ABERDEEN company KD Marine has purpose-designed and built a pair of 12m (40ft) workboats specially to support dive operations in the North Sea.
They are, in essence, the dive-support vessel equivalent of the daughter craft typically now carried by a significant number or emergency rescue and recovery (standby) vessels. They are not cheap – £1.5million apiece.
However, that is where the similarity ends. These are hefty, aluminium-hulled craft of moderate speed (12 knots) designed to provide a stable work platform for a team of divers. What they are not is a rigid inflatable boat where the accent is on speed and an ability to pluck people out of the sea and protect them from the elements until they can be safely delivered to the mother ERRV or evacuated by helicopter.
KD Marine’s managing director, Hamish Petersen, describes his boats as subsea intervention daughter craft. He says the two boats built to date, DC01 and DC02, provide an “enhanced and highly efficient” access system for divers or ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) while working around offshore production installations and facilities.
He says, too, that the design enables divers to be placed effectively in awkward locations not accessible to the far larger DSVs, such as where flexible catenary risers are involved.
The new design also facilitates diving to be performed from non-diving support vessels. As well as being able to access difficult and remote positions, they can also facilitate simultaneous working on multiple work faces, thus increasing productivity.
Their displacement/weight is 10 tonnes, they are road-transportable, have a lightweight cradle that can be handled by forklift, and each is packaged with a MacGregor/Hydramarine launch and recovery davit.
“Working with small boats offshore is challenging and, while there are a lot of fast rescue boat-type designs out there, they lack the stability that is needed when working with divers,” Petersen told Energy.
“So we developed and had designed and built a boat that would do what we needed, including being able to operate with eight persons on board in sea states to two metres.”
Marine architect Ian Darley developed the design and the basic boats were built at the now Barclay Curle-operated shipyard in Appledore, North Devon. They were then shipped to Aberdeen for fitting out. Lloyds Register certified both design and construction of these boats.
The heart of the dive suite is an integrated three-diver nitrox/air panel; Analox oxygen analysers; a Nautronix 3520 diver/deck communications system; diver’s dressing-in chair handily co-located close to the dive ladder sliced into the transom; three 50-70m diver umbilicals, and three Kongsberg Sea Hawk helmet-mounted closed-circuit TV systems.
Both vessels have been put through extensive trials off Aberdeen and are ready to start their first year commercially. KD Marine is currently tendering a number of contracts and Petersen says the new design is attracting considerable interest.
KD Marine does not hire out “bareboat”. Rather, the company offers a packaged service, including personnel versed in handling this innovative design.