BigLift & Happy Star

This mission was the maiden voyage of the BigLift Happy Star, a heavy lifting vessel with a 1A Ice Class hull. On a three-week voyage, I joined the ship in the Pacific, transited through the Panama Canal, across the Caribbean and up the Atlantic to Sept-Iles, Quebec. The ship used its two onboard cranes to offload some of the biggest cargo in the history of its fleet. Happy Star was a brand-new state-of-the-art vessel; however, they were still working out some glitches after delivery from the shipyard, including a faulty wiring issue that shut down the engines and had us adrift in the Atlantic for nearly three days. The initial moment of power failure occurred when my crew was filming atop one of the massive cranes. We were cruising the south Atlantic and loving the sunshine, the blue skies and endless ocean around us, as gusts of wind from high-up on the crane buffeted our jackets.  But soon the wind disappeared, and it was my sound recordist who first called attention to the fact we had stopped, perhaps because he couldn’t hear the wind noise in his boom microphone anymore.  We raced down the crane’s ladders and headed for the engine room to investigate the problem, trading in our sunshine and blue skies above for almost three days below decks in the control room and engine room as engineers began troubleshooting the issue and making the repair. Thanks again to the amazing BigLift crew for the adventure!

Tech Specs

Length: 511 ft
Breadth: 95 ft
Summer Draft: 31 ft
Draft open sailing: 24 ft 6 in
Weather Deck Hatch: 315 ft x 58 ft 6 in
Tween Deck Hatch: 301 ft x 58 ft 6 in
Weather Deck Floor Space: 3,280 m2
Tween Deck Floor Space: 1,716 m2
Tank Top: 1,624 m2
Capacity: 20,535 m3
Cranes: 2 X 1,100 mt SWL
Combinable: 2,200 MT
Trolley: 37.5 SWL

Main Engine

Main Engine: Wärtsilä 8,775 kW, bow thruster 1,000 kW
Service Speed: 16 kt