I have used the title “Supply Vessel” to cover all the different types of craft built to support offshore activitie, particularly in the old days since that’s what they were, or at least that’s how they started off, the addition of the winch and the tow wire and the enhanced bollard pull being developments of the original design. That being said, and hopefully accepted, in the mid 1970s there was a brief insurgence of the anchor-handling tug. This form of offshore vessel had been developed to overcome some of the problems which existed in the more standard type of combined AHTS, by now intended to carry out anchor-handling and towing and in between doing the work to support mobile units during the drilling phase. Typically because of the problems with stability, when semi-submersibles went through the transition from drilling draught to transit draught, the ships assigned to them would first of all have to backload all the deck cargo, often including the drill pipe, take it all ashore and then when the move had been completed bring it all out again. But the lengthy afterdeck required the  crew to pull wires down to the roller and hampered manoeuvring, so there seemed to be a place for these small ships. Maybe best known were the first Maersk B class, and one or two other owners, particularly OSA, ventured to have similar craft constructed some even smaller. But all were eclipsed by the arrival of the Smit purpose built anchor-handling and towing vessels the Tempest and the Typhoon in 1977. These small ships, they were only 47 metres long, had two Stork-Werkspor engines developing 8500 bhp giving them a bollard pull of 116 tons and had a collective wire storage capacity of 2400 metres of 64 mm wire. And here we should bear in mind that 200 metres was considered to be deep water fifty years ago, so it seemed that they could do anything required of them and spent much of their time as in-field support vessels. When I was a shipmaster in about 1983 I was instructed to go to sea on the Star Polaris in terrible weather conditions to assist with the stabilisation of the P84, a Pentagone semi-submersible which was then working for Total, which had lost two anchor wires from the same corner. When we arrived on the location there was the Typhoon on the tow wire, holding the rig in position and steaming into the weather, riding over the crests and disappearing into the troughs altogether. We went to work, recovered an anchor-wire onto one of our workdrums, re-attached it to the rig and ran the anchor. Once that had been done the Typhoon was released and went on its way. So it was with some sadness that I reported that the Typhoon had sunk while working out in Nigeria on my website in 2013 and in the same year the Tempest was sent to the breakers. The design lives on in the form of the Fairplay 32 and 33 and a number of the former Harms Bergung tugs  

PHOTOGRAPHS:  The Tempest at sea by Oddgeir Refvik