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I think it's a bit early to celebrate.
The "offshore Terminal" is a AIS Marker set by the AM on her way in.
It's position given by MarineTraffic is 60.17667° / -3.867833
The buoy position is 60.1799,-3.8699
It's 380m between those two positions, a bit far even allowing for the fact that there will be some slack in the chains and risers to allow for wind, swell and tide.
The position of the 'offshore terminal' coincides with the last reported AIS track location at 07:02 this morning.
The weather buoy 64046 is showing continual dropping of the wave height, but while the weather is still continually improving, optimum conditions won't be until early tomorrow morning,
https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=64046&meas=wvht&uom=M&time_diff=0&time_label=GMT
Nearly there, but the champagne can stay in the fridge this afternoon.
:-)
Albi1, can you drop me an email.?
(my username at gmail)
pages 28-31 give some reasons why even apparently light damage can severely reduce the safe working load that a rope can hold.
This document gives a good overview of the complexities of wire rope:
http://www.ushamartin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Wire-Rope-Handbook.pdf
Albi1: "Um - technical question - is the rope on the AM's winch made of the same stuff as guitar string?"
It's going to be made of steel wire, and it'll likely have man made cores, the actual type of steel and the build of the rope and how it's laid depends on many things: the corrosion resistance required, whether the rope is required to be wound over a pulley or drum under load, the radius of such pulley or drum, the safe working load required, normal operating temperature range required, ...
There is no "perfect" steel for wire rope, because (for example) when you change the composition of the steel for more flexibility, you'll get less strength, it's always the best compromise for the application. It's just "a length of rope" but building wire rope is as complicated as building a structure.
I don't know if shareholders are aware, there's a huge revolt happening on Facebook against Tim Martin being overtly political and promoting his political views in the company magazine that is being distributed across the chain and by the post office to households nationally.
Staff have stared a campaign against him bringing his politics into the workplace, and using company advertising for political ends. They're not particularly happy with him having assets of over £400m and many of them being on minimum wages with poor working conditions.
Voters are being encouraged to boycott the pub chain, and to post 'return to sender' the magazine back to the company in protest.
Search for the 'Spoons Workers Against Brexit' Facebook group to see the protest.
The course taken is similar to the last time and makes perfect sense as the Beatrice wind farm is the the NW of AM's current position.
They have just done a similar sequence of events as when approaching the buoy position on the last attempt.
they slowed down from their cruising speed of around 6 knots, to under 2 knots,
they set a 'port' marker on the AIS (zoom in at 58.0165, -2.4636 to see it),
and then travelled approximately another 5 miles and came to a halt.
The last time, the 'port' marker was also approximately 5 miles out from the buoy position.
It's not just the two times that the AIS activity has had a similar sequence to this, they did something similar as they set off from Cromarty last time (but I wasn't watching in detail then).
Maybe they're going through a drill to practice what they need to do for hookup?
It should be of no concern of any company to worry about how people who are overleveraged get a night's sleep, especially those who have spread bets or who have borrowed money to invest.
HUR is an oil company, not Gamblers Anonymous.
Wellwell, yes, they're the mooring connections, but what's the significance of them to this next part of the operation? They're already installed, connecting the mooring lines to the buoy.
What the weather is preventing at the moment is capturing the buoy on a cable, and pulling the buoy into the turret without causing damage to buoy or ship.
Once the buoy is winched up into it's position, the physical "hookup" is done using 12 latches (painted white in the photo) that are in a ring around the turret engaging around the top ring of the buoy.
https://www.hurricaneenergy.com/operations/early-production-system/gallery
Page 2, top left photo
At the end of the latches, you can see the rollers (brown) with grease holes, that will hook the buoy up and form the bearing on which the buoy will rotate.
Who said the swell was under 2m locally for the duration of their visit? maybe the swell locally was a fraction over 2m, maybe there wasn't only one swell, but two acting on different vectors, which makes it just a little more tricky for the DP to keep on station, and DP doesn't act vertically, there's SFA you can do to stop a vessel corkscrewing vertically pitching and yawing all at the same time with conflicting swells and waves. There's also a time lag between detecting movement in one direction and a thruster having any effect on the vessel moving in the opposite direction. It's awkward enough in a river craft never mind a ship with the inertia of the AM.
To only quote "2m swell" is a bit of an oversimplification.
Am I surprised it's going to take a number of attempts to hook up at this time of year? Not at all.
The only problem I can see (and that the information available confirms) is that the weather has been not quite calm enough for the hookup to take place.
and just one other "problem" here, too many assumptions being made on too little info.
I had a bit of a chuckle reading the posts about temperature and thermal expansion / contraction.
It's really, really simple topology.
The buoy mating surface and the turret socket it fits into are conical.
Even with very course tolerances, as long as both components are actually circular and the angle of the two cones are the same, it doesn't matter if one is boiling hot and the other is freezing, either way, it'll fit.
Looks like the weather was just marginally too much to attempt the hookup, They're obviously as keen as we are to get hooked up, but there's no weather forecast quite as accurate as stepping outside the bridge to confirm "yep, conditions match what I've been told". windy.com suggests no further attempt today and only possibly another window during Sunday morning, otherwise from mid afternoon on Sunday we can write off the coming week.
Nothing is going to happen today, which is why she's just plodding at "slow ahead" (it's gentlest on the ship and crew), if she turns and heads back this afternoon/evening then they'll have another attempt tomorrow morning, otherwise (arrggh!) we'll have to dig into our reserves of patience.
PS.
There's only one unidentified (T&SC) vessel that's been constantly operating in the area 5 miles radius of the buoy and she's been working some 2 or 3 miles out to the south west, between the buoy and the proposed Lincoln drill (that being some 4 or 5 miles distance), so being outside both location's anchor patterns; I don't believe she has anything to do with our operations, most likely just one of the many fishing vessels working around there.
We should know for definite before Monday morning.
If the AM's track is a very small arc or even a circle about the buoy position, allowing for a little movement of the buoy from the slack in the moorings, then we'll be able to make a good estimate whether she's hooked up, If she's not hooked up but staying stationary, then I would expect the DP to be keeping the heading much more constant over the hours.
It would be helpful if we had more frequent AIS track points being sent, but we'll have to read what's available.
Re: differences between MarineTraffic and Vesselfinder...
Both sites restrict the amount and accuracy of data for the free service, but the algorithms that extract the data work slightly differently on each site.
Marinetraffic shows older data, whereas vesselfinder drops old data a little quicker.
Vesselfinder seems to not display the inaccurate data, so old data, or outliers dont get displayed. (vf didn't display the AM going downtown in Dubai, whereas mt did) I can't work out whether mf deliberately introduces random errors into the data, I've noticed differences between tracks on the two systems that would be difficult to otherwise explain. (I've had a very long career of problem solving IT systems, I can sometimes smell the reasons for errors)
vf displays cleaner but less data, mf seems to throw anything onto the screen, even displaying two positions for the same vessel sometimes. I can sometimes deduce from the differences and errors, but we get what we pay for, in this case... we should be grateful for what get for paying nothing.
So far, I'm feeling confident from the AM's track so far, let's see what happens tomorrow.
The AM has popped up on AIS, the gps position on the bridge being 10m SW of the buoy location, so she's smack on position.
"Watching those penguins on the cliff cam"...
Do remind me which hemisphere were in?
Genghis15,
No anchors needed now.
The buoy is already secured by lines and chains to piles at around 1km distance to the north, SW and SE.
They were all installed last summer.
All the AM has to do is fish the buoy up from it's equilibrium position 20m down, winch it into the base of the turret and latch on.
She'll stay in position over the buoy for hooking up by using her Dynamic Positioning (DP) thrusters.
Once she's hooked up then the buoy effectively becoming a tethered bearing upon which the AM will rotate, the fixed moorings keeping her in place, the DP then only really being needed to maintain position when a tanker is offloading.
Shhh: "So now I am really convinced that the Tugs are there"
Given the position of the vessel at 60.15,-3.87 is 14 hours old,
do explain why you're convinced it's still there?
Shhh, you'd do well to read posts as well as make them, as nothing in your last post is based on fact..
In particular, have a look at the post where I explained why a "tug and special craft" isn't what it says on the tin.
forgot to add...
The "Tugs & Special craft" around Lancaster are often just fishing vessels.
One way to tell is to look at the icon used to display the vessel, (marinetraffic suppress the AIS info but leave the icon the same)
To see what the different colours mean, click on the Filter button (the funnel icon on the left), then "Ship Type".