When you need to transport 22 barges – each weighing nearly 3,000 tonnes – half way around the world, you're going to need a pretty sturdy ship. And they don't get much sturdier than the Blue Marlin, one of the most extraordinary crafts ever to sail the seas.
The incredible ship can carry 75,000 tonnes. Rather than the usual cargo of toys, TVs and coffee, it carries other ships and oil rigs. When the US Navy needed to give their stricken destroyer USS Cole a lift home, they called on the Blue Marlin. And when the Australian Navy wanted an aircraft carrier brought from Spain, only the semi-submersible heavy lift ship would do.
The Blue Marlin's dimensions are eye watering. It is 712 ft long and 138ft deep – and has a deck the size of two football pitches. It reaches a sedate top speed of 13 knots, powered by a gigantic 17,000 horse power diesel engines, with a crew of 24. Steering it is said to be like controlling a floating office block.
The barges pictured above – which weigh a total of 60,000 tonnes - were exported from Korea to be completed in Rotterdam. Some were destined to be river boats, others were off shore construction vessels. No crane in the world is big enough to lift these sorts of cargoes onto her deck and so she has an ingenious trick up her sleeve. The deck is submersible and can disappear under 13 metres of water when her ballast tanks are pumped full of water. Boats, oil rigs and ships can then be floated on before the deck is raised again by emptying its ballast tank.
In order to carry the barges, a specially designed set of cradles was added to the Blue Marlin. The barges were stacked up and then floated on the ship a few at a time. Its biggest cargo was a BP oil rig Thunder Horse 16,000 miles from Korea to the Gulf of Mexico. The one billion dollar rig is the largest offshore structure in the world and weighed 60,000 tonnes.
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