Just happened to be near the Port of Pensacola yesterday and saw this.
This is a Gulf of USA (Mexico?, can’t get used to that) open water oil drill rig. It Is not a ship, it is built on a barge and towed to location. The drill rig has been in port for a few weeks for maintenance and repairs.
We have a years long history of getting some strange looking oil field boats in port for refit. If you look at the bow (left side of the image), you can see the helipad used to get workers on and off.
This rig can drill 35,000 feet deep. Hope the workers speak Chinese.
I’m definitely not a Naval Architect and I can’t fathom (to coin a phrase) how this can remain upright when loaded with the drill heads, pipe and whatever else is hanging on up there while in a 10′-15’+ sea.
Bless the brave people who work on offshore rigs to provide us with oil and gas. It is a hard and dangerous job.
This was written for them, as well as fishermen and merchant sailors. “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble,… Read more »
My brother helped build jack-up, and semi-submersible rigs earlier in his career. They would be partially assembled, towed down the ship channel below a bridge that impeded a fully built rig, and finished nearer the coast. They were a marvel to see, and when they were towed in after a hurricane, a testament of the damage of high winds.
The technology of the oil and gas industry seems almost miraculous when you look at the conditions it has to perform under.