Ballet of the Giants

On this picture you can actually see how big the Thialf is, and how high her cranes are. The platform on the right is the Claymore facility on the British Continental Shelf. It is an ordinary platform still producing. Her steel risers, the pipelines from the seafloor to her production decks, had to be renewed. And that's what the Thialf is doing here. A bundle of pipes in one big pipe, called caisson, was lifted horizontally with two cranes from a barge, lowered underwater and placed with pinpoint navigation of the Thialf positioning in the jacket. A kind of coordinated ballet of the two Thialf cranes towering high above Claymore.