Restructuring of the OSV business is far from finished

Tidewater boats off for recycling. Looks like it’s the vessel XIANG YUN KOU on her way from New Orleans to India.

How old are all those Tidewater boats? From a distance they don’t look like complete junk. Seems a shame to scrap useful vessels, especially if Jones Act compliant.

NO they don’t look like junk form a distance. Every operator should scrap 10-15 of their older vessels maybe the OSV market could have a chance at some sort of recovery.

Further investigation shows the photo is from February. Youngest is 2006 built.

I can see many OSVs around the world suffering the same fate, a heavy lift ship taking 8 or so of them away for scrap. Many have been cold stacked for 3+ years now, they’re probably not economical to reactivate, scrapping the only solution.

The ships are:

WILLIAM ex-WILLIAM C. O’MALLEY - IMO 9259795 Built: (Built: 2005)
MADONNA ex-MADONNA TIDE - IMO 9221188 (Built: 2000)
CARLINE ex-CARLINE TIDE - IMO 9257400 (Built: 2001)
RICHARD ex-RICHARD A PHILIPPI - IMO 9173680 (Built: 1998)
BRIGHT ex-WILLIAM E BRIGHT - IMO 9173666 (Built: 1998)
SAM ex-SAM S ALLGOOD - IMO 9173678 (Built: 1998)
LABORDE ex-C E LABORDE JR - IMO 9259812 (Built: 2005)
ALDEN ex-ALDEN J LABORDE - IMO 9259800 (Built: 2006)

http://www.shipspotting.com/gallery/photo.php?lid=2816815

The three large AHTS at the stern are VS 486 design, built in China. The two former Laboard boats have Diesel/Electric propulsion, but in stead of AC/AC with VFC they have AC/SCR/DC arrangement.

I inspected those in Singapore when they were new. If I remember right it took 52 SCRs to get sufficient DC power for propulsion.

The others appear to be UT755s (without the L) with relatively small deck area, capacity and strength.

Lot of that design around, but if the have been laid up without proper preservation, I can see it would be difficult to get them back in action.

Nice picture of the XYK, I loaded a J/U Rig on this one for transport from Singapore to the Black Sea:

For passage through the Bosphorus we had to cut the legs, with one section placed on skidd beams by each leg, while the tops were place on deck of the XYK:

To pass under the bridges they lowered the legs to the maximum possible, keeping in the deepest part of the strait.

A previous sister rig going the same way was loaded on the Blue Marlin. (before she was jumponized):
DSCN2185
Here we cut enough to allow passage under the bridges without lowering legs.
Top of the derrick was also cropped:
DSCN2087
The leg sections were transported on a separate vessel.

The Norwegian branch have 22 vessel, of which 4 are in layup:
http://www.bourbon-offshore.no/fleet/

Correction: 5 of their vessels are in layup.

The Xiang Yun Kou took the Noble Discoverer to Korea as well in 2013. I was there for both the loading and unloading. Have pics somewhere.

this is truly nothing less than a bloodbath!

but then I look at them and think of all that wonderful equipment I could have sold in the US off of them if they had only allowed me to strip the vessels of the best equipment before sending them to their deaths in India? I better make a trip to NOLA soon to talk to these people!

Nice vessels but you are aware aren’t you that none of them are US built.

doesn’t matter…good maritime equipment is good maritime equipment and worth good money here in the good ol USofA. I know because I sell it and right now I am short on inventory

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Soon tariffs will bring more value to your operation. Are you going to thank the orange president for increasing your profits? lol

The UT 755s were built in Norway with mostly Norwegian machinery and equipment.
The 3 AHTS are all VS 486 design, but Tidewater changed the recommended equipment specs to save money. They were built at Yantai in China, with delivery delayed for several years.

Old news. Seacore is stepping up their game a notch by acquiring control of 6 modern PSVs :


Upgrading with battery pack to be even more competitive in the international market.

On 3/20/18, Andre Z wrote:

This is a SAD sight to say the least … All that hard work from the
crew, and investment of the company lost …
Andre

Yes, according to our Tax Cattle worker bee mentality, junking all those perfectly good marine assets is a waste of valuable human effort.

But according to the business mentality of our 0.001% bankster elite, destroying the old , opens the way for the new. George Orwell explains this in his book 1984, in the section entitled The Theory and Practice
of Oligarchical Collectivism, where he discusses our oligarchic elites’ endless need to continually destroy and reconstruct physical assets.

 "  Given that large-scale, mechanised production could not be eliminated once invented, the system arranges the destruction of surplus goods — before that makes "the masses too comfortable, and

hence, in the long run, too intelligent". Hence the perpetual war“ is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population . . . "

"  It is a deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. ”

Therefore, according to this bankster business model, destroying perfectly good assets opens the way to produce many more batches of “stuff” …

Some examples:

  • Rules to replace the world’s single hull oil tankers with double hulls called for the old ones to be banned long before they had worn out. The chances of a single hull tanker actually spilling oil due to not having a double hull, are not far from near zero. The point was that supporting single hull tankers became a Politically Incorrect topic. (Today, we are surrounded by increasing numbers of logically invalid Politically Incorrect issues.)

  • In WW2, there was no military reason to bomb civilian areas of cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Dresden, Berlin to flattened rubble. The benefit of reconstruction accrues to Big Business, at the end of
    hostilities. Civilian victims of oilfield downtowns or aerial bombardment are not relevant to larger and more important “business interests”. Our controlled corporate mainstream media ensures that these issues never became one of public debate.

So look on the bright side: no sooner will this generation of oilfield assets be scrapped, than we will be back in the fab yards, helping Wall Street build the next batch.

What else can we learn from this sad photo of perfectly good assets heading for the scrapyard?


Evan Jones

Currently in Bangkok

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According to Clarkson Research the OSV market has bottomed out and it is uphill from here, although over supply will persist in most segments of the worldwide market:
http://www.osjonline.com/news/view,over-the-worst-but-not-over-supply_51098.htm

Isnt there like 300 new OSV’s alongside in China?

Want the OPA 90 grandfathering period something like 20 years? That’s about the maximum life expectancy of any modern ship and keeping them running beyond that is dangerous.

20 years? That’s about the maximum life expectancy of any modern ship

Says who? The serviceability of a marine asset depends heavily on the usefulness of the design and how well it is maintained and managed. I was involved with commissioning a couple of newbuilding offshore work vessels that would have better to have been scrapped the year they were put into service.

Many military ships and aircraft survive 50 years in service. e.g.

  • TU95 and B52 bombers;
  • USS Kittyhawk CV63 and Enterprise CN65.
  • I routinely pass the former McDermott DLB26, still ready for work after 48 years in service.

Many offshore production facilities are still in use after 40 years:

  • SPM is building the first of their new Fast4Ward FPSOs with a 30 year design life.
  • Chevron’s Gorgon and Shell’s Prelude projects were both engineered with a design life aim of 50 years.

Engineers have different goals from Wall Street bankers.

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This has been one of my gripes for years. Building new vessels with 1970’s standard and equipment may be cheap, but it is not very good economy.
In good times any vessel available can find work, but when times are bad Charterers start to look at efficiency and fuel economy.
Your brand new vessel, with high finance costs, are no more efficient than older vessels of the same type that have been paid down, thus are less competitive in the market.

Working as Marine Advisor for an Offshore Construction Company in Singapore in the good years, with easy access to capital, I kept on repeating this mantra in every weekly Management meeting.
I wanted to go for innovative fuel efficient vessels, able to also work in deep waters, but was overruled and left. In stead they bought and build cheaply and are now in receivership.

A typical example was when a local Owner built two 7000 Bhp AHTs and equipped them with the cheapest possible Towing winch he could find. The first boat got kicked off a 2-year contract after 3 months for non-performance. The winch was the problem.

I was engaged to advice on what to do. I went to their yard in Batam to try to determine what the problem was. I found that the 150 m.t. winch had been downgraded to 100 m.t. pull on first layer even before delivery. An improvised pull test indicated that the actual capacity was +/-35 m.t. and the bearings required fire hoses to be used to keep cool.

When I reported to the Owner I asked why he had bought winches from a manufacturer with no previous track record and not a Brattvaag winch?
“Because it was cheap. Brattvaag winches cost 3x as much”
“Yes, but if you had invested in in a proper winch your boat would still have been on-hire, How much has it cost sitting at the yard for 6 months”.

He was luck and manage to sell both boats to a Norwegian company that would only use them for towing, not Anchor handling. (Thus didn’t need a high capacity winch, only high Break holding)