NEWS AND VIEWS JANUARY 2005 

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Seacor News

IWe reported a couple of weeks ago that we had heard that Havila had purchased the UK based Seacor fleet for about 85 million dollars. The five ships involved were the Stirling Tay, Stirling Spey, Smit-Loyd Fame, Stirling Pegasus, and Stirling Iona.

Since than all has been silence. Was it true or not. Did the crews of the Stirling vessels have to worry about their redundancy. At the time of writing who knows. But those who have followed the fortunes of these vessels will see that the residue of the Star Offshore fleet has changed hands again(probably), and may wonder what the business of ship-owning is about - again. Stirling purchased the Star Offshore fleet when it was a group of middle aged but effective vessels and then added a number of VS483s to it. There-after they built three utility anchor-handlers before all the ships except for the Stirling Forth and Stirling Clyde were sold to Seacor together with the name. It was apparently seeN at the time as being an expansion - a sort of march forward between an established British and an established American company. 

However, it was not long before the more effective units from the former Stirling fleet began to be disposed of and most of them are scattered all over the world. The two latest anchor-handlers for instance are in the Caspian being operated by BUE.

On the other side of the coin the Havila fleet has varied in size and quality over the years, and it is not long ago that numbers of their vessels were sold to Groupe Bourbon. For the British is will be sad if the crews of the former Seacor vessels are replaced by Norwegians.

Vic Gibson

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