THE PROJECT Aquatic was responsible for recovering the eight mooring lines that had secured the structure in 85m of water, plus its two, 8in flexible risers and an umbilical used to convey power to valves on the buoy’s pipeline end manifold. Rather than using an anchor handler, Aquatic chose to fit one of its modular powered reel systems to the back deck of a less-costly DP2 class vessel, the Volantis. Once cut at the seabed using an ROV, the mooring lines (individually comprising 765m of wire rope terminated at the top and bottom by 265m and 82.5m, respectively, of 31/4in chain) were each recovered directly to a reel specially designed to withstand the unusually high compression forces generated by the spooled chain. Rather than the 10 tonnes spooling-on load rating of the comp

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