S-Lay Stinger Installation

What follows now is a quite technical story. What you see here looks like a bridge and to a certain degree it also works like a bridge. But it is a stinger used when pipe laying in the S-mode. If you lay pipes in shallow water, you weld joints of pipe to each other and lower them to the seafloor. When the pipes are leaving your deck, they will make two bends before they'll land on the seafloor, this is called S-lay. If you're pipelaying on deep water the pipes will leave vertical from your deck, now they have to make only one bend and then it is called J-Lay. If you are laying S-Lay, you want to make the radius of the bends as big as possible to prevent buckling. Anyway, it is much easier if you take a look at THIS site and scroll a little bit down to S-Lay and J-Lay, then you'll understand. What you see on this picture is the pipelaybarge C-Master busy with installing their version of a stinger.