An Ode to a Big Weird Ship-thing
In which I resist the urge to tell you every number I can find about this very weird, very big ship-thing.
You might expect that this dispatch would be about the UEFA Champions League Final, which is ongoing as I type. The UCL Final is a big deal, the culmination of the European soccer season. However, it is not. Partially because I have no big opinions on the final–it’s kind of a meh matchup as far as teams I’m interested in, and other than Achraf Hakimi, there’s not a single player involved of whom I’m particularly a fan. Instead…I’m going to tell you about the SSCV Sleipnir.
If I were to choose a patron god from the Greek pantheon, it would not be Poseidon. Many of what he rules, in the mythology, makes me uncomfortable. The way I’ve put it before is that all my irrational fears are Poseidon-based. Namely: the ocean, earthquakes, and horses. I’ve already explained my unease with horses. But for the other two? Briefly:
Earthquakes are the gaslighters of natural disasters. In movies, there’s a sound cue and everyone knows “that was an earthquake.” But in reality, it’s less clear. I’ve never experienced a big one, and I don’t care to, there’s a reason I don’t live in California anymore. But the little ones? What was that? Did I imagine it? Was it a really big truck driving by? Or someone booming music with bass so low it’s almost subsonic? Or did the earth actually move? I guess I’ll log on to twitter and wait for someone to post about it?
Then there’s the ocean. It’s massive, y’all, and we only know like, a fraction of what’s happening there. We like to pretend that man has conquered the earth, but you cannot conquer the ocean. You can only wave your tiny, ineffectual fists at its might. The ocean is to be respected, but not trusted. It is powerful, vast, and unknowable, at least so long as we keep prioritizing sending pop stars into the upper atmosphere and calling that space exploration.
Of these three realms of Poseiden, I find the ocean most distressing, but I also can’t look away. Sometimes, I get an itch, and the only thing I can do about it is look up videos of deep-sea shipwrecks. I can’t explain it. Even though it’s horrifying, I need to see it. I need to know more about it. And this, I think, is how I accidentally convinced my Google algorithm that I care about maritime news.
If you’re an iPhone user, you may be unfamiliar with the Android feature where all phones have a screen to the far left that shows you curated news. My feed? Consistently made of news about soccer, local Boston happenings, and the maritime industry. Which is how I came to know about the SSCV Sleipnir.
And I’m obsessed.
This thing is a monstrosity. A testament to man’s hubris. And named perfectly, but I’ll get to that in a little bit.
Let’s start with a description. You can look at some pictures here but I’ll do my best in case you don’t want to click out. It in some way mimics a deep sea drilling platform that moves. It’s one big platform, on top of 8 giant columns, in a 2x4 arrangement, with a pontoon on either side. On top of the platform are two ginormous cranes, as well as two reasonable sized cranes. Then there’s the human space, which looks like someone cut the top six floors off of a normal ship and plopped in on the corner of this thing.
Size-wise, each column is just under 24 meters high, or 78 feet, and the draft is between 12 to 32 meters, or 39 to 105 ft. The surface platform is 220 meters, or 720 feet, long and 102 meters, or 335 feet, wide. At 241,200 square feet, that means you could fit the entirety of the world’s largest Costco on the surface of this ship.1 Imagine all the bulk granola bars this thing could hold!
I’m also not even sure what it technically qualifies as. It is a man-made construction that operates on water, so it is by definition a watercraft or waterborne vessel but it’s incredibly un-ship-like otherwise. When you think “ship,” you probably think of something generally banana-shaped. More long than wide, pointy at either end, a fair amount of curves. Sleipnir is notably un-curvy, but something more like a box–a very big box–that floats.
Also of note is that none of the descriptions I’ve found use gendered pronouns for Sleipnir. Generally speaking, boat people love to call boats by female pronouns. It’s a combination of linguistics, culture, and ancient traditions, but it’s also pretty much universal. Because of my slight but growing obsession with this world, I’ve read a lot of wikipedia articles about boats, and the article about Sleipnir is the first one I’ve ever encountered where the wiki editors refer to the vessel as “it” and not “she,” ditto for every other thing I’ve found, but I’ve not been able to find any explanation as to why. It simply seems that everyone has looked at this thing that is nominally a ship and said “nah, not quite right.”
It’s not the biggest ship ever, I should note. It’s up there, but I can’t tell how high. There are a few different ships who claim that, depending on measurement. There’s the Pioneering Spirit, a split hull crane vessel, which is the largest by tonnage, and very weird looking in its own right, and the Seawise Giant, the longest ship. And a few others come up in “smaller” categories, depending on how you search. But none of them are as weird looking as the Sleipnir. I mean, I’ve been staring at pictures of this ship for days and I still can’t wrap my head around how it…works.
The pontoons I mentioned are like two smaller platforms, with four columns each on top, then the large platform on top of that, then the two big cranes,2 two normal cranes, then the weird cut off top of a cruise ship, a helipad, and some other things that I haven’t figured out what they are. There’s one structure that looks like it could be a drydock spot for a more reasonably-sized ship, but it actually holds one of the two giant crane arms, like the dock that holds the tonearm of a record player. The other crane also has a holder but it’s less intense for some reason.
Why are the crane holders different? No idea! Apparently no one has the same questions I do about this ship, because I am really struggling to find some answers. Like, what does the underwater part look like? What’s inside the columns? Have the people behind the James Bond franchise inquired about filming onboard and if not, why not? Because, damn, this could be a cool Bond-Villain headquarters. Maybe this is because true maritime fans already know all these things? Or at least, know how to ask the right question?
Speaking of Bond villains, let me touch briefly on the crew complement. Most container ships these days run with a skeleton crew, with between 10 to 30 crew members, depending on the size of the ship and the laws of the ship’s governing state. This ship has berthing for up to 400 people, including a 200-person capacity dining hall. You could feed so many Bond Villain Henchmen in that space!
The Sleipnir is the second of its kind, with its older but smaller sibling named SSCV Thialf, constructed in 1985, but the Sleipnir is far more advanced, built 30 years later. There are pictures of the two of them together and better believe I am anthropomorphizing the hell out of them. The Thialf is how I became aware of the Sleipnir, because of a news article talking about the arrival of the Thialf in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, where it mentioned being “the second biggest” semi-submersible crane vessel. I took one look at the picture and thought to myself “what do you mean, there’s a bigger one???” And so, I met Sleipnir.
Now, I want to get to the name. This is the most perfectly named ship I’ve ever encountered, and my only complaint is that it wasn’t used for Sleipnir’s older brother, Thialf. Because Sleipnir is the name of a mythical horse from the Norse pantheon–yes we’re back to horses–but Sleipnir is no ordinary horse. He was Odin’s horse, a giant to carry a giant, and born with eight legs instead of four. Of course, like most mythology, there’s a weird conception story: Loki, in the form of a mare, was bred by a giant's stallion Svaðilfari, resulting in Sleipnir's birth. I’m not even going to touch that.
Point is, this is the perfect name for this absolutely giant, weird, eight-legged ship and I’ve never encountered a more perfect naming in my life except for this one kid I met named Ned, who was undoubtedly Ned.
Thialf on the other hand is just some-dude from Norse mythology. He literally doesn’t even get his own wikipedia page, but instead shares it with his sister. Ouch.
I’m going to end this pretty soon, because I don’t have a point beyond “let me tell you about this weird, big thing humans made” and I do want to watch the UCL Final. I need to get caught up though, because I took a little excursion today: I drove 3 hours round trip down to Jamestown, Rhode Island so I could see the SSCV Thialf in person. It’s leaving tomorrow. It had been moored in the Narragansett Bay for the week, waiting out some political posturing from Trump before it goes to help build a windfarm off the coast of New York. So I guess thanks for the opportunity to see this weird thing in person, Trump.
And boy did I! Crossing the Newport Bridge to Jamestown, I had a perfect view of the Thialf the whole way, and then I was able to park right up by a dock where I had a clear view of the thing, along with a DP2 crane vessel that was completely dwarfed in comparison to the Thialf. It was cold and really windy, but I was not the only one who was clearly there on a mission to see the thing. I took a walk along the shore for a little ways, and between that and the bridge, was granted a nearly 360° view of the ship.
I have this to say of my adventure: it is as weird in person as in pictures, and if that’s the smaller one, I truly hope I can see the Sleipnir someday, because the Thialf is so very, very large.
After I send this in newsletter form, I’ll update the web version with some of the pictures, so click the “view this email online” button at the bottom if you want to see those.
Now, back to soccer.
