Picture of the Day
We can't help featuring more and more offshore type vessels engaged in other tasks, the predominant one being the installation of offshore wind farms, but we are seeing the use of former offshore vessels in the operation of wind farms, and we have seen one or two of them here. So this is the Living Stone, said by the owners to be a "multi-purpose" vessel. It has been engaged in laying cables for an offshore windfarm and is at the moment on its way to do the same task at another. It is a substantial craft which can cut a trench and lay the cables in it. Good stuff then.
In a changing world I found myself looking back through what I regarded as my more decorative photos, and found the Skandi Buchan, taken in 2004 when it was working for Total. According to one of the many websites which can now tell you exactly where all ships are in the world, (Obviously by just wanting to write a few words I am lamentably out of date) it is tied up, probably, somewhere in Noway. Probably warm stacked - laid up with people on board. Just looking back to those days, I remember that the oil price was mostly between $40 and $50, but we had not been through a very unrealistic boom, which resulted in overbuilding is all sectors of the business.
I read that the four "Jigsaw" ships have finally been disposed of, and will no longer do any work for BP. This event marks the end of a saga which started in 2000 when BP had the idea of replacing 16 ERRVs with several helicopters based on platforms in the North Sea. This idea in its original form was completely loony, and so gradually they modified their ideas, finally having a couple of helicopter and four absolutely enormous platform ships fitted with equally large special vessels (there was one in the last upload) which would drift about out there and in the event of a problem launch on elf their rescue craft, which if necessary could storm off for land. There was a lot wrong, and here you see one of the ships without any rescue craft aboard.