How a rope change cut unplanned downtime and deck exclusion zones on a deepwater support vessel

For operators running offshore support vessels on continuous deepwater schedules, lifting equipment that imposes daily management overhead on deck crews is not just a safety issue — it is a throughput problem. Stabbert Maritime found that out running its multipurpose vessel Ocean Guardian on subsea and survey support missions to 6,000 meters, and addressed it by replacing steel wire rope with a synthetic alternative.

The Ocean Guardian is configured for near-continuous operations, which means its hoisting system is active far more often than on vessels that lift intermittently. That frequency exposed the accumulated cost of steel wire's operational characteristics in a way that lower-tempo deployments tend to mask.

Steel wire rope under load carries snap-back risk severe enough to require permanent crew exclusion zones around the line during operations. On a vessel where lifting happens daily, those exclusion zones are not occasional restrictions — they become a fixed feature of how the deck is organized and how work is sequenced. Tasks get re-ordered, crew positioning adapts to the rope rather than to the job, and the lifting system effectively becomes a scheduling constraint.

The lubrication steel wire requires under cyclic loading compounds this. Lubricant migrates from the rope onto drums, sheaves, and surrounding deck surfaces during operations, generating a recurring cleaning and containment burden that adds to crew workload on every shift. At the water depths Ocean Guardian operates to, the rope's own weight also increases the energy in the system during spooling and load transitions, pushing safe handling distances further from the line.

Scaling the steel-based system up was considered and set aside. Larger winches would have increased the deck footprint, tightened operating margins, and introduced commissioning risk during the transition. "We needed a system that behaved predictably every day instead of one that people had to keep compensating for," said Daniel Stabbert, CTO of Stabbert Maritime.

The Replacement

The vessel was refitted with TechIce®, a hybrid synthetic hoisting rope manufactured by Hampidjan incorporating Technora® aramid fibers from Teijin Aramid, running on a fully electric deepwater capstan winch designed by Parkburn. The winch fits within the vessel's existing power envelope and deck footprint, requiring no changes to foundations or auxiliary systems — an important consideration for operators assessing refit cost and schedule risk.

The synthetic rope eliminates lubrication entirely, removing the source of deck contamination. Its lower mass at depth reduces stored energy in the system during routine handling. And without the snap-back energy profile of steel wire under tension, the basis for mandatory crew exclusion zones during operations changes.

Independent cyclic bend-over-sheave testing conducted by NORCE Research in Norway — running repeated bending cycles at elevated temperature without external cooling — provided third-party validation of the rope's fatigue and thermal behaviour under sustained operational loading before the system entered service.

Operational Impact

In practice aboard Ocean Guardian, the clearest change was in how little the lifting system disrupted surrounding work. No lubricant transferred to deck surfaces between lifts. Line behaviour remained consistent across load transitions. During active heave compensation at depth, the rope generated neither the heat accumulation nor the surface contamination that the previous steel wire system produced under equivalent conditions.

Tasks that had previously been delayed or rescheduled around hoisting activity ran concurrently. The deck area around the winch did not require clearance and cleaning between operations. "What stood out was how little attention the system needed once it was running," Stabbert said.

For logistics and fleet managers evaluating offshore support vessel specifications, the Ocean Guardian case illustrates a category of operational cost that rarely appears in equipment datasheets: the cumulative drag imposed by a hoisting system that requires the crew to continuously organise around it. At high lifting frequencies, that drag is measurable in crew hours, in scheduling friction, and in the narrowed window for concurrent deck activity during operations. A rope change addressed all three.

TechIce® is manufactured by Hampidjan and incorporates Technora® aramid fibers from Teijin Aramid. The deepwater capstan winch was designed by Parkburn. Independent testing was conducted by NORCE Research at the Mechatronics Innovation Lab, Norway.