Cable ship Ile de Molène

 Fog and mist shrouded the arrival of the cable ship Ile Molène this morning June 23. The ship tied up at Pier 9B where it became more visible before heavy rain set in.

Now a state of the art cable laying and maintenance vessel, it dates from 2006 when it was built by Yantai Raffles Shipyard in Yantai China as a North Sea offshore standby and rescue vessel. Named Caledonian Vision it operated for a BP subsidiary called Vector Offshore carrying a number of fast rescue craft that could be deployed rapidly if needed.

In 2021 it was sold and renamed GSP Phoenix by GSP Offshore, but later in the same year it was re-sold to current owner ASN Marine.

ASN Marine is an arm of Alcatel Submarine Networks based in Paris, which in turn is owned by the Finnish company Nokia. Alcatel had the ship reconfigured for cable laying, repair, post-lay inspection, burial and pre-lay grapnel runs. An enclosed workshop house was built on deck and the hull outfitted with 450 cubic meters of cable stowage space. The ship is under the management of Louis Dreyfus Armateurs SAS, a major French shipping and trading house.

Based in Curaçao, the ship is available for cable repair in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific America west coast. It works under the Atlantic Private Maintenance Agreement, a co-operative arrangement among member cable companies to ensure rapid response to emergencies. Alcatel has a network of 750,000 and 800,000 km of optical undersea cable world wide and deploys a seven ship fleet world wide.

Whether by coincidence or not the cargo ship Franbo Logic is at anchor in Bedford Basin.

 It arrived off Halifax May 29, and moved in to Pier 9B on June 6. It was then fitted with cable storage racks and moved out to the Basin June 15. It is not unusual for ships to stand by in the Basin for extended periods before heading to Portsmouth, NH (Newington) to load fibre optic cable. The cable racks are fairly light and do not add much to the ship's unladen draft, so it is riding high at anchor.

The Franbo Logic is a 13,110 gt, 16,969 dwt ship built in 2016 by Honda Heavy Industry Ltd in Saiki, Japan as Thorco Logic. It carries two 50 tonne cranes and has a container capacity of 160 TEU. It was renamed in 2021 and is one of several Thorco and Franbo ships that have been fitted out in Halifax to carry cable. 

.