Free Blog Counter

Tuesday 13 March 2007

Safe Astoria

We headed out to Beauty Point to day for a tour of the 'Safe Astoria', A Dutch owned semi submersible exploration platform that has been converted to an accomodation and support platform for larger production platforms.

Here is the underside of the platform. The pontoons are flooded with water and the whole rig lowered by a depth of about 15metres when it is on station. To give you an idea of size the distance between water level and the underside of the platform in this picture is about 80 feet. Then there are about 5 stories on the platform plus cranes and utilities. The timber bollards you see here are designed to stop ships damaging the legs.



The view from the pontoon up to the 'spider deck'.



Taken from the recreation deck outside the galley. You can see the helideck two stories above. There was a fantastic view of the Tamar River.



The view from the helideck. Bell Bay is in the background and the dust from the loading of the woodchips to be sold to Japan for paper. The wire around the outside of the helipad is the locator beacon for the choppers to land in bad visibility and to find the rig at sea.



The "I" deck. :)



The anchor cables. There is something like 1300 metres of cable here. The anchors are towed out, posistioned and then sunk. Tension is then pulled quite strongly on them to ensure that the rig is in the correct posistion and stays there.



The anchors. They differ in design to normal ships anchors as they are designed to go subterranean. Often burying themselves up to 15metres below the seabed as tension iss pulled onto them. Normal anchors rely on the weight of the chain to hold them in place whereas these rely soley on the anchor themselves.

No comments: