After finishing sea trials in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM), Santa Fe International’s pipelay reelship Apache left on July 2, 1979, for her first job in the North Sea. As the first dynamically positioned reel-ship, the vessel could carry 1,818 metric tons (mt) of pipe spooled on its permanent reel and was rated to 915-m (3,000-ft) water depths.

Fast forward to 2013 some 34 years later, when Technip hosted a press tour of its pipelay capabilities at its Theodore, Ala., spoolbase. Its reelship Deep Blue was loading pipe while we were there, and the differences between this ship and the Apache are astounding. There are two reels on the Deep Blue with a combined capacity of 5,600 mt. The ship can carry a total of 10,000 mt of pipe and is rated to water depths of 3,000 m (9,842 ft). The ship has the world record for the deepest installed reeled pipe on the Perdido field in the GoM in 2,957 m (9,701 ft) of water.

The original Apache was 122 m (400 ft) long with a 21.3-m (70-ft) beam. The Deep Blue is 206.5 m (677.5 ft) long and has a molded breadth of 32 m (105 ft). Think of the effort that has gone into advancing the technology of deepwater pipelaying.

As Raymond Semple, Technip’s COO for the subsea business unit, told us, Technip ordered the hull of a drillship for the Deep Blue. Pipe is laid vertically through the moonpool. The sheer size of the pipehandling equipment is massive. And the masters of the vessel can drop the end of the pipeline in a 10-m (33-ft) square on the seabed in nearly 3,000 m of water.

While on the bridge of the Deep Blue talking to Capt. Julian Osman, master of the Deep Blue, and Adrian Bruce, offshore construction manager, I mentioned the Santa Fe Apache. I was working on another magazine in 1979 where we did a six-part series on the then-new ship. What was interesting was that both of these men on the Deep Blue had worked on the original Apache. They said that the hull of the original Apache had been scrapped, but the reel and pipelay spread from the vessel were transferred to Technip’s Apache II, which was built in 2009, exactly 30 years after the original vessel began operations.

That says a lot about the original equipment as well as the people who designed, built, and operated it. Bruce was a diver on the Apache. He now controls the pipelay operations on the Deep Blue. The skills that he learned as a diver and working subsea make him exemplary as the operator of the laying system, Semple said. The past and the future blend together very well on the bridge of the Deep Blue.