Behold, the Blue Marlin, a “semi-submersible heavy lift ship” that is capable of hoisting and transplanting other, full-sized ships (that is ships as big or bigger than a US Destroyer-class vessel) all around the oceans.
The photos of this thing are amazing, like something off the cover of an old Modern Mechanix, the scale nearly incomprehensible — as though a careless child had mixed up two different toy-sets, each at a radically different scale.
Blue Marlin and her sister ship were owned by Offshore Heavy Transport of Oslo, Norway, from their construction, in April 2000 and November 1999 respectively, until 6 July 2001, when they were purchased by Dockwise. The U.S. Navy hired Blue Marlin from Offshore Heavy Transport to move the destroyer USS Cole back to the United States after the warship was damaged by Al-Qaeda[2][3] suicide bombers while anchored in the port of Aden, Yemen. During the latter part of 2003, work done on Blue Marlin boosted its capacity and added two retractable propulsors to improve maneuverability. The ship re-entered service in January 2004. Following these improvements, Blue Marlin delivered the oil platform Thunder Horse PDQ, weighing 60,000 tons, to Corpus Christi, Texas, for completion.
MV Blue Marlin
[Wikipedia]
(via We Make Money Not Art)
