Cable ship Ile d'Aix

The French cable ship Ile d'Aix anchored in Halifax this morning. The ship, which works out of Calais, France, has a Canadian Coasting License, allowing it to work in Canadian waters for emergency cable repairs to three important subsea cable systems, namely Hibernia Atlantic (running from Herring Cove, NS to Ireland and England), Greenland Connect (running from Newfoundland to several locations in Greenland, and on to Iceland) and Grand Banks Offshore Optical Cable (connecting several oil production sites to the island of Newfoundland). The one year license runs from November 23, 2017 to November 2, 2018.

 
The ship is a fully equipped cable lay / cable repair ship with a capacity of 2,000 tonnes of cable and carrying all the associated technical materials to do the work including an ROV and seabed plow for trenching and burying cable. It has a heli-deck (forward) and alarge crane aft.

It was built by the FarEast-Levingston Shipyard in Singapore in 1992 as Global Mariner. In 2004 it became Badaro and in 2007 Gulmar Badaro. ASN Marine (Alcatel Submarine Networks) formed ALDA Marine with French shpping company Louis Dreyfus Armateurs (LDA) to manage and operate of a fleet of  cable ships that work world wide. They acquired and renamed the ship in 2011.

In 2016 Nokia took over Alcatel-Lucent SA and absorbed it, however the ASN name is still used by Nokia Networks. The company also has the largest fibre optic cable manufacturing facility in the world, located in Calais.

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