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Displaying items by tag: Seismic Support Ship

Irish Mainport Holdings was delighted to welcome one of their two seismic support ships, Mainport Cedar, when the vessel made a brief call to Cork Harbour recently.

The 54.6m length overall (LOA) Mainport Cedar, made the call to the Port of Cork while in transit from Namibia to Rotterdam, Netherlands, having worked in the southern African nation since October 2023, at the base port of Walvis Bay & Luderitz.

Currently, the 1,659 gross tonnage vessel is underway in the North Sea, from where it will work with the same client for the summer season, engaging in a number of seismic support projects with this client.

During the call to the port in Munster, this facilitated carrying out a Class Annual inspections of the vessel (built in 2013 by Shin Yang Miri Malaysia), with ship classification society, (BV) Bureau Veritas.

In addition, the call to a Cork City central quay, led to the availing of local service providers and to renew some of the annual inspections / maintenance on safety equipment, and life saving appliances etc.

The call was also an opportunity for a crew change (11 on 11 off) and both of the crews agreed to pose for the new Mainport Cedar football team (as pictured above) where the off signers are the lads with the biggest smiles!

Mainport Cedar departed Cork last Friday for Rotterdam, and Afloat this afternoon tracked the vessel north-east of the Shetlands, having departed the Dutch port bound for Ålesund, western Norway, from where this will be the ship’s base port for the crew’s next project.

The second seismic support ship (part of the group’s mixed fleet) is the Mainport Pine, built a year later of its twin and was also launched from the same shipyard in Asia.

Published in Cork Harbour

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago