The United States flagged cable ship Decisive has been a caller in Halifax from time to time. It was reaponsible for laying and maintaining one of the major transatlantic cables that lands at the mouth of Halifax harbour. The Hibernia Express fibreoptic cable runs to Ireland and the UK, and was installed in 2015.
At the time, the ship displayed the corporate symbol "TE" on its hull.
Built by Keppel Hitachi in Singapore in 2003 as Tyco Decisive, it was one of four sister ships of 12,184 gt, 10,077 dwt built for submarine cable laying, recovery and repair. Tyco International, as it was then known, was renamed Tyco Electronics, then TE Connectivity in 2011 and its submarine cable division became TE Subsea Communications. The ship then dropped Tyco from its name. The tortured history of the Tyco company, its subsidiaries and spin offs is too complex to recount here, but the submarine cable manufacturing and the cable ship divisions were hived off and were independent from the many other Tyco businesses.
The sub sea cable division TE Connectivity was renamed SubCom Cable Sytemns LLC in 2018 when it was acquired by Cerberus Capital Management. A new graphic then appeared on the ship's hull. (Not to sound too snarky: the absence of lettering should allow the company to re-configure again without having to repaint.) SubCom continues to own the fibreoptic cable manufacturing facility in Newington, NH, formerly Simplex Wire + Cable Co..
The ship arrived in Halifax on Saturday, April 8, fresh from work on the last leg of the Amitié cable linking the US, UK and France. The US shore end of the cable passes through Massachusetts coastal waters and lands in Nahant, bear Boston.
Like most modern cable ships the Decisive works over the stern and is equipped to operate submersible remotely operated vessels (ROVs). To lay cable it plows a 1 foot wide by 6 foot deep trench and buries the 1.5 inch diameter cable all in one pass. Cable ships no longer show the prominent bow sheaves that used to distinguish cable layers from other ships.
Lord Kelvin 1955
The Decisive is based in Baltimore, MD along with the other ships of the SubCom fleet, but they work world wide.
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