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Not everybody could live six months of the year at sea, but Mathesons Bay’s Grey Hutchinson says it keeps his marriage fresh.
Grey is the captain of the Pacific Liberty, a 97 metre, 5200 tonne offshore supply vessel, working for Swire Pacific.
Grey’s next job in August is in Taiwan, installing 21 offshore wind turbines, which require a pile base to be drilled 40 metres into the seabed.
“That kind of activity generates a lot of vibration, so we blow a curtain of bubbles around the pile in a ring, so that fish don’t get harmed in the process,” he says.
“The fish can’t swim through the curtain and the air absorbs and dissipates the shockwaves.”
Before drilling starts, a remotely operated vehicle that is tethered to the ship is sent down to observe what marine life might be in the surrounding water, and if a Chinese White Dolphin is spotted, then work has to be halted.
Sometimes, the Pacific Liberty is responsible for facilitating a team of divers that work on maintaining deep sea structures.
The divers are able to work at an incredible depth of up to 300 metres, but to do this they have to live in a pressurised container on board the ship for 28 days.
It takes seven days for the divers to decompress from the pressure that is required at such depth, so they live in the pressurised chamber and have a smaller pod which delivers them to the deep sea.
“They have a television and books in there, but it does stink. Typically, three divers do a rotation of eight hour shifts working underwater.”
If the divers get sick, then a medic has to go through the ordeal of compression as it is much quicker to enter, at only five hours, than to come out.
Grey himself is medically trained and even able to perform basic surgery in an emergency.
Though legally he can only perform medical procedures at sea and has to have a doctor in Singapore talk him through the procedure over a radio from land.
Grey’s core responsibilities require him to be available at a moment’s notice, 24/7, to pilot the ship as its operations require that it be extremely steady.
The ship uses computerised ‘dynamic positioning’ which keeps the ship in place using an enhanced form of GPS that is accurate down to one metre.
Nevertheless, due to atmospheric interference, the GPS is not particularly accurate and so the ship sends its GPS coordinates to an onshore station, which then calculates and compensates for error and sends the information back in real time.
However, if for any reason the computer fails to fulfil its task, Grey sits at the helm controlling three bow thrusters and two 360 degree azipod thrusters to balance the forces and keep the ship in position.
Grey studied at the NZ Maritime School in Auckland to become a captain, but it all started for him at 16 when he went on a voyage aboard the Spirit of Adventure as a locksmith apprentice. He then signed up as an able-bodied seaman on a merchant vessel and climbed up the ranks from there.
“Most officers these days come straight out of university, but I was ‘dragged through the hawse pipe’ right from the bottom,” he says.
