not all be operated at once from the driving seat – a problem which seems to have become more or less endemic in the industry. The Seaforth ships went on to be operated by Farstad and then others. The Seaforth Crusader, became the Far Crusader, then the Nobleman and thereafter the Ramco Crusader. As that vessel it suffered from a fire on board offshore Brazil and sank on 12th August 2013 (photograph from Shipspotting). The Seaforth Centurion (Photographed also in Brazil by Tony Poll) was to similarly pass through other hands and was seen as the Ocean Viking in 2013. The design and later derivatives was much used by Maersk Supply and Maritime Engineering became Moss Maritime and was bought by Saipem in 2001.