Sea Services North America and the commercial fishermen in this unique cooperative business model are establishing best-practice procedures for a significant part of the offshore wind turbine installation process.

As a vital element of the Tier I team during construction, commercial fishermen with local knowledge of the fishing grounds and vessel traffic in a given area provide developers with seabed scouting ahead of construction, and safety perimeter vessels during construction.

Sea Services set the standard for such work on Ørsted’s South Fork Wind project, the nation’s first, utility-scale offshore wind farm now providing clean, domestic, sustainable energy to homes on Long Island. It was a learning experience that paid big dividends for all involved, thus establishing best-practice procedures for the industry.

With that success to its credit, Sea Services rolled right into providing these services for Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.

These scouting and safety campaigns require complex, fluid scheduling of vessels and crewmen that involves changes in developer needs, vessel maintenance requirements, crew rotation schedules and even temporary housing for crews.

Doug VanVerdeghem, Sea Services Operations Manager, is responsible for aligning all the puzzle pieces of these 24/7 campaigns. And while the best planning may indicate that 2 or 12 vessels are needed, conditions may require a fast adjustment to the schedule.

“Because we’ve established high safety training standards, we can’t just grab any vessel owner or fisherman looking for work,” VanVerdeghem said. “If there’s a last-minute change that requires an additional vessel, we need to be prepared with back-up vessels and crews that meet our standards.”

Sea Services provides this important interface between developers – who must meet stringent federal regulations and their own standards for worker safety and the safety of other vessel operators during construction – and the fishermen to determine how many vessels are needed for each step of each project.

Seabed monitoring ahead of turbine location and cable lay work can begin with just one vessel. As the project ramps up, more vessels are needed to ensure against entanglements with active and “ghost” fishing gear, unexploded ordnance, and other debris that could add significant expense in downtime for developers. To date, Sea Services has operated nine scout campaigns that identified more than 700 fixed-gear sites that were protected from vessel entanglements.

In addition to avoiding downtime for developers, this service avoids conflicts with other commercial fishermen.