For this historic ship type I admit to venturing into unknown territory. It is informally known as the Halter Marine 180 footer although it seems to have been built by a number of different shipyards in the Gulf. From the various bits of information available to me I have found one constructed by the Quality Shipyard in 1979 which was the Gulf Fleet 36. It could have been the first, on the other hand it might not be a type at all, just a design controlled by the requirement to keep the gross tonnage under 200 tons, and by the need to provide what the Americans called “North Sea stacks”. I have direct experience of the possible ship type as master of the Pike for some months in 1994 out in Saudi Arabia. This ship was built in 1982 by Halter Marine as Petromar Norseman, one of five constructed for Petromar Offshore and advertised as being “Ready for the North Sea”. The exhausts still came out of the deck half way down the sides and were then directed forward until they could turn to the vertical and come out of the funnels. The gross tonnage was kept low to fit in with US manning requirements by having the cabins fitted with enormous plates on the inboard bulkheads which would be removed during the tonnage measurement (for non mariners who might be reading this, gross tonnage is a measurement of space not of weight). It was powered by two EMDs offering 3900 bhp and giving it 40 tons bollard pull, and virtually all its other systems were powered by identical GM V8s. These included the pumping systems, the bowthruster and the winch so in an emergency any of these engines could be moved to somewhere else.  The Gulf Fleet 36 was sold to an Egyptian company in 2005 and may now have been scrapped, and the Pike was sold by Seacor to a Mexican company in 1999 and became the Isla Coronado, to be passed on again in 2009. But there are many other very similar vessels probably still in service somewhere. Although there is a tendency for European mariners to look down on these simple craft they were, and maybe still are, ideal for the task of moving small jack-ups in benign environments, a long way from technical support. Indeed, during my three months in command, if there was a rig shift to be done, we were assigned to it, a source of some pride for our Filipino crew. While they were probably unsuitable for doing anything with semi-submersibles in European waters several Halter 180 footers were imported into the UK during the first decade of the new century and were rebuilt and operated successfully as standby vessels.

Photographs: The Gulf Fleet 36 photographed back in 2002 by Oddgeir Refvik in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pikephotographed in West Africa by Fergus Mack in 1999.