Well, the trip is wearing on now, and I should have less than a week to go. In the last week or so, we’ve installed all the subsea termination “mats” and almost completed the first umbilical lay. I had a really long day a couple of days ago, when we first started the cable lay operations. Our new carousel control system was being a bit difficult. With a little bit of investigation we managed to take some parameters out of the control loop and got it behaving a bit better. We may have to do a bit more experimenting when we start the second cable that’s on the same carousel. Once we had things running, the cable lay has gone pertty well. We’ve managed to keep the lay speed up at around 750 meters/hr, which is just about as fast as we can go with the tensioners working in “tandem” mode. We now just have to lower the end to the seabed… over a mile down ❗ It’s almost time to start thinking about all the things I have to put in my end of trip hand-over notes.. I think there will be quite a lot to put in there with all the problems we’ve had ❗
